Inner Mongolia!

From Harbin, it’s a twelve-hour train ride west to Hailar, a large city in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia, an Autonomous Region of China. Last Friday night, our entire force of 60+ students and teachers boarded the overnight with plenty of Romantic expectations about the northern steppes and the ethnic minorities we would encounter the next day.

Warm beer, which we brought along in great quantities, served to get things hopping in our train car of hard sleepers. Three classmates brought guitars, and so the night passed enjoyably to the sound of classic American songs sung in Chinese translation. Endlessly amusing to Chinese language students, and probably unintelligible to native speakers, this form of rapid lyric translation has become a test not only of one’s command of Chinese vocabulary, but also of the ability to think quickly in rhyme schemes. At nine-thirty, the conductor cut our lights, but well past midnight the party car continued to attract curious Chinese from other compartments whose more conservative passengers had long since gone to sleep.

At about four in the morning, I woke up to drink some water and risk my life by using the facilities (read: hole in the metal floor of the washroom). It was already bright outside, and I found myself staring transfixed out of the window for a long period. I saw a peasant tending his cattle in the wide open landscape, and then as we passed by a small town, a lone conductor in uniform stood watching our train fly by his platform.