Ramble On

We left the city and that took quite a while, but once we got out, we were on a highway, passed a GIGANTIC monument to Genghis Khan, and then turned down a gravel road and into the highlands of Mongolia. We drove for two more hours through some of the most sweeping and gorgeous, remote landscapes I have ever seen and arrived at our ger camp just before dinner. We pulled up a hill to a grassy overlook area and parked the car. We were greeted by staff, and then, I kid you not, a yak was fetched to bring our luggage to our tent/room. I should take a moment to say here that I found the Mongolian people all to be very beautiful. They have high cheekbones and a ruddiness to their complexion that is gorgeous. Their faces are round but structured and they have uniformly kind eyes, slanted up and out. Everyone I saw seemed like they had been born in the region except for two people at our camp, and it was truly lovely to interact with such beautiful people, inside and out. Our beautifully a...

Cara and I left the calm oasis of her apartment in Liangmaqiao at about 9:45am Saturday morning and headed into the thick of Saturday traffic in Beijing, which Cara explained to me is extraordinarily bad. It took us about an hour to get there, and when we did the crush of people outside the station was overwhelming. It took us a while to figure out that we had to go through a ticket check outside the station to actually get in and get to our train. We were stressed because we were getting close to our train’s departure time and we still needed to get food. We had heard the train food was pretty terrible and though we had an epic snack collection with us, it wouldn’t be enough. No one was answering our questions, or taking our orders at Subway. It’s strange, we were asking for the things one always asks for, and Cara was asking for them in Chinese, and her Chinese is excellent. But people just sort of could only hear and see “foreigner” and they either willfully chose to ignore or m...

I arrived in Beijing on Tuesday night, August 30. When I came up to the airport and started walking through, I noticed how similar everything felt. So many of the things I find in every airport, in every city everywhere were there in Beijing. Of course, there was a different feel to it all but there was also something very familiar about everything too. Cities are strange, the more I see the more I realize that there are certain commonalities between all of them and its a rarity to see very distinct character in a city. I did find it in Beijing but you really have to go looking for it. Cara met me at the airport and I was so very thankful for that. She navigated me back to her neighborhood. We sat down at a restaurant after getting off the airport express subway line and arriving at her metro stop and had a quick drink and a snack and then walked to her beautiful apartment a few minutes away in the diplomatic residences right across from the American Embassy in Beijing. The be...