Reflections on a Wandering Life.....
I found out that the bus from Hohhot to Beijing is only a 6 hour run. Lonely Planet says 8-11 hours. Guess I need to break down and buy the latest edition, because train tickets can be really tough to get, but bus tickets and plane tickets are usually easy to get. But bus tickets are about a third the cost of plane tickets. There is a new highway now between Hohhot and Beijing, so you don't really save that much time by flying, if you figure the time spent getting to and from the airport on both ends.
The trip leaves me with some questions, and a few insights. First of all, there is the question of the relationship between Inner Mongolia and the country of Mongolia. The people are ethnically related. But so much time has passed since they were politically separated. They are just so different now. The Mongolians became quite Russian. They don't use the Mongolian script; they use the Russian Cyrillic. And contrary to what you might think, they are more likely to resent the Chinese than to resent the Russians, in spite of everything the Russians took from them. This may be partly because they did get their independence from Russia, so they don't seem to have the need to indulge resentment for stuff most of them don't remember. But I am going to stop there, because I have never been to Mongolia, so much of what I'm saying is surmised from what I hear.
Inner Mongolia is becoming a very Chinese place. Hohhot, for example, is a Chinese city, not a Mongolian city. Some would argue with that, because there are certainly many Mongolian cultural elements throughout the city. Tuesday evening we went to a bar to hear the famed Mongolian "throat singing." I've never heard anything like that in Beijing, except on TV. But those remaining cultural elements do not subtract significantly from the fact that Hohhot has become a Chinese city. It's similar to what you see in Xinjiang, actually. Kashgar is Uighur, not Chinese. But Urumqi, the capital city, is Chinese. It is like Hohhot in that respect. It has become very Chinese, because young professionals from Beijing and Shanghai find that they can buy a nice apartment in Urumqi for a fraction of what it would cost them in the East.
Labels: Mongolians
