Inner Mongolia

At 6:30pm on Friday afternoon while playing some double disc (Frisbee game) in Chaoyang Park, I received a call from Avril informing me that if I get back to the hotel in 20 minutes, I can go to Inner Mongolia for the weekend for free! This trip had been planned for weeks, but I had opted not to go after being told it'd cost approximately US$400. Apparently someone dropped out at the last minute, and I had approximately an hour and a half to get all the way across town to the hotel, pack my stuff, and get to the train station. Of course I had no problem doing so...
Inner Mongolia is actually in northern China along the border of Mongolia itself. Getting there takes an overnight train ride that's approximately ten hours. We had hard sleepers, which are sections of 6 beds, 3 on top of each other on two sides, along a corridor. Each car has about 20 rows, so it sleeps 60 people. Our group was spread out on a few different cars, but of course we all managed to take over a section to chat and drink. The lights go out in the cars at about 10:30pm, which forces you to go to sleep. The beds are surprisingly comfortable considering they are about 2 feet wide and consist of a board with some padding and a comforter. I slept straight through for the most part until the train attendant woke me at 7am: "kuai! kuai!" was all I understood really, which means "quickly! quickly!". We were almost there, so I got myself up.
We ate breakfast at a buffet at a 4-star hotel. The food was pretty good, however the drink options were: hot water, coffee, room-temperature milk, or steaming hot tang (OJ). After being given a speech about keeping hydrated, we were unsure of how to do so with such drink options, and I ended up filling my nalgene with hot water in hopes of it becoming room-temp in an hour or so.
After a 3-hour busride to the grasslands complete with speeding past trucks on the highway and going .2 mph through ditches on the dirt roads, we arrived at our "hotel" if you can call it that. We were staying in yurts, 2 people to a yurt, in the middle of the grasslands. All you could see around you was grassland and more yurts. We had lunch in the larger dining yurts, and then set out on horseback across the grassland. The horses were following a path, but pretty much free to go at whatever pace they liked, so they'd randomly trott without warning, but it was a really cool way to see the area. We stopped partway at another yurt to taste the traditional milk tea. It does not taste like milk+tea, but more like salt water with some other weird flavors. Most of us were not huge fans, though we all tasted it. We rode our horses back to our yurts, and then we had 3-4 hours of free time. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and it was perfect weather to chill outside.
I'd brought a disc along, so I started throwing it with some people, and then some of the locals started joining in. By the end of the three hours, we'd probably taught about 10 people how to throw a frisbee who'd never even seen one before. It was really cool to be bringing this new sport to their lives, and I ended up giving them the disc as a gift, communicating in Chinese that they could use it to practice (lianxi).
That night, we had the Mongolian specialty of roasted lamb. We'd seen them deliver the live lamb earlier, and though we hadn't seen the actual killing of it, we'd seen the skin lying on the ground, and then being thrown on the truck full of other live lambs before driving away. Two whole roasted lambs were brought out to the yurt, and there was a ceremony before they were cut up. The ceremony involved a king and queen who were given traditional clothes to wear. I was initially picked as the queen, but the clothes wouldn't fit me, so they picked one of the skinnier girls. The ceremony involved some songs and some drinking of baijiu out of bowls.
Sidenote about baijiu: It's a distilled liquor that's usually anywhere from %40-%60 alcohol (not proof). A small bottle costs 4 kuai here (about 60 cents), which is absurd. There are many more expensive brands, but we obviously don't partake in them. This is what wikipedia says about the taste, "There are a number of accounts in English which comment unfavorably on the taste of baijiu, comparing it with rubbing alcohol or diesel fuel. The author Tim Clissold, who writes frequently on China, noted that he'd "never met anybody, even at the heights of alcoholic derangement, prepared to admit that they actually liked the taste", and that "after drinking it, most people screw up their faces in an involuntary expression of pain and some even yell out.""
After dinner, we all walked a bit away from our yurts and watched a horse race and then a some Mongolian wrestling matches. Some of the guys on our trip wrestled as well...this would NEVER happen at a hotel in the states. All this was followed by a bonfire, music, and fireworks back where our yurts were, and we all stayed up dancing, singing, and drinking baijiu (it was way cheaper than beer there because water is so scarce) late into the night.
The next morning, we were all awoken at 7am to eat breakfast and head out to the desert. Our breakfast consisted of very little that any of us wanted to eat, but we managed to shove some of it in our mouths before getting on the bus. We had a 5 hour bus ride to the desert, the former half of which I spent trying to get a piece of glass out of my foot that I'd stupidly gotten stuck there when I'd wandered outside without shoes on. I guess I got it out because it's certainly not there anymore.
We arrived at the desert at about one and had lunch before heading up the dunes. Climbing the large dune to get to the top was rather difficult. There were two options: a ladder along the sand and just straight climbing. Shoes were kinda the opposite of useful, so I took them off. Climbing up the ladder hurt your feet, but climbing up the dune straight was like taking one step forwards and half a step backwards each time. It was strenuous, but really cool at the same time. Once we reached the top, we got in this vehicle I can only describe as a mix between a large ATV and a tank, but the top was open, and it seated 30-40 people. We drove through the dunes, and it was kinda like a roller coaster without a track. We stopped at one point and were let off to walk around for a bit before returning. After that, we got to ride camels out in a different direction to an oasis where we again stopped a bit before turning around. Riding camels was really cool, though slightly painful after the horseback rides the day before. When we finished the camel rides, we got to sled down the dune we'd walked up on wooden sleds. It looked a lot faster than it actually felt, but was nonetheless really cool. We took a chair lift the rest of the way back as it was getting late and were on our way back to the capital city, Hohhot, where we would catch our train. We stopped at what we were told was a factory along the way, although it seemed more like a bustling outlet center. After being given 30 minutes in a restaurant to eat dinner, we rushed to the train station exhausted, gross, and sandy for our overnight train back home. Needless to say there was a lot less drinking on the return trip since we all passed out pretty quickly. The next morning upon returning to our hotel at about 9am, everyone showered and almost immediately went to McDonalds (Maidonglao) for breakfast sandwiches. They've become a novelty to us!