Radio Ulaanbaatar: loud loud loudspeakers

we're finally in beijing, and based on two days of intense eyes-open-exploring, its crazy and amazing and i think it'll take the whole year to settle in. chinese people are easy to communicate with and extremely helpful and nice, and i feel the chinese is slowly coming back to my mind (after 3 months of no studying), well its kind of automatic since its so loud all the time, everybody's shouting and spitting and selling and haggling and just living

the rest of our stay in mongolia was great, we spent three days in terelj, in a little camp of a few ger tents with a family, hiking and horseriding and taking it easy after city life in russia and ulaanbaatar. yes, about the horseriding. being very scared since id never ridden before, and since the circumstances (10-year old giggling boys who didnt speak english as guides) werent the most assuring, when my horse started jumping all over piles of planks and decided it doesnt want to do what some stupid foreign beginner tourist wants it to do, i was shit-scared. but then, after half an hour of being on a leash, we got our act together, and bartholomew (as i named the horse since the mongolian names were rather impossible to pronounce and involved a lot of saliva output) decided that im ok after all. so i ended up very happy being able to control such a big and scary animal at least a little bit, and the experience was even worth the blister on my ass. and the whole three days was just great, with only nature sounds surrounding us, and for example cows, horses, dogs and a camel using the front of our tent as a highway, and me making a lot of new furry friends, like fluffy, who looked like a combination of a dog and a sheep.

after a couple more days in ulaanbaatar we took a train to the chinese border, and a sleeper bus from there to beijing. and now were here, me, ellen and vas are moving to our flat near xizhimen station tomorrow (and hanna and eva are continuing to southern china), and after that we can really start thinking about actually staying here for a year.