This trip was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. I'm so glad I got the opportunity.
The first train was 28 hours long. It was brutal, especially since you couldn't use the bathroom when the train was stopped. Also it was a squatting toilet. Squatting toilet + moving train = not good. We were in the hard sleeper cars, so six people to a berth.
We eventually arrived in Hailaer
And had some delicious Korean barbecue.
The next day we went to Hailaer Cultural museum
Later that same day, we went to the Hulunbeier grasslands
There were dogs
And pretty views
We slept in yurts
And danced around a bonfire
I woke up early to watch the sunrise
And then went on a hike
We saw some horses
And a castle...
And then I rode a (different) horse!
And wrestled.
We left the Hulunbeier grasslands to go to Manzhouli. We checked into a hotel on an hourly basis to shower, and then we left again to go to Harbin. On the way there, we stopped in this park that had a bunch of Russian nesting dolls.
Harbin
We picked up some oreos. It turned out that they weren't oreos, but were actually olios, and looked like this:
Yup.
You could buy the tigers live animals to eat
There's one eating a chicken
After that, we went to dinner at a "red" restaurant. They sang songs about Mao. There were lots of drunk happy people singing along.
Street food. "Food".
We also went to the Sophia Cathedral. It looks like my pictures for that didn't upload. It wasn't that impressive, but I'm a little bit spoiled when it comes to cathedrals.
After Harbin we took a train to Antu/Erdao Baihe. Worst train of the three. There were roughly ten million drunk Chinese men SCREAMING on the bunks below mine while I was trying to sleep. Not bringing my ipod was a bad decision.
We ended up in an ethnic North Korean village
We learned how to make kimchi
and how to hammer dough
One of the group members had a birthday
Then we went hiking
There were some pretty views
And streams
This was our camping site
This was our dinner
Then we hiked out of the forest and got on a bus to Tianchi.
There was some decent scenery
There were also hotsprings, where they boiled some eggs and corn
More korean barbecue for dinner
Birthday no. 2 for lunch the next day in Hunchun
We were pretty excited to be on the North Korean border
North Korea
We stayed in Hunchun for a good three days, and I'm surprised I didn't get more pictures of the place, because it was awesome, also because it was the longest we stayed in any one city. Anyway, in Hunchun we went to a lecture on North Korea and to a high school's field day. The rest of the time was just spend exploring the area and going to bars. Then we took another train back to Beijing, but this time it was only 24 hours instead of 28 :)
Sorry for the month long hiatus! Half of that was partly due to this trip, the other half because I've been lazy. I will get caught up in the next few days, probably.
