In an earlier post about a typical day, we spotted an amazing “bubble trike” but it zipped by too fast to get a picture. Read more...
Graffiti in Hohhot is more about commerce than about making art or marking territory. Sidewalks and blank walls here are plastered with stickers and spray-painted phone numbers advertising various services, most of them illegal. Read more...
Dan has encountered many strange and unfamiliar foods since coming to Hohhot. Besides Northern Chinese and Mongolian cuisines, there are all sorts of random produce items and snack foods that cross our path. Read more...
Do you think of laundry as an irksome chore? Maybe meeting our Hohhot washing machine, the Green Midget, will change your mind. Read more...
These postcards got lost in the mail for a few months. This January while Dan was back in Seattle for work, Sarala visited the region of Alashan in the far west of Inner Mongolia. This first picture sets the scene rather well. Read more...
This one’s for those of you who like to think about weather in terms of the gear needed to combat it. Over the past six months, we’ve had to dust off some outerwear that we rarely or never use in Seattle, while some Seattle staples have had a much briefer season here. We’ve illustrated with pictures of Sarala, since Dan’s outerwear all looks the same (more and more layers under a black Northface ski jacket). Read more...
Greetings from the inter-new-year limbo! 2015 has begun, but the Year of the Horse hasn't yet given way to the Year of the Goat/Sheep. The Lunar New Year, which falls on February 19th this year, is still a bigger deal around here than January 1st. However, Christmas and New Year's weren't completely ignored. Here's a little recap of how we and those around us celebrated. Read more...
Recently we’ve had a lot of meetings with local linguists, and Dan has started having Mongolian lessons twice a week, so we’ve been too busy to write any long blog posts. But we have been taking a lot of walks, and in the last few days we’ve come across some curious sights that we just had to share. First up: the Urban Donkey. Read more...
Winter is in the air. Last week we had our first snow flurry: Read more...
In our earlier post about three-wheeled vehicles, we promised more trike-spotting in the future. Today’s instalment features the trikes that haul goods back and forth around the city. Read more...
Last weekend we spent a few days in Ereenhot (“Èrlián” in Chinese), a small city on the border with Mongolia. It is probably most famous for the dinosaur fossils that have been found in a nearby dry lakebed, notably the species Erliansaurus. Read more...
The notice went up in August: our apartment complex would be undergoing renovation to improve thermal efficiency. Work crews would be replacing everyone’s windows and adding insulation to the walls and roofs. Read more...
We were surprised to learn after arriving in Hohhot that there was about to be an international sociolinguistics conference held right here on the IMU campus. The Urban Language Seminar convenes in a different city every year, usually in China or Europe. Since Sarala’s project concerns the Mongolian language as used in cities in China, the conference was right up her alley. Read more...
Bikes are everywhere in Hohhot. People of all ages ride every day, carrying toddlers, groceries, large boxes, and yes, even satellite dishes. Read more...
Some of our days in Hohhot are pretty quiet. We stay home and work on our computers, and maybe go out to exercise or buy groceries or meet someone for an hour or two. This post describes a day that was less typical in that regard, but that exemplifies a lot of typical aspects of daily life here nonetheless. Read more...
In China, tricycles aren’t just for toddlers. The streets here are chock-full of three-wheeled contraptions. Gas-powered, battery-powered, and pedal-powered, all sizes and shapes, and all ages (both vehicles and riders). Here are a few we’ve seen lately. Read more...
Last Monday was the Mid-autumn festival. We participated in a small way by eating a lot of fruit and moon cakes and gazing at the moon while strolling around the campus of Inner Mongolia University. Here are some pictures. Read more...
Some friends gave me (Sarala) some starter from their yogurt. Now we too have a Mongolian yogurt culture living in our house. It sits on one corner of the dining table in a yellow plastic tub that was originally a takeout container. I eat some each morning and feed it more milk each afternoon. Read more...
Our apartment is on the sixth and highest floor of a building of teachers’ residences on the campus of Inner Mongolia University. Since it's at one end of the building, there are windows on three sides. Here's a tour of some views we got in July and August. Read more...
After a tough month of July spent by Dan in packing up the old Seattle apartment and by Sarala in cleaning and organizing the new Hohhot one, we were happily reunited in Beijing on Friday 08 August. Read more...