Hohhot

Jan 2020

So, yeah this is where I was when it all happened. I was in the hotel room when I got a bunch of text
messages from my school telling me what to do and what all the new regula ons were dealing with
covid. My plan was to get a mask at the airport. A sort of self-gouging strategy. I was making a lot more
money than other people in China, I didn’t want to by cheap masks and take them away from the people
who need them. At the airport, I knew they would be more expensive, I also knew there would s ll be
some there. They wouldn’t let me on the subway without a mask, so I had to go around the city trying
to find masks. I felt like I was right behind this group of people who were buying boxes of masks and I
saw them loading them into their car. I thought I found some masks at a pharmacy, but those wound up
being masks for taking off makeup or something. It covered everything but the mouth and nose. I
eventually found some masks, and when I got to Shanghai, there was a guy trying to tell me how masks
are useless and don’t work. When I was in line for the train to go to Mongolia, my mom texted me
warning about covid. I told her not to worry that was happening far from where I was. She told me how
other provinces were star ng to get covid. I wanted to tell her that if it was spreading from Wuhan, then
she was in more danger than I am. I just said ok.

I wanted to break this down like I normally do, but I really can’t remember the exact places I went, so I’m
going to talk about everything in one go. When I got there I no ced a lot of horse iconography. It really
felt like home, there was also snow on the ground. This was the most like Kentucky I have ever seen. A
lot of stuff was closed. I don’t know if it was because of the snow, the new year or covid. The only thing
really open was some Buddhist temples.

One of the things that was closed was a park that I think is where China shoots off its rockets. That is
something I would really like to have seen. I just looked through the gate and there was a map of the
park I could look at. Another thing that was closed was an Islamic mosque. While I couldn’t go in, it had
a large campus that I could walk around. It looked a bit like marble, but it was made of metal. It was
kind of green.

The Buddhist temples were open and, unlike in China proper, they were very ac ve with rites, etc being
preformed. It wasn’t just a bunch of statues that people went to look at. Originally, I wanted to go to
Tibet, but that required ge ng permission and you had to book a tour. You couldn’t just go and walk
around like wherever else I travel. But Mongolian Buddhism is a lot like Tibetan Buddhism. (There was
an agreement between the Kahns and the Dali Lama, an agreement that modern China points to as to
why they own Tibet). When I say that people in China proper just go to temples and look at the pre y
statues. There are not that many pre y statues to look at in those Temples. Here it is packed wall to
wall with statues of various Buddhas. Some are of a graphic and carnal nature. That’s a weird place to
end this, but that’s all I have to say about the Buddhist temples of Mongolia. Except that not only are
they big, there is a lot of them.

There is also, like a history area, sort of like Colonial Williamsburg. It has a bunch of historical exhibits
about the famous people and the way people lived during the Mongolian Golden Age. There is a lot of
horse iconography. I bought like a li le saddle canteen, but I wasn’t allowed to take it on the plane so I
had to abandon it.

Shanghai Wildlife Center

3/23/2020

Covid felt over now. So I decided to start traveling again. I went to Shanghai. There was s ll a bunch of
safety measures which were a bit difficult to navigate, because I don’t speak Chinese. Anyway, I made it
into the zoo. There were a lot more pandas here than at the Shanghai Zoo. One of the Pandas was that
one that was born in Washington. There was also an Orangutan that people would throw food at.
Seeing that made my stomach turn. The ape just sat there with his hand out wai ng to be fed. He
seemed fat, but now I know that that is about how fat they get in the wild. There was also a liger. I
learned that a female liger wont mate with a male ger, only a male lion. They like beards.