Midterm Trip to Datong

Datong was both fun and incredibly frustrating, much like China. I was expecting an escape from the smog, but no such luck. Datong is about a 6 hour train ride away from Beijing, so we left Thursday at 11 pm and arrived in Datong at 5am. Datong is close to inner Mongolia, so it is pretty dry and there aren't a lot of trees. We went straight to the hotel and had breakfast. Everyone was really tired and pretty cranky, since it's hard to sleep on the train. After breakfast we left for our first destination. We took a coach bus everywhere, so we were quite obviously tourists. We went to the Hanging Monastery, which is built right into the side of a cliff. The views from the monastery are great. We then went to the Heng Mountain and most of the group took a ferrocarril up, but me and 7 others walked up, since the views were great and we had a lot of time to spend there. After our final destination of the day was the Wooden Pagoda, which was apparently featured in the movie Prison Break, which I haven't seen. At this
point we were exhausted, we went back to the hotel and it was already 7. We had to arrange our own dinner, so Jiaona, Alicia, Julia and I met at 8. We wandered around for a little until we found a place that looked good, at this point we were starving and so it didn't take much persuading. We ended up at a hotpot restaurant and it was fabulous! The waitress was really nice; the menu didn't have pictures, so she helped us order, but she wasn't obnoxious and didn't talk down to us, which happens a lot in Beijing when you don't understand something. In Datong they don't get that many foreign tourists, so we were an oddity, and people would ask to take pictures with us.

The second day wasn't as interesting. We went to the Yungang Grottoes, which are caves that hold Buddah carvings, that was pretty cool. Then we went to another small monastery for about 30 minutes and ended the day at the Nine Dragon Screen, which was basically a large dragon mosaic. Then we had until 10pm to do what we wanted. My roommate and I slept until 6 pm, which was when you had to vacate the room. Afterwards Jiaona, Julia, Alicia and I took a taxi to the shopping district. We ate at a not very good restaurant and then wandered around afterwards, which was probably my favorite part of the trip. The street was packed on both sides with little vendors, selling everything from popcorn to clothes. Alicia ordered "chou dofu" which is basically aged tofu. It's really stinky, it smells like old socks, she and Jiaona loved it, I tried it, but it tastes much like it smells. Then on a whim, we all got a spray on skull tattoo. I was the first one to do it, and a crowd of people gathered around to watch, it was really strange. When we went back to the hotel, we played a joke on our favorite teacher Zhang laoshi. We told her Jiaona had a small "problem", her arm hurt. Then we showed her the "tattoo" and our matching ones. For about 5 seconds she actually thought it was real and then she grabbed our arms and took a closer look and tried to see if it smeared. That was really fun. Then we took the night train back and arrived at Beijing at 5am.