Tuesday, June 5th - Leaving Hohhot for Xi'An

• First attempt at Chinese pharmacy
• My allergies were killing me (and only in Hohhot has this happened while I’ve been in China) so I looked up on baidu.com the word for allergy and went to the pharmacy to try my luck
• I showed my lady the word, she pulled out some allergy medicine with some English instructions (the inside instructions expressing what I think was the waiver of rights was all in Chinese and I didn’t understand a word of it), forked over my money and went on my merry way
• Inner Mongolia Museum was pretty cool
• If you don’t speak Chinese or Mongolian (like me) then you’re kind of out of luck because you can oly read about 30 things and 1/3 of them are about how great the communist party is
• After a while you’re like, “Ok, ok, Mao Zedong is a hero, we get it”

• • The museum is super huge, free, and the outside is cool because it's supposed to resemble the grasslands of Mongolia

• I love how well behaved the feral cats and dogs in China are
• You can walk up to them and almost pet them they’re so nice
• You don’t even get the feeling that they’re going to bite you, which is probably related to the fact that you can order dog meat in China as an entree and I think the feral animals know that
• Met a cool guy in the hostel
• He was a world traveler and he had a lot of good tips to spare
• Iceland is the most laid-back place ever
• He said that him and his girlfriend went to Iceland on the cheap because they just bummed rides off of soccer moms and stayed in the front yards of farmers houses
• He said this really only works if you’re travelling with a girl, a child, or wearing an academic looking hat
• Basically, he would just wait at gas stations with his girlfriend for rides and they even got a ride from a soccer mom and her kids
• Then when they needed a place to stay, they just knocked on a farmer’s door and asked, “Hey, can we crash in your front yard” and they always said yes (sometimes they even threw in beer)
• He also had this joke about a Japanese guy, a South Korean guy, and a North Korean guy walk into a restaurant and the head waitress says, “Sorry, we don’t have any meat”
• The Japanese guy says, “What is ‘sorry’?”
• The South Korean guy says, “What is ‘don’t have’?”
• The North Korean guy says, “What is ‘meat’?”
• He also joked about how when Kim Jong-Il died, the fat population of North Korea dropped in half
• The only reason we (USA) keep troops in South Korea and Japan is so that we can keep Japan and South Korea from blowing North Korea off of the map
• Backkom the Polar Bear
• They had this playing in the train station in Hohhot which was actually pretty entertaining
• For some reason my VPN won't work with youbue at the current moment so here's the Wikipedia page at least http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_(TV_shorts)