Inner Mongolia - The Fight

As tales from Inner Mongolia continue, we come to the low point of our trip.

We had been at the grasslands and experienced all that drama with the horses and disappointment with touristy "Yurt Land." We had a taxi take us back to the bus station. Our next destination was the desert. Sadly, we discovered there was no direct bus to take us to Baotou (desert area), so we had to take a bus back to Hohhot (2 hrs) and then would have to take another 2 hr bus to Baotou later in the day. Sigh.

We decided since we had to be in Hohhot anyway, that we might as well eat another delicious lamb hotpot at Not the Same, the restaurant we had been to previously. On the way to the restaurant we saw a shameless pickpocket in broad daylight. We were appalled a) that when people caught the guy's hand in their purse, the just held their bag closer and kept walking. No screaming. No scene. No police. And b) that the pickpocket wasn't phased by defeat and just carried on to the next person. Brad, being the action-taker that he is, trailed the guy several times trying to thwart his attempts at thievery, but in the end, what could we do? Follow him all day? He went in a different direction than us, and we walked off in shock.

At this point every person in Inner Mongolia had stared at us, screamed "Hallo" like that was our name, tried to rip us off at every opportunity, and we were just feeling defeated by corrupt Chinese business "ethics." Oh, and did I mention that Hohhot is China's toilet? Truly, it smelled horrific, and I saw at least 3 grown men peeing on on the street while we were there. Avoid all puddles.

So all we wanted was a nice relaxing meal...to stuff ourselves with lamb before taking yet another bus. Nope. The table beside us was completely drunk and obnoxious. They began their "Hallos" but we just ignored them, trying to eat our meal in peace. I guess that wasn't the most hospitable response, but we were weary. The men continued mouthing off in Chinese, foreigner this, foreigner that. Midway through our meal, one of the losers threw a paper ball at Brad. Are we in elementary school? Apparently. Brad just looked at them, like "Are you kidding?" At some point in the meal the guys got Brad's attention enough to "cheers" and "make friends." They were still super annoying.

We got up to leave and the drunkest of the group through a cup of tea at Peach. Yes, threw a cup of tea at Peach. At that point, she switched over to "attack mode" as is the Chinese way...to cause a verbal scene. Meanwhile the guy that threw the tea started throwing stuff off the table and breaking things. The other customers got scared and left. We moved to the other side of the room while Peach was talking to the drunk guy's friend and the boss.

In the end we saw how futile it was to trying to reason anything with the drunks or the boss. The boss wouldn't take any action against these guys, I guess because she didn't want to lose their business in the future. Or maybe it's just the Chinese way to sort of "take it". I dont' like to continually bring up the "in America" line, but truly, in America we would have been apologized to, gotten a free meal, the guys would have been kicked out, maybe the cops called. None of those things happened.

Then we came to the dilemma of who was going to leave first. The drunk crew insisted we leave first, but I didn't feel safe with that. I was afraid they'd follow us. One of the guys was threatening to beat Peach up if we didn't leave first. It was so ridiculous. In the end the boss agreed to hold the guys at the restaurant while we left in a taxi. We ended up waiting forever. We were all so distressed and frustrated. Maybe Hohhot has nice people, but we didn't meet any of them...