Tonight we say goodbye to Inner Mongolia, it will be sad but we are looking forward to seeing our students. We have had many great memories on this first leg of our trip from the camel ride where my camel broke loose and stole our friend's water bottle and decided to eat it, the flood we had the last two days here in Hohhot (it was almost a foot deep in many places with many cars stalled, lots of long train rides (I think over 140 hours now plus our 11 to Beijing tonight too). We have learned a lot of culture and history too (very educational time).

Tonight we will take the train to Beijing for a super short stop...we are not as excited about the Olympic mania and will enjoy seeing the Olympics on TV. We will then travel to the Yunnan province to see a student and do some traveling there. There are many famous places that we are looking forward to seeing such as DAli, Lijiang, Shangrila (zhongdian), etc. We are very excited to not be staying in a hotel for a few days...last night our room had no windows so we were not sure of the time or anything. We will also be traveling alone which will be fun to not have to worry about four people, but also we lack the language, but will do fine I think. We will give you another update soon. Hope you are all doing well.

Ohh...beautiful Mongolia. We have spent about a week in Mongolia and will be leaving tomorrow on the long train ride back through the desert and grasslands to Hohhot China. There have been many things we have learned since being here about the history, culture, and how God is working here. I am trying to read a book on Genghis Khan and how he changed world history (very interesting and a workwhile read) and that has been very eye opening to the culture. Mongolian culture is still very centered around herding, horses, and their past. It is very expensive in the capital city to do most things, even more expensive then America at times, and with the high inflation it seems even worse. Patty and I bought a frozen pizza for 7500 turgets ($6.50) and it was good but expensive. There are many foreign restaurants and many foreign workers since opening up in 1990 after the Soviets left. The Soviets did bring many good things to the country though such as a better education system, the cyrillic letters that Mongolians can read, and many technological advances. Mongolians in the countryside are very friendly, we just stopped in to see a family yesterday and they provided us the traditional foods, milk tea, curdled milk candies, and other milk products (all very gross). The main food is mutton (lamb meat) that is also an acquired taste. Many people still live in gers (pronounced gair like hair), even in the capital. Only 12% live in apartments or houses. We went to two National Parks (Terelj and Hustai). They were truly beautiful places with lots of mountains and grasslands. We got to ride horses, see the folk dances and songs (Patty is now addicted to their music especially the throat singers and horse fiddles), seen wild horses (they are hard to find but we tracked some down and chased them around the mountains). Our greatest joys have been in seeing how God is moving among the people though. We have met many family members and friends and been able to hear their stories and attend their church today. What a blessing. There is a lot of history of Christianity and Mongolia. Marco Polo was asked to bring priests to Kublai Khan and he promised the country would become Christian but there were only a couple takers so the country became Buddist. Ghengis worshipped the Eternal Sky and Shamanism which still remains here as he is revered very highly. We have been very fortunate to be able to stay at our friend Beth's apartment while she is gone in France and to be able to have a wonderful guide, Gany during our travels. Yesterday, we went with a driver on the crazy bumpy roads of the countryside out exploring Hustai National Park which is co-funded by the Minnesota Zoo (yippee). There are few true roads so we took a Land Cruiser and followed paths and made a few of our own, over rocks and rivers. It is such a beautiful place with green everywhere!! We hope your summer has been nice and green but without all of the mowing that comes from it...maybe you need to get a few hundred sheep or goats so cows to mow your lawns!?! Love you all tons!!

We have arrived in Ulaanbaator Mongolia after over 30 hours on the train. A lot of that time was spent at the border while they changed the wheels on the train and left us to wander around the city. We were able to meet lots of people, some of them family listening to songs and also the police who asked us to decifer some artwork on the walls. We had a peaceful trip and the views were simply awe-inspiring with the beautiful desert and the grasslands that went on forever with lots of gers and animals grazing and mountains everywhere.

In Mongolia, we were able to get together with our friend Beth who is working here as a nurse and that was fun. We have seen lots of different historical sites, went on a walking tour today of temples, monasteries and other old buildings. Tonight we will go to the Mongolian Circus which we are very excited about and tomorrow possibly going to the grasslands to stay in a ger and do some horseback riding. We will have a Mongolian friend guide us around the days after that and are excited to go out to the countryside and visit real Mongolian families and see many sites. We are enjoying the country, but it is quite warm with lots of sunlight (18 hours a day or more).

One big different in Mongolia is that there are no "real" taxis so normal looking cars will pick you up and you have to try to communicate even though most people do not understand much English and no Chinese. We even went to the Black Market yesterday with mainly Chinese imported things, our train was loaded with fruit and other things. We bought some Mongolian clothing--we will try to get some pictures of them in different places and get some online in the next month. We hope your lives are blessed in every conceivable way!!

We are on the border of Mongolia. Our train is getting its wheels changed, which is a crazy thought that they change all of the wheels on the train to safeguard against any attacks from either China or Russia. We have about 8 hours to explore, so we went out to a Dinosaur dig site and we were able to pick up some fossils and other cool rocks. It was very fun but as you can expect I came back with too much stuff. We are excited to be able to get to Mongolia as we can visit a friend from college who is working there. There are a few really nice museums that we are looking forward to as well as exploring the culture. We were able to meet with some family members while traveling and that was interesting to hear their stories. We are doing well though the traveling has made us a bit more tired. The trip from Huhehaote to Ulan Bator is about 36 hours, but we luckily were able to get a soft sleeper car with a door so we are able to shut off from the bustle of traveling. The area is super flat with lots of tumbleweed and geckos, but few trees and a decent amount of sand. The sunrise was pretty amazing this morning. We are blessed to be able to see so many of the father's works in nature. We hope you are doing well and we look forward to sharing more later.

We have gotten a chance to see multiple deserts in the last couple of days. That has been a new experience but something that leaves you in awe as you go from trees to shrubs to huge desert sands. We did get to ride our camels, which was quite the experience. We named our camels, from camcam, baibai (white/white), sprout (Patty's), and mine which we named Rebel. Mongolian camels are different from other camels as they have two humps instead of one. The camels were tied together with Patty and I in the back. My camel did not like to stay in line and got itself untied so that it could go up two places to steal the water bottle out of our friends backpack. He chewed on it until he got all of the water out and then spit out the bottle. The desert is an exciting place to be as you can take dune buggies around (we did not), go sliding down the mountains of sand (quite the experience), climb up huge dunes (sometimes harder than others).

We made our way to Wuhai another city nearby, Patty saw it online and it looked interesting so we got train tickets and went there. Everyone kept saying why are you going to Wuhai and we found out that yes it is interesting but its tourism industry is not quite as good as the internet said. They have really neat stone carvings of the ancient letters and symbols from 5000 years ago that very few people know where they are and they are illegal to photograph (we got some after the lady left--she said it was okay as long as she did not see and we did not develop the pictures nearby), we tried to go visit a temple but found out it was impossible because of dangerous roads and went out to the desert to see it mostly deserted. Maybe in a couple of years Wuhai will be much better, but they do have the best night life in their square. We have been enjoying Chinese squares with activities at night like Musical Fountains that spray water to music with lights and lots of fun, but this place had all kinds of games for the kids, teenagers and even adults. My favorites were the kids catching goldfish in a huge pool with little nets (1-4 year olds), huge balls where they the kids try to run in while, and lots of the impossible to win carnival games. Tonight we will take a night train to Huhehaote (Hohhot) and then we will travel to Mongolia for the next couple weeks. Hope your summer is going well...we are getting lots of sun here.

Time is going quickly and the miles and people we have met stack up. We are continuing to travel through Inner Mongolia. It is slowly becoming more and more desert-like, but we have been surprised to see how upscale the cities have been. We have gotten a chance to visit a number of places the last couple of days. We went out to visit the Geghis Khan (Changis) maseleum yesterday. It was amazing to see all of the artifacts that have been collected and protected for the past 600 years by the same group of people. He is highly revered by both Mongolians and Chinese, but it is a disputed issue as the Mongolians say most Chinese have Mongolian blood because of his invasions. His bones were scattered around the desert by his followers so there is no actual grave for him, but there is a pile of rocks to woship his horse at and a palace to hold his artifacts. IT is amazing to see how his actions affected this area in bringing together the many tribes and how he affected world history as a military invader. During the night, we stayed at a Mongolian yurt (ger), which is a must for any trip to Mongolia (just like visiting the Great Wall and China). It was rather comfortable with a fan and other modern conveniences. We even had some little cats and a puppy to keep us company. The old man said he was going to kill them over and over again, making Patty sad. Today, we traveled by bus in all kinds of places to get back to where we actually wanted to be.

We have gotten a chance to visit many people and try different foods. The mongolian food is rather interesting with lots of homemade dairy and I was very surprised to see Holstein cows up here and we did not get to ride the horses yesterday because it was too expensive and they would guide the horse for you. But tomorrow we are planning on going camel riding through the deserts at the Singing Sands and climbing and sliding down the sand dunes. It will be fascinating to actually see the desert all around us. Well, we are hoping to get many more chances to say hello and share a little bit more and some pictures when we return. Love and peace!!

Classes are over, grades turned in, we celebrated the 4th of July and now we are on the road traveling. It is sad to leave our students for the summer, but we are excited to see more parts of China. We have made it past the large travel portion of our trip--51 hours of trains and many hours of buses also. We traveled from Anshun to spend time with friends for the 4th--no fireworks as it is not celebrated much here in China. We then traveled 27 hours to Xian in sleeper car--very nice and we met lots of nice people. When we arrived a friend of a friend met us and put us up at a hotel as it was 11:30pm. We did not know that the next two days would be planned by him. unfortunately, we did not get to go to the famous terracotta soldiers, but did get to see some other famous historical sites before having to go t Baoji to meet our train--there were no seats on any other train. We did not get tickets for seats there either but were able to find some seats, but no sleeper car for over 24 hours in a hard seat with lots of people stuffed in. We met some nice people but were not always able to communicate. The area up is very beautiful with lots of interesting houses, lots of mountains, and varying farming practices. We are now in Hohhot in Inner Mongolia and will spend a week or so in this area before traveling up to Mongolia. One interesting thing that happens at the border of China and Mongolia is that they stop and change the wheels on the train because they are afraid that China will invade. We will go to Beijing on the 1st of August and then to Yunnan. We are thankful for your thoughts and we hope you are doing well. We will hope to update more in the coming days. Love you all tons and hope to hear from you.