Road Trip to Inner Mongolia

Background information on my internship:

I am interning in Beijing, China. The company I am interning for is Double L, which manufactures potato farming equipment in Idaho. 

In April, Kenny, Lial, Johnny and I took a road trip out to Inner Mongolia to visit some of our customers.  It was about a 6 hr drive or so from Beijing out to the outskirts of Inner Mongolia. (Note: Inner Mongolia is a province of China. The country that you're all thinking of is just Mongolia).

 This sign proves that I was in Inner Mongolia

Kenny drove his car and when we were "almost" there, we waited at a gas station so as to meet up with a customer, so he could lead us to his farm. Yeah, typical Chinese would (and he did) say, "Ok yeah, I'll be there soon" or "ok, I'm on my way." FALSE.  They say it because I guess it is culturally appropriate, but culturally whatever, it is false.  After waiting for 20 minutes, we called back to find out that they hadn't left and instead they just gave us directions on how to get there. Or so we thought.

We drove for another 20 minutes, following the directions, finally got to the end of his directions and called him again.  He said now we needed to drive another 15 min or 15 km to point X.  Then we would turn and see this and that etc.  This whole process happened at least 4 times, by which time we found ourselves literally in the middle of nowhere, and with our gas level dipping.  We eventually got to the point where we had to decide if we were going to bag it, knowing that we barely had enough gas to get back to the gas station, or if we were just going to push forward, hoping somewhere there would be gas along the way. 

After calling the guy again, he said that there was a place to get gas on the way which, as you might guess, was another 15km.  Keep in mind all the while we are driving in the middle of a dirty, dry, dusty desert on a bumpy dirt road.  How nice it is that everything is just 15km (which by the way is also almost never true).

Finally, we pull into...I don't think it was even big enough to call it a village, but we pulled into it.  We found a sign that said "Gas Station" (加油站）and told the lady we needed gas.  She goes into the shed and pulls out a gas can.  Who knows what grade it was...probably half dirt too, but she had gas.  We had to cut a Mountain Dew bottle to use as a funnel to put the gas into the tank.  Also, the lady filling us up, she must've been in her 60's or 70's and this was her first time EVER seeing a foreigner!  And now she had the privilege of seeing three.

All in all, it was a fun and interesting road trip.  Things turned out well, but yeah, the first 7 hrs or so were definitely the most interesting!

Filling up the car with some sort of gas.

Cut-up Mountain Dew bottle was the funnel b/w the car and the gas jug.

From left to right (white people only)

Josef, Kenny, Lial.

The Chinese in the picture were the people that lived in this small village.

What was a quaint mud house in Inner Mongolia...just one wall left now.

This was part of one of the many "villages" we passed.