Above:The Baha'i House of Worship of Asia. Below:Life and times of your fellow World Citizen, Kolya

China's Spring Break is always centered on May 1st (Labor Day) and lasts 5 to 7 days for most people. I didn't have enough money to leave Baotou. So i stayed at home most of the week. Except on Monday i spent the day with Maria and her meimei (pronounced: maymay)--younger sister, River, and 4 of River's friends, on the Eastside. They're all dogs, except for Maria and one of her friends. And no i'm not saying anything bad!!! They really are! Born in the year of the dog. Except, one of River's friends is chicken, ahem, i mean a chicken, and Maria's born in the year of the rabbit. (I'm a Dragon, by the way). Anyway, I met them for a hot-pot lunch and then we went to the South Lake water park. They’re all lovely people, btw, beautiful good-natured and kind… and happy to meet a foreigner (it was the first time I met River’s friends who are all nurses). And possibly the first time they’d met a foreigner. At the Lake, Maria, River and Vicki went speed boating. And the other 3 friends and I went paddle boating, which was fun since I got to steer most of the time! Then before I took the 45 min bus ride home to the Westside I watched West Side Story (my DVD) at Maria’s English School with her, River and Suzzi. (Baotou is like a twin city. The East and West Sides are connected by a half hour’s drive worth of road—without much else there, it’s basically rural/suburb. So that Baotou kind of looks like a dumbbell with the road connecting the two parts. The Eastside is the old city and the Westside the new, built as late as the 1950s.)
The other exception was on Wednesday, when I went to Kundulun Reservoir with 3 friends, 2 of whom are also my English students, by bike. It takes about an hour to ride there. It’s a pretty big reservoir and there are also various other things there like a brand new Buddhist temple (a second building is still under construction), a boating pond, go-kart and dune buggy tracks, and mountains to hike up. On the way back from the reservoir we stopped at an old Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. It’s still in use for the public but it’s monk-less. There’s only a caretaker there, who is not a monk unless he was in civvies. It’s about 200 years old. The 2 main buildings are still in good condition, however, the complex was apparently at least a little bigger before the cultural revolution. Apparently, though, once a lunar month monks do come to the temple/monastery to hold devotionals. I’ve sometimes seen people around Baotou saying prayers and lighting incense sticks in these temples, however, usually they seem to be doing it for the first time and a bit awkwardly and are being coached on how to do it by the attendant. Also, they’re not usually praying so much as making a wish, or trying out something new and interesting or just having a bit of “fun”. However, one of my students said she often used to go there when she was a child and lived nearby. Inside the smaller building was a shrine-room with very interesting, impressive and memorable sculpted shelving the likes of which I don’t remember ever seeing before, although the rest of the Monastery was just like others I’ve seen in Beijing, Ladakh or Sikkim (both in India). There is also a very large Tibetan Buddhist monastery (with—a few—monks) within a couple hours drive of Baotou, but I haven’t been there yet.