Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel

This is the letterpress gauge. 1.25 mm of balanced Lynx that presses into the ball and leaves a mark, wound on a 660-foot spool, quick and not remotely stupid. Water bottles, please. Kharkhorin gets covered on foot before anything is strung: a hundred and eight stupas, two granite turtles, one very direct rock.

↓ Tour Kharkhorin, Mongolia

Four stops before the checkout

Kharkhorin, Mongolia

Stop one

Erdene Zuu Monastery

Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel: Count the wall. One hundred and eight stupas, the auspicious number in Buddhism, and you are going to tell me that is a coincidence. Abtai Sain Khan founded Erdene Zuu in 1585, oldest surviving Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, and he built it partly with stone taken out of the ruins of Karakorum. Wall roughly four hundred metres square. Sixty-odd temples and a thousand monks at its height. Then 1937: in the Stalinist purges the Mongolian government destroyed most of the country's monasteries and executed thousands of monks. Erdene Zuu was closed and largely stripped; a portion was preserved as a museum, reportedly on the intervention of officials. Religious activity resumed in 1990. UNESCO listed it in 2004.

cardio tennis for loneliness — The Stone Turtles of Karakorum in Kharkhorin, A large weathered granite tortoise carved with a flat back and blunt head, squatting alone on open steppe grass among scattered rubble, with a monastery wall of white stupas in the distance

Stop two

Stone Turtle of Karakorum

Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel: Four tortoises. Four, one at each corner of the city. Two are here. Nobody ever wants to talk about the other two. These granite ones mark the boundaries of Karakorum, the capital Ögedei Khan founded in 1235 to run the Mongol Empire, and the form is Chinese, used as the base for inscribed memorial stelae, the tortoise standing for longevity and stability. William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar, walked in here in 1254 and wrote down the palace, the foreign quarters, the mosques and churches, and a silver fountain tree built by a captured goldsmith from Paris. A silver tree. Then Kublai Khan moves the capital to Khanbaliq, and only after that do Ming forces destroy the place in 1380. Think about the order of those two events.

cardio tennis for loneliness — Karakorum Museum in Kharkhorin, A low modern building of pale stone and glass on the edge of the steppe town, its galleries holding glazed pottery, coins, bronze fittings, stone inscriptions and a scale model of a walled medieval city

Stop three

Kharkhorum Museum

Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel: They opened this museum in 2011 on Japanese funding, and I want you to notice the gap: German and Mongolian archaeologists have been digging at Karakorum since 1999, twelve years of finds before anybody built a room to put them in. Glazed roof tiles. Chinese and Persian ceramics. Coins from across Eurasia, iron tools, fragments of wall painting, a reconstructed section of the great hall's floor. And here is the part nobody buried: goods arriving from China, Central Asia, Persia and Europe, into a population of Muslim merchants, Nestorian Christians, Buddhist monks and craftsmen taken as captives from conquered cities. It even covers the Turkic and Uyghur empires that had their capitals in this same Orkhon valley. All of it on open display. Allegedly.

cardio tennis for loneliness — Mongol Empire Monument in Kharkhorin, A large open-air memorial of three tall curved concrete walls faced with coloured mosaic maps and mounted warriors, standing on a bare hillside above a river valley and reached by a long flight of steps

Stop four

Kharkhorin Rock

Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel: Now this one they explain very fast, have you noticed that? A stone carved into a phallus, on a slope a few kilometres from Erdene Zuu, generally attributed to the monastic period. The local explanation, and I am only repeating what I am told, is that it enforced celibacy among the monks by reminding them of what they had renounced, and that it counteracted a hillside opposite whose form suggested a woman. Fertility monuments like it turn up at several Mongolian sites, in a religious landscape where Buddhist practice absorbed the older shamanic and animist elements rather than replacing them. It is a standard stop on the Karakorum circuit, inside the Orkhon Valley cultural landscape, UNESCO-inscribed in 2004 for its layered nomadic history. Layered. Their word.

The Kharkhorin, Mongolia track

Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel

Written for this world alone.

They are not stupid, they are fast, and you learn that difference quickly and painfully. Head Lynx 17g is fast too: a co-polyester monofilament at 1.25 mm, the balanced gauge of Head's balanced poly, on a 200-metre reel — 660 feet, roughly sixteen racquets.

Seventeen gauge is where most players land: enough bite for spin, enough body to last, and Lynx keeps decent tension behaviour for a poly, which matters a great deal more than people admit. Control and bite, without going dead by Wednesday.

Kharkhorin. Take water. We are covering ground today.

We begin at Erdene Zuu Monastery, a walled square roughly four hundred metres a side with one hundred and eight stupas along the top of the wall and Chinese-style temple halls inside on open grassland. Abtai Sain Khan founded it in 1585, partly out of stone carted from the ruins of Karakorum, and at its height it held over sixty temples and a thousand monks.

In the purges of 1937 the government destroyed most of the monasteries in the country and executed thousands of monks; this one was closed and largely stripped, though a portion was preserved as a museum. Religious activity resumed in 1990 and UNESCO inscribed the site in 2004.

Then out onto the steppe to the stone turtles of Karakorum — weathered granite tortoises about two metres long sitting alone in the grass, shells worn smooth, heads barely defined.

Four originally marked the corners of Karakorum, the capital Ögedei Khan founded in 1235 as the administrative centre of the Mongol Empire, and they were the bases for inscribed memorial stelae, the tortoise standing for longevity.

William of Rubruck reached the city in 1254 and recorded its palace, its foreign quarters, its mosques and churches and a silver fountain tree made by a captured goldsmith from Paris. Kublai moved the capital to Khanbaliq and Ming forces destroyed Karakorum in 1380. Two turtles are what is left. They are still upright. So are we.

Then the Kharkhorum Museum on the edge of town, opened in 2011 with Japanese funding to hold what has come out of the ground since German and Mongolian archaeologists began work in 1999: glazed roof tiles, Chinese and Persian ceramics, coins from across Eurasia, iron tools, fragments of wall painting, and a reconstructed section of the great hall's floor.

Goods from China, Central Asia, Persia and Europe all arrived at one capital, whose population ran to Muslim merchants, Nestorian Christians, Buddhist monks and craftsmen taken captive from conquered cities.

And we finish uphill at the Kharkhorin Rock, a stone carved into an unmistakable phallus lying tilted on the slope and pointing at a cleft in the hills opposite. The local account is that it kept the monks' minds on their vows and countered the influence of the hillside across the valley. It stands inside the Orkhon Valley cultural landscape, inscribed by UNESCO in 2004 for its layered nomadic history.

You will work through this reel everywhere from a windblown court in Kharkhorin to an indoor hall in Ulaanbaatar three hundred kilometres east, and by the way, it is also perfect for a bowl of airag out on the Orkhon in summer, which will do more for your recovery than anything I can shout at you.

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Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel

Head Lynx 17g Tennis String Reel