Mostly Red

The Continuing Adventures of...

2010-12-04T18:38:00.002-05:00

NEW YORK – I've continued to blog at my food and adventures in eating site www.subineats.com. Follow my failures, triumphs and tales of indigestion there.

The Wild, Wild West

2008-01-31T20:22:00.000-05:00

ULAANBASHI, Mongolia – Hollywood scared the shit out of the Soviet censors. Very, very few films were allowed to pass the Iron Curtain, and nothing in John Wayne's canon was on that list. The quintessentially American westerns – "High Noon" and "The Quick and The Dead" – never screened in Warsaw or Moscow. Instead the proletariat a revisionist take on the genre: the Red Western.

As with their American brethren, the Red Westerns are a diffuse group, but in general these movies subverted and questioned the Western's moral compass. Many times the Native Americans are shown to be heroes, and the maundering cowboy an enemy. Instead of making off with a pile of money, the Red Western hero distributes it amongst the people.

With these plotlines, the Soviet Film Agency couldn't just call up the National Park Service and request a three-week shoot in Monument Valley. The Red Westerns had to use stand-ins for the scenery of the American West, and by far the most popular alternative was here in Mongolia.

After a long drive back to Ulaanbaatar today, I realize that the directors needed to alter very little to make the shooting location seem American. Our route from Kharkorum is more southerly than the one we took out, which means we are much closer to the Gobi Desert. Soon after leaving, the terrain goes from light brown to a deep rust. Rolling hills are replaced with strange rock formations dropped randomly in the plains. The steppe winds have blown oblong curves into the rock. This could be Colorado or Arizona.

Bobby is apparently not desperate to get back to Ulaanbaatar. Three hours into our trip, six rotations into Battir's new tape – a collection of Buddhist mantras acquired at the Kharkorum Gift Shop – she asks if we are up for one last tourist attraction. "Do you want to see dunes?" she says, and half-hour later the van is parked on the top of a small hill of sand.

Although they lobbied for the stop, Myriam, Cing and Bobby decide the biting wind is too much and just take a few steps out of the van. Caleb and I plunge into the wilderness. Here there are no trees and no grasses, just sand and a few scattered pieces of scrub brush. I run toward a high dune, a couple hundred meters from the van, scamper to the summit and then jump off the sharpest face.

Thud! I land not in a cushion of buoyant sand but on a patch of crusty sand hard as cement. My knees scream in pain. I have been the victim of a mirage. The toffee dunes and blinding sunlight so much resembled the Southwest for a brief moment, I deluded myself into believe I was in a real desert. I hobble back to the car, cursing not to make the same mistake again.

Perhaps it is lingering skepticism from the fall or the combined effect of four nights of questionable sleep and hard drinking, but I am slow to realize the other Western parallels as we pull off the road for lunch. We stop in the first settlement since our ger the previous night, five bumpy hours from Kharkorum.

Our destination is a canteen smack dab in the middle of a one-street town. Inside a young waitress, bland expression practically bursting with ennui, moves her hand to indicate open seating. We choose the only table big enough to accommodate a party of six. The menu sticks to familiar favorites: noodles with mutton, mutton soup, fried mutton rice and buuz, which are mutton-filled dumplings. On the walls is a collection of crap that looks pulled out of someone's storage closet: yellowed surveryor's maps, a brochure for a ger camp, a couple family photos and a wool hat. This is an old time saloon, a watering hole for grizzled locals (two old herders sit at the table opposite ours, sipping milk tea) and travelers passing through.

Hunger abated, I am able to examine the rest of the town with a clear mind. The dozen or so structures in this town are all on the same side of the street, built so they connect in one long row. They are each the same heigh, with matching shutters and all made out of wood. Each building is seperated by a different bright paint color, either a coral blue, fiery orange or magenta. This place is a couple tumbleweeds and a hero short of being a Sergio Leone film set.

Too soon I am in the backseat of the van, speeding back towards civilization. Mongolia is true the Wild West. Here there is no need to remember a time when the place wasn't "tame." We still cut our own path, choosing where to explore in a virgin land. Authority is far away; no one is coming to rescue the idiotic adventurer. It is a place where people still live as they please, mostly unfettered by the pressures of the information age. I will miss it.

A Hollow Shrine

2008-01-30T20:20:00.000-05:00

KHARKORHIN, Mongolia – A stumpa is the oldest and arguably the most reverential symbol of Buddhism. Long before statues of the effeminate, elbow-less prophet dotted Asia's temples, devout followers of the Buddha built stumpas, cylindrical shrines that come to a point like a Hershey's Kiss. They are painted ochre and gold, the colors of a bright sky. The stumpa is an expression of enlightenment at the end of the FIVE FOLD PATH – Buddha's gift to the world.

To show religious piety, rulers in nearly every town and hamlet erected a stumpa long ago. Larger, wealthier places sometimes have a couple stumpas, or even a row for pilgrims to prostrate around. But only here in Mongolia is there an entire wall made of stumpas. This is Kharkorum, the palace of The Great Khans.

Although he's heavily featured in tourist literature, the most famous Khan, Genghis, never lived here. That Khan didn't need no stinking palace to show he was boss.

Born to a broken family on Siberian plains, Khan built an land empire unmatched until the Soviet Union nearly a millennium later. When he died, his iron-clad rule stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. A flick of the Khan's wrist could mean annihilation for hundreds of thousands of people in a disloyal township.

Khan relied on his cunning wit, masterful tactics and fearsome army to rule most of the known world. His power sprung from his mind, not his office. He did without much of the monarchical pomp and circumstance that fascinated other rulers. No entourage of young boys throwing flowers ahead of his horse, no harem of young virgins. This man lived in a tent.

But later Khans did not share Genghis' frugality. Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, forced the court to set up a permanent camp here in Kharkorum. He assembled a dream team of designers, architects and masons: an Italian engineer, Persian craftsman and Russian serfs came to the steppe. They built an opulent capital here. Or rather, they supposedly built an opulent capital, because most of what modern historians know about the place comes from "The Secret History of the Mongols," and other contemporary accounts, since very little remains of the place.

The ruins of Kharkorum are close enough to the dingy, modern town of Kharkorhin to approach as Kublai would, on horseback, but my party rumbles up to the main entrance in Battir's battered van. As I've mentioned, the dramatic wall that surrounds the palace raises expectations in its majesty. The rows and rows of stumpas rise towards the heavens like giant sentries on permanent guard.

After paying the modest entrance fee, my three companions and I walk inside. We cross the threshold to discover nothing. The fountain of mercury, the magnificent gardens and all the other wonders are gone. Instead, there are dead tufts of short grass and a few scattered patches of ice, in other words the inside of the gate is barely discernible from the outside.

Closer inspection reveals two structures on the property. One is a Chinese temple, with glazed-jade roof tiles and two dragons guarded the entrance. The door is bolted shut with a rusted padlock, with a "Do Not Enter" sign in English, Mongolian and Russian.

In the northwest corner we find a small Mongolian temple. Inside a young, bald monk offers to sell us a Genghis Khan figurine or a postcard of the steppe. I decline, and go to the outside of the temple, where there are a few prayers to turn. We soon are killing time: Cing takes a few pictures. Caleb smokes a cigarette. Myriam waves to small dog. In all, we spend half an hour in Mongolia's greatest palace, and that seems like 20 minutes too long.

As we head toward the van, I'm left to ponder the legacy of Genghis Khan. It makes sense the Mongolians' greatest ruler would be a nomad. People here are born in a land without natural barriers. They are raised in an wide, open expanse. Every few weeks all families take town their home, and look for someplace better. Genghis Khan took this quest for self-betterment to its natural conclusion – empire.

It also makes sense that those who tried and alter the landscape, to built and settle in one place, failed. The Mongol empire crumbled as quickly as it was constructed, and soon the country slipped into 500 years of foreign domination. The Khan's palace is lost to time, reclaimed by the endless steppe. I wonder if someday the steppe will reclaim the tatty town nearby. Even if it does, I doubt that Genghis Khan, and his tent will be forgotten.

Behind the Door

2008-01-29T23:11:00.000-05:00

KHARKHORIN, Mongolia – Traveling, to some extent, is about limits, journeying to the edges of the Earth and seeing if it is possible to cross thresholds hidden in our home communities. On this trip I have done many things that I previously thought too complicated, foreign or illegal to consider. But here I found the place where even I will not venture, my line in the sand: a fern green door covered with deep scratches in its thick hardwood.

The door lies in a part of Mongolia I am sure my hosts would rather I not see. I found it by wandering off, going on another "walk" that confuses the Mongolians so much. After my companions and I arrive at the ger camp in the mid-afternoon, we are not interested in sitting around the cast-iron stove and drinking salty milk tea. Instead, Caleb, Myriam and I excuse ourselves after just one cup (rather than the customary five or six) and set off for the town. Bobby, increasingly in-tune with our need to meander, looks at her watch and declares that we can go, as long as we are back in precisely two hours. It might be a strange request coming from someone who on this trip has shown a lax regard for puncuality, but we promise to return in time for more milk tea and steamed mutton dumplings.

Our accommodation is an enclosed ger in the middle of a string of fenced lots running on an east-west axis. The ger entrances face south, toward the town of Kharkhorin. For a front yard, the half-dozen or so families that live here have a kilometer-wide zone of boggy meadow between them and the town. There is no established road leading toward town, so the three of us walk the shortest course available: a straight line.

As we walk, looming to our east is a decaying flour factory, a reminant of the country's attempted industrialization. In the post-war period, when Stalin and Krushchev's Five Year Plans pushed the Soviet Union to recover through massive expansion of heavy industry, the regime's puppet rulers here in Mongolia tried to do the same thing on the steppe. They encouraged nomadic Mongolians to cluster in agricultural communes and newly constructed communities and export commodities to other Soviet republics and allies. For fairly obvious reasons, it didn't work. Fercriously independent people accustomed to packing up their house and moving every few weeks did not take kindly to sixteen hour shifts in an airless factory, grinding grain for the Ukrainian Youth League.

After the Communists lost power in 1991, the suddenly sponsorless factory shuttered its doors, leaving most of the people in the town unemployed. A grant from the Japanese government allowed it to reopen several years later, but there is no sign of activity among the rust covered pylons and smoke stacks caked tar black from decades of grime. I cannot believe that this complex produces a basic food staple. I imagine any flour that comes from this place to be inedible, laced with carcinogens and additives.

We press on. The late afternoon sun is intense, even in the middle of the winter, and I am forced to unzip my bulbous down jacket and remove my scarf. Today, for the first time in weeks, there is water mixed in with the thin crust of snow on the ground. Approximately halfway between the ger and town, we encounter a sheep train. Two herders, both young men in dirty deels, solemnly march back toward a fenced in era to our north after a day of grazing in the mostly barren fields. The sheep seemed well accustomed to humans, and do not baa or complain in any nonverbal way as we snake through the herd.

These few animals are the last sign of natural life we will see on this walk, for Kharkhorin appears to a Hollywood post-Apocalyptic set brought to life. The first building we pass in the town proper is a prison, decaying like every other structure here. Thankfully, no inmates are about, the only sign of life is a couple bare light bulbs glowing in the middle of a window. There is no fence around the building, as if there is nothing worthwhile about the place for people locked up inside to escape.

The prison is one of the more solidly constructed places in town. The streets, all unpaved and filled with slushy potholes, are lined with cheaply constructed buildings of concrete. Some are shops, others small homes. The residences are designed in the same style as in Tsesterleg: square lots, fenced in with mismatched hardwood pickets, with a ger or tiny house placed in the middle. Many lots have a latrine in the back, and I suspect no running water inside.

As soon as I arrive in the town, I realize that we have no reason for coming here. We have plenty of provisions back and dinner waiting in the ger, and there are no tourist attractions or museums on the town's few streets. Every business we pass is shuttered, presumably for the Mongolian New Year, but perhaps because the owners have fled someplace nicer.

Kharkhorin is a blot of the beautiful landscape of Mongolia. It is an argument against urbanization, for here there are not enough people for an interesting, vibrant gathering of people, but enough so that the combined waste and pollution of several hundred families can congeal into a bloody mess. This is perhaps the most depressing place I have ever visited, sadder than the Killing Fields of Cambodia or the KGB Prison in Lithuania, for here the despair does not seem to be improving.

With no other plan, the three of us walk a rectangle around town, with each small street more depressing than the next. We walk mostly in silence. I am amazed at how forlorn this place is; it is so down that it seems beyond a cheery joke or two. Just as we are about to make our third right turn, and begin the last segment of the rectangle, a small building catches my eye. It appears to be a small bagoda, but there are no windows to peer inside. But under the scratched door I see a light.

I want to go inside. I want there to be a point, some redeeming value in this ugly place. But as I make a move to go in, Myriam stops me.

"Wait," she says, and I reconsider. What is behind the door? And why do I need to go inside?

In all probability, there is just a gaunt, frail Mongolian man on the other side of the door with a small selection on canned goods. But I realize there is no reason for me to found out, nor do I want to take the risk of endangering my friends by going inside. The entrance is closed, and there is no sign I can tell that the store is open. This, it appears, is my limit.

Deep Throat

2008-01-25T23:13:00.001-05:00

KARAKORUM, Mongolia - Bobby is my guide on this five day tour through Mongolia's outer aimags, but since neither my companions nor I are paying her any money for the privilege, we are careful not to make arcane requests. I have not demanded a chance to sample the local delicacy of boodog - lamb mutton roasted in the stomach of a deboned marmot - nor requested a retelling of the her parents' experiences during the Communist purges of the Khorloogiin Choibalsan (Stalin's neighborhood stooge). No, I've tried to avoid anything that might make Bobby reconsider her generosity and run back to Ulaanbaatar.

But I didn't even need to ask Bobby about my greatest Mongol desire: She brought the throat singer to me.

For the final night on the steppe, we drove several hours from Tserterleg to Karakorum, the old Khanate capital. The city is a major stop on Mongolia's minor league tourist circuit. In the summer, thousands of people pass through here to see where Genghis Khan's grandson issued decrees for subjects as far away as Romania. During peak season there are apparently sizable, if not Great Wall-level, crowds but on this blustery February afternoon, I could not see any other foreign faces as we drove through town to our destination: a tiny ger camp at the edge of a field.

Although the tourists are gone for the season, the infrastructure remains. We no sooner arrived than Bobby asked if we wanted to hear a local man perform traditional music in the evening. The cost would be just 4,000 tugrugs, or $3.50 a person. Even though I am generally leery of song-and-dance on the tourist trail, I feared declining might offend Bobby, the sole link to our monolingual Mongolian hosts. We agreed to the show. Bobby went off to contact the performer, but not before - perhaps she felt emboldened by how quickly we agreed - pointing in the direction of the camp's only building, a tiny wooden structure. Inside we found a wrinkled woman with beet-red, wind sheared cheeks, offering dozens of tchockes for sale.

Seconds later, Bobby appears without her usual smile. "The old man did not answer his phone," she said. "I guess he is not home."

Caleb, holding a camel figurine, whispered to me: "That means he's too drunk to leave the house. He's on a bender."

Bobby then left us to shop. We were standing in a one-room house the size of a small walk-in closet, crowding around a few sleeves of knick-knacks, wasting time before a dinner of mutton buuz and pickled vegetables. The Mongolians we encountered (continued to) confounded my western ideas of living spaces. Here the proprietors live and serve meals in a ger, keep guests in a second ger, and use the only permanent structure on their property as a gift shop. Considering the way the gelid winds pierced the cracks in the cabin's siding, my hosts are clearly not irrational, just adaptable.

With the concert apparently off the table, we four guests continued with preparations for our final evening on the road. Caleb fetched a bottle of cheap Russian vodka from his pack, I found bottles of Coke and Sprite for mixers and Myriam produced a pack of cards. But I no sooner dealt the first hands of hearts when Bobby burst into the ger with good news. The old man not only has been found, he is next door, waiting to perform. As a manner of introduction, she asks - in the most pro forma way possible - if we are still interested in a bit of music. When we nod, she sticks her head out of the canvas and gestures with her hand. A few seconds later, the evening's entertainment steps into the ger.

In walks someone who appeared to have several decades of hard-living under his belt. The "old man" - whose Mongolian name I immediately forget - sports a face that is covered not with wrinkles but full crevices, scores of lines that look more like heavily whipped meringue than skin, and eyelashes that bush in every direction except perpendicular to his eyes. Take away his garments, an olive green del with a bright orange cumberbun and a loovus, the traditional Mongolian hat that curves to a point like the onion domes of St. Basil's in Moscow, and the person he would most resemble in America is a Berkley hobo. I am surprised he can walk a straight line from the ger door to small bench, where he lays down his bundle of instruments and begins the show.

"Hello," he says, tentatively, and then launches into what is certainly a well-trodden tour through the Mongolian folk song canon. He sings a tune about doomed lovers, a ballad to the country's open spaces, and two songs about a horse. Between each tune he pauses to tell a bit of history behind the composition, at first speaking in Mongolian and having Bobby translate, but as the evening progresses switching to stuttering English, which is not hard to comprehend.

His act is vaudevillian and high-spirited, he works the claustrophobic ger and audience of five as if playing a large concert hall. He taps his feet with the beat, and flashes his decaying teeth filled smile during the pause between verses and choruses. Instruments are swapped out between nearly every song. He starts with a two-string fiddle known in Chinese as the erhu, which is played by rubbing a bow of horse hair across the instrument's long neck. The next piece is played on a small recorder-like flute, and then he switches to a bigger stringed, instrument, the morin khuur. It resembles a guitar with a square base. Like the erhu, it has just two strings, and is played like a bow. When played by the old man, the tones are long and deep, like the rumble of a commercial airliner high in the atmosphere.

The instruments and lyrics of these songs are secondary to the way they are sung. Bobby did not specifically say the Old Man was a throat singer, but it is clear from the first note that this man has mastered the technique. There is no mistaking the two tones filling the air.

When I first encountered throat singing - on Bjork's 2004 album Medulla - it was like discovering a new, secret part of the English language. It was as if before I was a songwriter composing with just E and F, and suddenly became aware of every other note. Suddenly there was just so much more to music. Now, hearing it performed live for the first time, those feelings of discovery are magnified by a factor of ten.

Throat singing, like everything else alien to Westerners, has now been throughly dissected by scientists and ethnographers. We know that the sound, technically known as overtone singing is produced by changing the shape of the resonant cavities in the mouth and throat. This allows people to produce two pitches at once, as the sound is bounced around in the vocal chambers.

But I don't care if throat singing is easily explained. No matter how hard I try, I can't make my throat make the high and low pitches that I normally associate with hearing tests and dishwasher cycles, yet here most men can do it with ease. I think there is something magical about the magnificently bizarre sight of an aging drunkard making these otherworldly sounds. He may look disheveled, but by the time he finished with a cover of The Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" on the horse-head fiddle, it didn't matter. This was the concert of the year.

The Buddha on the Hill

2008-01-22T00:13:00.001-05:00

TSETSERLEG, Mongolia - Caleb stares, one hand on his forehead to shield the midday sun, with unusual intensity at the small rocky hill, just above us. Strangely, he ignores the most prominent object in his line of sight, a 20 meter statue of the future Buddha, Maitreya, carved out of white rock. Instead, his eyes scan the rocky crags of the hillside.

"I'll be back," he said, and he goes off into the wilderness to exorcise his demons.

There are many ghosts in this place. In the year 1706, Zanabazar, a Mongolian warlord, picked this spot to build a temple to the Buddhist Goddess Tara. A holy man, Zanabazar studied for many years in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa before returning to his native land and taking up the sword. When the sage died nine years later, his body was mummified in a lotus position and placed in a stumpa, a Buddhist holy relic, on the site. Generations passed, and the monastery prospered. At its peak in the early twentieth century, more than 2,000 monks studied here, making it one of the largest and most powerful monasteries in the country.

Then came a murder. In 1931, Mongolia's new Communist government feared the monastery's power: Tsetserleg and the holy men were said to support anti-government movements. One night, to counteract the perceived threat, the Communists killed the abbot, who was known as the Sixth Zaya Pandita. They also leveled the monastery, leaving only two temples, one of which was turned in a fire station. In the purges that followed, hundreds of former monks were tortured or killed.

But Caleb's nostalgia is from another time. Two years ago, on leave from teaching English in Ulaanbaatar, he and a fellow teacher rode out here, crammed into a battered van with a dozen other Mongolians. They took over half a day to arrive, and when they did, they found the town closed for Tsagaan Sar, the Mongolian New Year. The only open hotel had no heat and only sporadic cold water, hard mattresses and dim lighting. At the first opportunity, they went outside.

They walked to the monastery, past the statue of Maitreya, over the small hill and into the valley below. It was cold, but they walked at a steady pace, descending into a wooded glade. After a of couple hours, frozen perspiration on the edges of their hats, they decided to turn back. By then the sun hung low in the sky, and was about to disappear behind the hills above and end the short winter day. Soon the two hikers were surrounded by darkness, hopelessly lost. They had few supplies, and none of the warm layers of fur the nomads rely on to buttress themselves from the cold nights.

They kept walking. There was no other choice, really, except to lie down and accept a slow death by freezing. Sometime in the night, they heard a noise, the crunching of footsteps in the crusty snow. The footsteps were those of a passing herder, out with his flock of sheep. With customary Mongolian courtesy, he pointed the lost adventurers in the direction of Tsetserleg, and not long afterwards they found themselves back at the dingy hotel, cold, damp, and tired but alive.

Now, back in town for the first time since that night, Caleb runs in the direction of his misfortune. He scampers toward the top of the hill. I watch his progress from the statue's base, as he pauses briefly and then heads down into a col. Just a moment later his appears, the wind snapping his checkered black and white scarf as he lunges from boulder to boulder toward the peak. He reaches the top and then is suddenly out of view.

Sometime later, as I shoot pictures of the town's distant gers and crumbling schools, Caleb returns. He says nothing, but I take his tranquil expression to mean that by returning here, he has made peace with this haunted valley and the chilling time he almost became one of its ghosts.

A Day at the Races

2008-01-21T00:54:00.000-05:00

TSETSERLEG, Mongolia – How do you set your watch to Mongolian Time?

If you are familiar with the temporal concept known variously as "French Time," "Black People Time," "Island Time" and "College Freshman Time," your watch will need no adjustment. Mongolians, too, are constantly late.

As with any culture not known for punctuality, it's not that people here are so busy they cannot keep appointments. It's just that there's not a high priority placed on getting there exactly at the specified time. Mongolians dawdle, loaf and mosey; rarely do they run.

So when Bobby informed us last night that we would attend the Tsetserleg New Year's Horse Race at 8 a.m. the next morning, we probably should not have set our alarms for seven.

After a protracted farewell to our warm sleeping bags, Myriam the Frontierswoman tries to revive the fire, and I head for the loo. Outside in the dawn light, I am able to take stock of our accommodations. We are staying in a ger, but out the door, instead of the endless steppe, there is a wooden picket fence. This is the backyard of our hosts, who are sleeping, along with Battir and bobby, inside their two bedroom house.The arrangement is an elaborate visual joke. The Mongolians packed up and moved into a warm toasty house with central heat, while white folks travel hundreds of miles to stay in some pieces of canvas thrown up on top of some dead grass. They also pay for the privilege.

Half an hour later, our host's daughter appears with some hot water, Mongolian milk tea, and fried doughnuts. We nosh on the food as we stuff and zipper our overstuffed packs back together. Then we switch to cards, and play a couple of rounds of hearts. Eight comes and goes, and soon it's almost nine.

"Where are they?" I say.

"Uh." Caleb says, exasperated. "It's always like this."

Battir pokes his rosy cheeks into the ger soon after, hunting for our belongings. The van is packed in 10 minutes, but Bobby continues conversing indoors about the price of yak cheese, or whatever. Soon the host family's two sons amble out of the house, apparently bored silly by the grownups' conversation. They bring a basketball with them, and we alternate taking shots against a square piece of wood that's been nailed to the top of a metal pole to form a makeshift hoop.

Bobby finally appears, smiling and apparently free of worry. She informs us that there is a small problem with the van, and that Battir needs to change a part of the tire. We will leave soon, she assures her slightly perturbed clients. Then she goes back inside, leaving us to dribble. We don't pull out of the gravel driveway for another 45 minutes, or just before 11 a.m.

Tseterleg is a small town, but with 15,000 people, it ranks as Mongolia's seventh largest population center. Most people live in small fenced pieces of property, in grey-and-white homes of poured concrete. If there is any beauty in the place, it is in spite of the town's design, which imposes a drab Soviet grid on the golden hills of the steppe. The town is built on the banks of two hills, with the administrative buildings situated in the bottom of the narrow valley. Our host lived high on the east-facing hill, so Battir must take a looping road down to the center.

I doubt there's one traffic cop in Tseterleg or the surrounding state, but Battir drives as if he's under constant threat of citation. Not helping matters is the fact that he does not appear to know our destination. Bobby is constantly chatting and pointing in different directions at each intersection. We eventually reach the base of the hill, and Battir turns off the engine. Bobby darts out of the van, but not without first telling everyone to stay inside. I peer out the window to discover we've stopped not at the race course, but at Mongolia's strangest restaurant.

Although it is well advertised in the guidebooks, I found it impossible to believe the Fairview Restaurant existed until I saw the building, smack in the middle of Tsetserleg. Here in a town where a three window concrete block building functions as a hospital, is an ex-pat run restaurant that serves lasagna, chili con carne, burgers and pies. An oasis in a desert of fatty mutton, the Lonely Planet claims this restaurant is the best in the entire country.

The previous evening, a rumor had spread through the van that we would stop at the Fairview for dinner, but that turned out to be false. I thought we'd get a burger for lunch, but Bobby returned to the van after 15 minutes with just a business card. As the van continued its crawl around town, she explained that she wanted to talk with the owners about forming a partnership. Satisfied with the place, Bobby will start recommending guests at the UB Guesthouse eat the Fairview. As for us, unfortunately, the place was closed for the New Year.

We continued driving down the gravel streets, until Battir made a left and suddenly we were in a long, narrow field. Scattered throughout were locals with their horses, motorcycles and ramshackle cars. This was the race course.

There is no admission fee for the race, nor any refreshments or announcer shouting the proceedings in staccato voice. Instead people just stood around, chatting. Battir drove the van right through the middle, and at an arbitrary place, stopped. I no sooner put on my scarf and stepped out when people started to scream and point far in the distance. The horses! After running a lap around the entire valley -- about 15 miles, the leading riders were sprinting toward the finish line. The brown mares galloped at an incredible speed, so quickly that shortly after I first their dust trail, I saw the leading horse itself, and only seconds before it crossed the finish line.

The winning rider, a diminutive boy not more than 10 years old, finished not three minutes after we arrived. We came at precisely the correct moment.

In this case, Mongolian Time meant right on time.

The Overlap

2008-01-19T02:56:00.000-05:00

MOGOD, Mongolia – Sociologists, psychologists and geneticists agree: we are unique little snowflakes.

Children are encouraged from the time they enter their first classes in school to find out how they are unique. Not long after they learn how to write, they are required to fill in worksheets defining who they: favorite color, favorite music, strange talent. Every individual preference needs to be recognized and codified as soon as possible.

This differentiation may be good for a developing a child's sense of self, but the average group of elementary school students also have a great deal in common. Most of their short lives have been defined by their localities, including the classrooms, neighborhoods and restaurants they share. So, on the first day of classes, while these children are strangers in many ways, they also have numerous shared experiences to talk about: Where did you go to summer camp? Have you been to the new Cheesecake Factory? Did you see Transformers at the downtown cinema or in the mall?

On the other hand, if you are on the road, this isn't true. When I met Caleb three bites into a piece of bread and Nutella, I could assume nothing. His look is something I regrettably refer to as "ambiguously ethnic." He does not look Western European. His nose is long and ends in a round bulb, his thin hazelnut hair is messily parted in the middle, and his skin is neither a pale Scandinavian nor dark Iberian complexion. This face is the pre-requisite for a spy: Caleb could pass as a citizen from any Warsaw Pact nation. It was a visage that gave nothing away.

And then he opened his mouth, said hello, and the hunt to discover our commonalities began. Our conversation started in the hostel kitchen, continued in the common living room, down the stairs, onto the streets of Ulaanbaatar, and then in the back seat of Battir's van.

In the van, there is much time for stories. I knew our route would trace a rough circle starting and ending in Ulaanbaatar, but not until we spent a couple of days on the road did I realize the circle's vast diameter. Every day we spent at least five hours on the road, and sometimes as many as eight. Bobby makes sure to stop periodically for bathroom breaks, Khanate ruins and scenic vistas, but after a few minutes we are shepherded back into our transport. Delaying only makes the arrival time later, it does not shorten the journey.

Things start at the first place our lives intersect – nationality. Caleb is my first American since America, and comes from just outside of Northampton, a town in Massachusetts not an hour from my own. We have both made pilgrimages to Crossgates Mall and the Pepsi Arena, the Clark Institute and the track at Saratoga.

Our universities are similar, mine Tufts, his Reed. Both are liberal arts schools with liberal, international focuses. We both followed our school's ideals by heading off into the world, studying at another university, in a place where we did not speak the language. Perhaps most importantly, we are both in the middle of an adventure most would consider imprudent and quixotic.

Caleb left Cairo several weeks ago on a plane flight to London. He spent New Year's in Paris, stayed with friends in Berlin, and took a long bus to St. Petersburg. There he admired the art – sometime later he would upload nearly 100 pictures of the Hermitage, the repository of the Czar's treasures – and the atmosphere. Caleb is a great lover of the Russian spirit, the melancholy of Dostoevsky, Chekov and Bulgakov.

In Moscow, Caleb looked up a distant relation – a third, fourth, or fifth cousin with the same last name. When asked by his host what he wanted to see, Caleb immediately replied, "Take me to the place where the Devil appears in The Master and Margarita
Caleb's route paralleled mine, but where his trip went right, my tacked left. In Moscow he found family; I spent long nights cooped up with fellow travelers in the hostel. My kupe train ride saw a group of strangers welcoming me into their small group, but Caleb spent the time mostly alone, and just occasionally with a non-communicative cabin mate or two. I spent three days in Ulan Ude, tramping out to Siberian temples and sampling Chinese cuisine. Caleb spent just a few hours waiting for his next train.

The place where our two Venn Diagrams intersect the most is an idea: our love of the precarious and hazardous, the need for the uncertain, the quest for a tomorrow unlike today. To find this adventure, we are headed to similar places. I am going to Beijing, Caleb to Hohhot, a city in the Chinese Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. We will both try to conquer the Chinese language – our current, elementary level is unacceptable – and use it to try to solve the enigma that is China. We understand that things may not go according to plan.

We talk and talk and talk. We go on so long that Myriam and Cing fall asleep, Battir's tape repeats eight times and the sun moves most of the way across the sky. We talk so much that Cing wakes up and teases that we should be ones sleeping, and the two women chatting. But then she closes her eyes again and the conversation continues, for we have so much in common.

Try This Tape

2008-01-15T23:59:00.000-05:00

ARKHANGAI AIMAG, Mongolia – Battir and I have different tastes in music. He prefers saccharine love songs with milquetoast melodies belted out by Ulaanbaatar's latest pre-fab teen sensation. I prefer, well, not that.

Since Battir is the only person who can drive, navigate and repair our aging Soviet van out here on the steppes, we've been listening to mostly soft rock and power ballads on the trip. As there's no radio stations out of the capital area and no one here possesses an angelic voice, we would be hearing these cloying tunes over and over again, if I hadn't remembered to pack a small piece of plastic. This $10 accessory from Sony is an over-looked but essential bit of equipment for anyone planning on a long overland journey in a third world country.

I'm talking about a car tape adapter, a piece of plastic that resembles a cassette tape with a long cord strung off the end. These devices were popular in the 90's, when they allowed drivers to listen to CD players in older cars. Now most American cars come with CD players standard, and these devices have little use.

Not in Mongolia. On the first day of trip, one hour after leaving the UB Guesthouse, Battir slid a tape into the antique van's antique system. We heard a Mongolian love song, with a Celine Dion tempo and a gently played Casio keyboard. Another song came on, indistinguishable from the first, and another and another. Then, after the fifth song, I heard a familiar drum pattern, then a few keyboard chords I'd heard before. And the singer didn't sound like a copy of the one earlier in the tape, she was a clone. It took nearly 30 seconds - 25 more than it should have - for me to piece together what was going on: the tape had started over.

As we drove through champagne colored fields splattered with a thin patch of crusty snow, the tape looped and looped. Out of courtesy, I said nothing. I concentrated on the alien scenery, counted the stray sheep and tried to remember every state capital. Anything to drown out the muzak.

By lunch on the second day, I stopped being polite. I rummaged through my internal frame pack until I found the cassette adapter and marched over to Battir. Now, it took me some to do this. Battir is an imposing figure, a gigantic six-foot five inches with a rotund belly. At age 26, he is still growing. He easily consumes twice as many buuzat dinner as any other member of the crew, and on some nights approaches our combined food intake. Battir wrestled as a teenager, and competed in the national championships during the Nadaam Festival, Mongolia's most important holiday. He's massive man, someone who in America would be a bouncer at a gentleman's club.

Thankfully, I've learned this guy is a big softy. My first was the music - a Mongolian alpha-male listens strictly to gangsta-rap. Then there's the smile. It's hard to be afraid of someone, no matter how big he is, when he wears a goofy grin from cheek to cheek. Battir's is constant. Whether unloading hundreds of pounds of luggage from the van or checking the oil, he never stops smiling.

Confident the man wouldn't try any wrestling moves, I gave Battir the tape and pointed to the player. "Put this in there," I said, even though Battir doesn't speak a word of English. And with a smile, he did just that.

Half a second later, the booming bass of Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At?" came on the stereo. It's been a long time since I've heard Western music outside of my teeny iPod earbuds, and it sounded great. All that afternoon, the car worked through a lengthy playlist of hit songs. We sang along to R.E.M., U2, Nelly, Jay-Z and Eminem. It was wonderful, even if I did sing slightly off-key.

Something Old, Something Digital

2008-01-14T22:40:00.000-05:00

TERKHIIN TSAGAAN NUUR, Mongolia – From the outside, the ger where the resident family lives and the one where I'm staying are identical except for a small detail: the family's ger has a satellite dish. That's right: the canvas tent next to mine has a satellite dish. Not the tiny kind that people in the Bronx string on a fire escape or rooftop, but a six-foot model that's wider than the door. Here I am 400 miles from the nearest city, in the middle of a mountain range, staying in a collapsible home, but my hosts get more channels than I do in the States.

Oh, I know I shouldn't be shocked that there is television on the steppes. The Indo-American author Pico Iyer traveled around the region 20 years ago and reported back about "Video Night in Kathmandu." In the rather ponderous final product, Iyer argued that people around the world, no matter how from "civilization" they may appear to live, are being drawn into our globalized world.

Good for them. Too often, Westerners come to places such as the Great White Lake, and expect to find indigenous people living exactly the way their ancestors did 1,500 years ago. Meanwhile, these same people have an iPhone on order to be delivered as soon as they are available in New York. I despise "native" rituals, so common in China, hate "sacred dances" and "traditional rites" performed three times a day for tourists.

Mongolia is refreshingly different. I won't say the place is "authentic," rather the Mongolians approach to tourism, at least on this trip, is just more laid-back. Once we left the capital, there have been no stops at souvenir stands, no detours to cheaply restored cultural relics with steep admission fees. People here don't apologize for their lives.

At our first ger, Battir's family extended extraordinary hospitality, but made no attempts to hide away the trappings of twenty-first century life. Some of the family wore the traditional Mongolian herder's outfit, the del, while the teenagers strolled around in jeans and knock-off sweatshirts. In one corner of the ger hung a series of family portraits taken during a visit to Ulaanbaatar's Sukhbaatar Square. At night, we listened to the radio.

Here at the Great White Lake, we arrive just before dark and immediately are shown the same kindness. Inside the family's ger, we down buuz and buuz in soup and take the obligatory shots of vodka. The oldest man in the house starts asking questions through Bobby, our guide. Where are we from? Are we students? How is Mongolia?

We talk until nine, when Bobby takes to our sleeping quarters. Rather than bunking next to the fire, this night we sleep in a ger specially for tourists, one with five beds and no wall of photos. The arrangement here is more a business proposition than the one we found on our first night, as this family relies on tourism for their income.

The next day, we wake up to plates of stale bread and a young girl warming the embers of the fire, making it safe to crawl out of our sleeping bags. As we wait for the adults to rally, the girl shows us a game. She takes out a worn bag of shagai, or sheep ankle bones, and shows us how to play shagai dice. The bone pieces, which are about two inches long and an inch wide with a S-shaped curve, are thrown in pieces. Each side is an animal: camel, horse, goat or sheep. Players take turns rolling the dice, moving a set number of places based on the animals thrown (horse is great, camels stink), until someone "wins" the race.

Cing is smitten with the game, and after Bobby arrives she has Bobby ask the girl the price of a set. The girl is visibly puzzled: She clearly brought out the dice as a way of making friends with the guests, not making a sale. After a lengthy discussion, she finally accepts 5,000 turgug, or $4.50.

Her mother arrives shortly afterward, and then there is a subtle shift in her behavior. They stop being just hospitable and start offering "service." The mother wants to know if we would like to try on dels and go horseback riding to the lake. I shoot Caleb a look and at the same time I see Myriam glancing a Cing: we all realize this is ridiculous, but don't want to offend the host family. They believe that we came to Mongolia and expect a bit of a show. So, as a courtesy we accept the mother's offer, and soon her husband appears with a large trunk. Inside are a few crisply folded del. A del resembles a one piece, knee-high dress made with thick cotton. As with all things Mongolian, it is extremely functional: the open legs allow a rider to comfortably be in the saddle all day while insulation protects against the wind. The four tourists are each handed a piece in his or her own size. Myriam and Cing both wiggle into plum-colored garments, Caleb's is maroon with a repeating gold circular pattern, and mine a dull shade of gray. Our hosts tie colorful belts to complete the ensembles.

We are then paraded outside, where our noble steeds await. A young man, perhaps 10 or 11, helps Caleb, Cing and I mount (Myriam, of course, needs no assistance). Our handler arranges us in a line, and then requests our cameras. Then, with the young guide and his even smaller brother in the lead, we are sent in the direction of the lake, three kilometers distant.

On the way, with my horse frequently running off-course, I have plenty of time to ponder the family. They brought out a bit of kitsch - dressing us up in colorful costumes and taking snapshots to send home to Mom and Dad - but they didn't put on a mask in their dealings with us. There is no pretension that these people are herders who live off the land and spend their evenings reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead by candlelight. They're in the tourist industry, making three dollars a night for hosting and feeding a foreigner, and an additional two dollars for every hour someone rides a horse. It's not much, but with few expenses, it means enough for something special from time to time.

Here's my only question: When the yuppies in the Patagonia jackets arrive, do they hide the satellite dish?

Myriam Takes the Reins

2008-01-12T23:13:00.000-05:00

TERKHIIN TSAGAAN NUUR, Mongolia – I summoned my inner cowboy, felt the noise build from deep in my gullet, and then bellowed so loudly that the sides of the frost-lined mountains echoed.

"CHU!" I said, but nothing happened.

My diminutive transport continued to munch on brown tufts of grass, ignoring my command to go. I tried again, this time with a gentle voice.

"Chu." And again and again. "Chu, chu, chu."

The obstinate equine would not budge. He could somehow sense the novice rider (and poor speaker of Mongolian) in the saddle. Then a knight in a reindeer coat galloped up beside us, and barked the order with such gravitas that the horse had no choice but to trot. Myriam, once again, showed why she is the group's naturalist.

I profile Myriam at great risk, because she is one of the most mercurial personalities I have ever met. Her vivacious enthusiasm hides a complex person, someone who can't be pinned down. I'm sure the Myriam I know is quite different from the Myriam I would have met off the steppes.

So, I start with the irrefutable. Myriam is German, her nationality clear from the first word out of her mouth. Her cadences are a bit abnormal, drawing out "o" and "u" sounds for an extra beat. Her natural tendency is to reach for the longer cognate, using compound words that are seldom found outside of English academic literature. She sometimes says "jaa."

Her hometown is a small village in Southern Germany. Her parents run a biodynamic farm. I've never heard the term before, but apparently they raise livestock and vegetables using organic methods and renewable energy. Here Myriam learned how to ride a horse. She adores animals, and pets anything in sight with fur or feathers.

Despite their reputation for punctuality, Germans dawdle through school. She spent most of her childhood in a Steiner School (sometimes called a "Waldorf Education"), where pupils don't use standardized textbooks, they create their own illustrated guides to the material. Significant amounts of time were spent being creative, with many art and music lessons. Rote learning and grades were minimized, although when they were introduced, she did well. Myriam graduated from high school at the age of 19, and will take between four and six years to earn her bachelors. In between she is taking two Gap years, to break up the long stays in academia.

She wanted to do a long-term volunteer project, so when she heard about a Swiss-Russian charity that sponsored a village for mentally and physical handicapped Russians, she pledged a year of her life. Incredibly, Myriam spoke no Russian. She boarded a plane for Irkutsk, 5,000 miles away, without knowing a word of the language. On arrival, a man drove her 60 miles to her new work site. There is no Internet, no cable television, just a few buildings, a barn and some animals. She works alongside a few Russian staff members, and one other volunteer, who is Swiss.

Two months after she arrived, Myriam felt ill. Her stomach hurt so badly that the village van took her to a hospital in Irkutsk. The doctors determined she had appendicitis, and removed the vestigial organ. Maybe a surgeon did not sanitize the scalpel or a nurse had a touch of the flu, because Myriam continued to deteriorate after the surgery. She slipped into a coma, probably from an infection. Worried, the hospital staff called Myriam's parents on the farm.

At this point in the story, my mouth is open and my eyebrows are arched from worry. But Myriam continues her near-death tale in a jaunty tone, as if this was a perfectly normal string of events. "After five days I woke up," she said. "My parents, they were worried for me, jaa. But they knew if it was my time, it was my time."

After a couple weeks of recovery, Myriam resumed her unpaid position deep in the forest. She shared a stuffy room with the Swiss girl, washed dishes, planted crops, and hauled equipment. She supervised the mentally-challenged patients, some of whom were prone to fits of violence and hysteria. They have few resources and little support in this isolated village; most Russians stigmatize the mentally and physically ill. What little money comes in is mostly from selling crafts made by the residents at European craft fairs and specialty shops. Myriam works tirelessly; her respite trips to Irkutsk are weeks apart and then only for a day or two.

For the first month Myriam was essentially a deaf-mute. She could not express her desires or understand what people around her wanted. Slowly, slowly the words came. She wrote them down, made lists and practiced over and over with the residents. Soon she had phrases, then sentences. And as the months went by, she got to know the people around her along with the language. Now her Russian is at a level where she finds it easier to speak to most Mongolians in Russian rather than in the English she's learned in grade school.

Myriam finds satisfying what to most would be unbearable. She's in Mongolia on a holiday, a holiday mandated by her continued to desire to work. Russia would only issue this tireless volunteer a six-month visa, so she had to head south and wait for the embassy to slowly process a couple of pieces of paper. The current estimate is two weeks.

So she came out here to the countryside, back to open spaces and wild horses. Wearing a bell bottom-shaped coat of reindeer fur given to her by a colleague in Russia, she mounts her steed without assistance – unlike the other three riders on this particular day.

With a single "CHU!" she takes off to the south. After a few paces the olive-colored scarf with tiny croqueted roses tied around her neck takes flight, forming a train of fabric that flows backward, as she charges ahead, toward adventure.

Stinky Pile of Poo

2008-01-11T00:46:00.000-05:00

LÜN, Mongolia — I don't need to say what's absent from a Mongolian rest stop, but I will anyway. No McDonald's, no Sbarros, no chain restaurants selling foot-long sandwiches, no refillable Big Gulp glasses that hold more than a liter of soda and cost under a dollar, no windshield wiper fluid or premium grade gasoline, no friendly Mexicans who wave as they mop the filthy floors. This is not a place for swanky service - here, a rest stop is classy if it has a bathroom.

(Disclaimer: The following post contains some frank discussion of human bodily functions. If offended, please don't continue — but keep in mind Everyone Poops.)

There's no room for the picky eater on the wide open Mongolian transportation system. On our first day, we left Ulaanbaatar in the mid-morning and were off the pavement less than half an hour later. When the sun made it to the highest point in the sky, Bobby, our de-facto guide, turned around and posed a question.

"There is a place where we can have lunch. It may not be open. Should we stop?"

Our stomaches, rattled though they may be from our van's questionable shocks, demanded nourishment. And since we had not passed an eating establishment for hours, we could not be choosy. Fortunately, the small wooden house optimistically called a café was open, and we took seats at the largest of three tables inside.

Traditional Mongolian dishes were served, or more to the point, a traditional Mongolian dish. After having the group study the menu for five minutes, Bobby emerged from the kitchen to inform us that we would be eating mutton stew with a side of rice. We stopped by on New Year's Day, and were not surprisingly the only customers. That meant freshly prepared food, and we had to wait for the stout chef to cut every hunk of meat and simmer an appropriate amount of time. Mongolian wrestling, live from Ulaanbaatar, was the only distraction on the television. I watched for several minutes as two obese men attempted to force each other out of a ring. I now understand why many top sumo wrestlers are Mongolian.

The rumbling on the set caused a rumbling in my bowels. This was a bit unusual, as I believe my intestinal track has a sixth sense and intuitively knows when I'm entering a new territory. I normally have two, sometimes three days in unfamiliar ground before I need an outhouse. Out on the steppe, I got just six hours.

Asked about a bathroom, the chef pointed out the window towards nowhere. I walked outside, expecting to pop a squat in an open field, but instead I followed the specified plane and saw a small brown shed a couple of hundred meters in the distance. On closer inspection, the structure used the same primitive log cabin design as the restaurant, except here the boards seemed thrown together rather than carefully laid out. The latrine had three sides, an open entrance which meant relieving oneself while facing The Great Outdoors, and a low ceiling. Once inside, I surprisingly smelled no odor; the waste was frozen solid.

I did my business, and then looked down into the hole. In a hole that appeared eight feet deep, there was a long, thin pile of poo reaching six feet back toward the earth. It was the refuse of thousands of protein-rich meals, all ejected in the same alignment.

I did some quick mental math: at this rate, the latrine could be overflowing before spring. And then I had a new candidate for world's worst job: knocking down a frozen pile of feces in the bottom of a cesspit. What tool would be right for the job? A hoe, maybe a spade. Maybe that wouldn't be enough to cut through the solid matter. Perhaps an ax would be needed, or pots of boiling water to soften the mound.

I should be thankful. The latrine's three walls protected my nether regions from the biting winds, and there was no chance that any fecal matter would accidentally wind up on my shoes. Mongolia isn't the most developed country in the world, but they haven't let the shit overflow — yet.

Home Sweet Ger

2008-01-10T00:53:00.000-05:00

Near BALGAI, MONGOLIA — Preparing for bed on the steppe is a strange ritual. First I take off the clothes I wore to keep warm during the day: the fuzzy brown sweater, the two layers of long underwear, the smoky pair of Gap cargo pants. All of them are covered in sweat, sweat that will freeze in the night and lower my body temperature. I rummage through my bag for new set of clothes: another layer of long underwear, blue sleep pants, a T-shirt and a hat. I put on the sleep pants and the T-shirt, but keep the long underwear tucked under my shoulder, to hide under my pillow for later. Only then can I put on a fresh pair of wool socks and tuck myself into the Mummy sleeping bag.

Maintaining the appropriate body temperature during the night will take balance. I must weigh the heat of the fire against the icy winds of the steppe outside. It's four hours after dark and already Bobby's pocket thermometer reads -20 on a quick trip outside. Getting through the night, like everything else out here in the Mongolian countryside, requires careful planning.

Thankfully, I don't need to invent a way to survive out here. Our hosts, with decades of experience and the wisdom passed down from generations of nomads, are experts. The most important line of defense against the elements is the ger. The ger, usually called a "yurt" in English, is a specialized tent with features even the most advanced North Face structure can't match. The base of the structure is a circular lattice of wood, about four feet high. At the top of the lattice, several dozen wooden poles are angled inward so they meet in a small circle. This opening is the chimney, and it is supported by two thick beams that drop to the floor. These wooden pieces (which aren't found out here on the steppe, they come from distant forests) are wrapped around the outside in a thick layer of white canvas. In the winter, wool felt blankets are hung around the insides of the tent to keep out the howling winds.

The felt is less than an inch thick, but it's throughly windproof. On this cold night I can hear the wind howl, but it doesn't penetrate this warm space. A small iron stove is the only source of heat, and it's placed right in the center of the structure.

Our party arrived an hour after an awe-inspiring sunset with empty stomachs. Tonight, our hosts are the family of Battir, who Bobby has hired as our van driver. We've only met a day earlier, but Battir's mother, father and sister are very welcoming when we haul our still clean bags from the van. They implore us to take off our coats, and start feeding us bowls of buuz, a fatty mutton dumpling, and airag, fermented horse milk. Vodka comes out later, and we do several shots to honor our hosts.

By 9 p.m. the bottle is put away, Battir goes off to an adjoining ger where Bobby and he will spend the night. Bobby then begins to figure out sleeping arrangements. This ger, like all others, appears cylindrical from the outside, but in reality is five-sided. One side is the entrance, another contains a small armoire, and final three sides have thin mattresses that serve as chairs during the day, beds at night. Battir's mother and grandmother take one bed, Jin and Myriam squeeze on another side, while Battir's father has the smallest bed to himself. Caleb and I are placed on the floor on opposite sides of the fireplace.

Maybe it's the heavy dinner, or the excitement of beginning the journey, but I'm not tired after getting in my sleeping bag. I scan the surroundings. Grandma is already asleep. Husband and wife, sleeping in separate beds, are conducting conversation in whispers. A portable short wave radio is quietly playing an Old Mongolian folk tune. Then I return to the ger. The outside seems so plain, just a circle of off-white fabric, but inside it is colorful. A ring of hand stitched flowers has been carefully sewn and placed at eye level. The wool blankets that provide insulation are colorful scenes from nomadic life: a strutting ram, a picturesque sunset. In between one bed there are a few family photos, one of Grandma on a visit to Ulaanbaatar many years, another of a young Battir in front of his home. Opposite these is a small altar, where Buddhist prayers can be performed. Although the interior of the ger is wide open, each bit of space has been carefully compartmentalized, to ensure that all basic life functions can happen in this small space.

After the radio is turned off and the married couple stop chatting, I take stock of where I am. As the dateline suggests, I'm not entirely sure. We are somewhere "near" Balgai, a town of a few dozen, several hundred miles from anywhere. All that separates me from that nothingness is a couple of layers of felt and canvas. The mind wanders: If my heart stops, there is no defibrillator to restart it. If a piece of an old Soviet Military Satellite falls on me, there is no government official to report it. If quicksand swallows the ger whole, there is no one to pull us out. But I've already let these worries go. My eyelids are closed and in my dreams I head toward the stars.

Previously: "Welcome to Our Home"

Sun, Moon & Stars

2008-01-08T00:30:00.000-05:00

TÔV AIMAG, Mongolia — Life happens in seconds, seconds that turn into hours and then days. Sometimes, though, a moment yanks us from the dreary tick of the clock and lifts the ordinary into the sublime. Today, incredibly, featured two such moments.

I'll start with the second. It was around 9 p.m: I stepped out of our ger with Cing, Caleb and Myriam. We told our hosts we were going for a walk, which Bobby translated into Mongolian only to receive a puzzled grin in response. Why leave the warmth of the fire, their faces said.

The night is chilly. It touches my face even though my scarf covers most of my cheeks. Caleb lights a cigarette. He quit in America, but after traveling through Russia and Mongolia, he's back to the habit. We set off in no particular direction, wandering a few steps to the west, then back toward the east before settling on the north. We stumble around for only a minute and then stop. There's no point in continuing. I look around, and in each direction there is nothing — only the faint glow coming from inside the ger. I strain my eyes in all directions, scanning 360 degrees to the limits of my near-sighted vision. I cannot see a thing — no other source of light.

For many city slickers, a formative childhood moment occurred during an early childhood vacation, staring up at the clear, dark sky. I signed up for the astronomy merit badge two years in a row at Scout Camp, so I could stay up late as a teenage counselor picked out constellations with a laser pointer. Tonight is ten times more intense. There is no faint glow of the city on the horizon, no summer cabin on the other side of the lake. This is a pre-civilization state of darkness.

The unobstructed sky is overflowing with points of light. The Milky Way rips a broad swath through the center. There must be several commercial airliners and 100 satellites high above. And I then realize then the night moves, flows like a body of water. I don't go back inside until my nose is frostbite white.

But before the stars can rise, the sun must set. Today the sunset made the van stop, even though Bobby wanted to reach the first camp by nightfall. The brilliant orange rays shone directly through the windshield. When they started to mix with deep pinks and rich shades of magenta, Cing suggested we pull over. Everyone rummaged desperately for a camera, to capture the last rays of light. In the foreground, the rolling hills of steppe went on and on until they covered the horizon. The thin, hard layer of snow sent the light bouncing off and toward our eyes.

The sun sets everyday, and the stars are always shining. But today something beautiful happened: the inevitable became incredible.

I don't post many pictures here, mainly because I believe this should be a place to practice my writing, to put my travels into words. I'm reminded of something the author Paul Theroux says in his essay collection, "Sunrise with Sea Monsters." Young Theroux explains that he doesn't carry a camera, because he's afraid the technology will make him lazy. Instead he pushes for the right words to describe the experience. At the time of the writing, Theroux wonders if he'll ever have the skills to capture a moment in Paris when a group of pigeons took flight from a spire high on Notre Dame. He'd been three years trying to find what to say, and hadn't succeeded. Maybe someday I, too, can present this post without images, but for now I think the image below helps one appreciate the awesomeness of that sunset.

A Hasty Assembly

2008-01-07T18:25:00.000-05:00

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia — We were four, six if you count Bobby and Battir, but they do this for work and can't be counted among the adventurers. Fate brought us together, plus a common belief that costs should be kept as low as possible.

There is Cing, whose actual name might be Qing, Jin or Elida. There is Myriam, who favors a black bandanna around her neck, and finally Caleb, who knows a dozen Mongolian swear words.

The girls were expecting me. They had seen my e-mail sent from the small town near the border, indicating that I would stay through Lunar New Year and wanted to get out of the capital. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was their only hope, but their options were slim. Most people had just a day or two between trains, enough to sneak out to Terlej National Park on the outskirts of the city, ride a tame horse for 45 minutes, sleep in a ger and make it back by noon the next day. But the girls wanted more, someone with more time and up for a bigger challenge. I was their man.

Bobby, co-owner of the guesthouse, knew that she had to move quickly, so she started pushing as I filled out the hostel's registration forms.

"You said that you might be interested in going to the countryside?" she said.

I demurred. I woke up that morning before dawn, and had entered the country less than 24 hours before. I wanted a hot shower and a catnap before making any serious decisions.

"There are two women here," she continued. "They want to leave tomorrow."

She explained the itinerary. We would leave Ulaanbaatar midday, and begin the two day journey to the White Lake. The first night would be spent in a ger along the way. At the lake there would be horses, a ger family and climbing. Then we would swing through the town of Tseterleg, stopping there to refuel and then make our way to Kharkhorum, the old capital for the final night. On the fifth day, we would be back in the capital.

White Lake, Tseterleg, Kharkhorum. These places meant nothing to me. I knew Genghis Khan, Soviet Colony and yurt. That's it. I needed a nap.

Bobby pushed further. "I would come along as a free translator. These people are my friends. We stay with nice families." She promised an "authentic experience," by celebrating the second most important Mongolian holiday in a traditional way.

Then she brought out the calendar and started crunching numbers. The fee for the driver, petrol and the car would be $340. An eye-popping figure for someone of limited means, but then Bobby started dividing. Split over five days and four people, the costs would be well within the budget range. She promised two-dollar accommodation and one dollar meals during the trek.

Everything sounded fine, and I realized that I wouldn't be allowed a respite without making a yes or no decision. I was on board.

We had three, but the numbers were based on four. I found him in the hostel's small pantry, which is stocked with complimentary strawberry tea, bread and condensed milk. His name was Caleb, and he didn't seem to know what he was doing. He might come on the trip, he might stay here in Ulaanbaatar. He possibly could be leaving for China in a couple of days, or the embassy could take another week to issue his visa. He teeter-tottered, and he did it very well. But he did know the area and offered to take me out to lunch and to scout out a couple of record shops.

By the time we finished our Cuban sandwiches, the hesitation in his voice had died down. We swung back to the hostel for a credit card, and went to Mongolbank for a withdrawal. Mid-afternoon I slapped several dozen turgik bills on Bobby's desk, which made it official. In under a day, I'd be headed into the wilderness with five people I didn't know, to places I knew nothing about.

The future was wide open.

I (Not Him) Have Been Expecting You

2008-01-07T01:27:00.000-05:00

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia — The sharp tug on my checkered sleep pants means it's time to wake up. My eyes open but nothing changes: It's pitch dark in the train cabin. Why did my bunkmate wake me up? I fumble for my glasses, and after locating them, peer out the window. The sky is still monochromatic, but I do see a smattering of white lights illuminating empty blocks. This must be Ulaanbaatar.

At the station I perform what is now routine: awkwardly gather my belongings and bang the rolling suitcase on the train as I exit. The station is long and narrow; there is only one set of tracks, and the sole platform is now full of scurrying passengers from the biggest arrival of the young day. I am conspicuous in my puffy green down jacket and internal frame pack. But I'm not the only foreigner in this crowd: I see, for the first time since Moscow, obviously Western European faces.

And where there are multiple people from developed countries in a developing one, there will be people trying to give them service. An aged man approaches me as I shuffle toward the main exit. His coat is worn at the shoulders and the hair on his uncovered head frizzles out like bolts of lightning.

"UB Guesthouse?" I ask him. He nods and I start walking in tandem.

I booked a room at this particular guesthouse on the advice of some westbound Siberian passengers. Through an online reservation service, I secured a bunk bed for the night of February 14. Fate intervened, I missed my direct bus to Ulaanbaatar and was forced to rely on a couple of beat up vans and the slow local train to make it to the city. This put me 12 hours behind my original schedule, so instead of spending Valentine's Day in a six-person bunkroom in the hostel, I was in a four-person bunkroom on wheels.

When I checked my e-mail just over the border in Sukhbaatar, I had a message with the subject line "Hi From Mongolia." It read as follows:

"Dear Johathan,

Thank you very much for your reservation through the Hostelworld.

We would like to know how would you like to come to Mongolia? By train or by air? Because we arrange a pick up service. Our charge is $10 from the airport, but free of charge from the train station. If you like, please send us your arrival information such as train and carriage number or flight number etc.,

With kind regards,
Bobby"

I responded by explaining my situation, and requesting a pickup the next morning. And here, apparently was my man. He spoke no English, but led me out the station to a vast parking lot. Taxis, vans and motorcycles were shoved into a tight space, arranged in positions that ensured more than half the cars had no chance of exit. As we made our way through the third row, a voice yelled my name.

"Jonathan? JONATHAN!" It came from a few cars over. A tall Mongolian with a western-style coat and a red beanie gestured when I turned my head. He then ran over and started berating the old man in Mongolian. "Come with me," he said, and dazed, I followed.

"That man isn't from the guesthouse," he said. "He tried to trick you. I am from UB Guesthouse." To prove it, he took a business card that showed the guesthouse logo identical to the one I saw online. The man seemed legit, and when we arrived at his late-model van, I could see a couple of white faces already inside. I let him take the rolling suitcase and toss on top of the other rucksacks.

The man who rescued me was Anbar. As we pulled out of the parking lot he explained in excited tones about how I'd almost wandered into a strange car. He grew more and more animated; I cracked a smile at my stupidity. I've been traveling on this lonely winter route for so long that I forgot about touts. With no tourists in Siberia or on the train, there's been no one to try to trick me. This encounter also happened before dawn, and I'm typically useless before noon.

So, Mongolia, you got me once. But now I've activated my anti-virus software, and I won't let anything slip through the firewall again.

Previously: "Straight Outta Ulaanbaatar"

We're Out of That

2008-01-06T02:04:00.000-05:00

SUKHBAATAR, Mongolia — From the outside, the place is the spitting image of the bar from the "Dukes of Hazard": a wooden porch, window shutters with peeling paint and a big sign over the door. The parking lot is unpaved and full of small boulders. A weak gold light shines out from the two front windows.

But this isn't Nashville, it's Mongolia in winter. Rather than facing a room full of rednecks, I find this place deserted when I walk in the door at 7 p.m.

The restaurant is quite simple, but there has been some effort made to decorate. Pictures of the short Mongolian horses are on display along with a couple of small landscape paintings. The wall is painted salmon, and is lit up by mood lighting. The bathroom is a squatter, a porcelain hole with a hose that only produces a dribble on the side to flush it. But it is clean and the light inside works. Considering that the equivalent establishment in China would only have three walls and harsh fluorescent lighting, I'm impressed at the level sophistication.

The sole waitress leads me to a back room, a ten by ten foot cube connected to the restaurant's other small room. She brings a menu, which runs four pages and lists dishes in Mongolian, Russian and English. There are Russian specialties, including borscht and other beet dishes, several kinds of meat and even french fries. After much debating, I select a chicken and rice dish and call for the waitress, who is back at her desk, staring into space.

I point to my selection. She shakes her head. They don't have the chicken.

I slide my finger down a couple of spots to a beef stew. She shakes her head again. I'm beginning to see a pattern, so I ask the waitress what they do have in stock

"Noodles," she says, and moves her fingers around in a circle to show a bowl. "Noodles with meat."

"Anything else?"

She doesn't seem to understand the question. I go with the noodles and an order of bread, which the menu indicates comes with the meal.

Of course, beer was in stock and I ordered a bottle. I never used to drink alone. I was so against non-social drinking that I had a rule: If you're not going out, you're not having a drop of alcohol. But a glass of beer seems necessary after a long day in these far-out places, relaxing the mind and dulling the body's temperature receptors during the walk back to the hotel in the frigid outdoors. Being in the former Soviet Bloc is threatening to turn me into an alcoholic.

The waitress brings over a Tiger Beer, which is from Singapore. How the beer from this equitorially-based company made it all the way to the top of Mongolia I'm not sure, but the crisp taste is a reminder of tropical days past. It warms the body, and not just because it opens capillaries.

The food arrives all at once. It's a huge plate of noodles, thick and yellow, covering an entire oval-shaped serving plate. There are strips of mutton mixed in. Garlic and oil are the obvious seasonings, and they have been applied generously. It's good: hardy in the best sense of the word. I'm barely able to finish half the dish. I mourn the fact that the "doggy bag" probably has not yet come to Mongolia.

I also used to be intimidated by the prospect of eating alone - I certainly would never do it at an Olive Garden or TGI Friday's, or the high school cafeteria - but it's something I do now with being self-conscious. Tonight I am the sole diner, and I interact little with the waitress. Instead I fish around in my pack for Lonely Planet Mongolia, and start researching possible adventures. Eagle hunting in the Altay Mountains, camel trekking in the Gobi. It's all imagination, with no need to ruminate with a tired companion about the challenges faced during the trip here. Instead I'm able to just forget them and move onto a more smoothing place.

Eventually two Russian men interrupt the quiet and take a table on the opposite side of the tiny room. They demand menus and glasses of vodka. I demand the check. I spent 3,800 tugriks on the meal, which after struggling with a new conversion rate, I realize is about $3.50. At least the sole dish on the menu is not an expensive one.

Clusterfuck!

2008-01-05T18:50:00.000-05:00

SUKHBAATAR, Mongolia — I love the word "clusterfuck."

It's a wonderful piece of slang, a precise word to describe the epic, swirling disasters that appear so often in the comedy of life.

My father adores the word, and uses it liberally: The mall in December. The post office on tax day. Pretty much every part of an airport. They're all clusterfucks. Coming out of my father's mouth, it's not a compliment.

Especially egregious situations - perhaps a five-mile backup on the Interstate during a rainstorm - require a modifier. In his lexicon, these are not merely clusterfucks, they are Mongolian Clusterfucks. Growing up I knew whenever the words "Mongolian Clusterfuck" were put together, it was time to shut up and give my father some room to vent: we were in a bit of mess.

Until this very moment, I never thought about why the word "Monoglian" was used to emphasize the worst type of clusterfuck. Now, after only two hours in the country, I realize that the slang-coiners were dead on this time.

I needed a train ticket to the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. The crowded van I took from the border dropped me and my rolling suitcase right in front of the gray, Social-Realist train station. I rolled into the waiting room, a box filled with two rows of decaying plastic seats and an ugly shade of lime green paint peeling off the walls. It took much of my concentration to stay awake. I'd been traveling for 12 hours, difficult ones punctuated by yelling at various customs officers and bank tellers.

I focused on the occupants of the room. They're weren't many, and the few people were huddled in the corners, guarding their bags. The faces here are sadder and thinner than the faces I had seen over the border in Buryata. These people, in their tattered clothes, with their dust-covered possessions, wear their poverty as an outer layer. Yet they also seemed stoic, as if showing that years and years of abuse and hard conditions wouldn't crush their will to go on.

A small movement broke the peace. A young staff member removed a sign that was next to one of the ticket windows; pandemonium ensued. Every person in the station went toward that window at a full sprint - mothers grabbed their kids and forced them to lunge, an old man abandoned his bag of dirty vegetables - and they formed a massive huddle. People from the outside streamed into the station, and soon a dozen became nearly a 100.

Being mostly British, I made a move toward a shape to the right of the window that somewhat resembled a line. A uniformed train employee arrived and an attempted to make the line mandatory, with little success.

It took 15 minutes to get in front of that window. I was next in line three times, but each time I went to make that final step a skinny Mongolian wiggled his way around me. The fourth time I felt someone behind me attempting the same maneuver, but I'd had enough. I threw a right elbow out and blocked the deviant. Then I turned around to discover that I'd just hit a young mother in the side of the cheek, and come within a foot of giving her young son brain damage. But after fighting through that sea of humanity, I didn't feel guilty. I bought my ticket, one first-class upper berth, and ran out of the station.

It was an awful, awful time; the worst ticket buying experience ever. This is why a really bad clusterfuck is called a Mongolian Clusterfuck.

The Exile

2008-01-01T23:32:00.000-05:00

KYAKHTA, Russia – On the road out of Russia, I passed only a single vehicle: an aging brown tank driving on a dirt road parallel to the main highway. As my rudimentary taxi got closer, two heads popped out. They wore the Russian army uniform, had shaven heads and couldn't have been older than 19. The tank operators had to stop because their mode of transport got completely ensconced in mud. The tank moved feebly forward and backward, but as my car drove into the distance it wasn't going much of anywhere.

That tank neatly represents what I will take away from two weeks in the Russian Federation. Russia is a powerful country, one that is becoming even more powerful with surging energy commodity prices and new mineral discoveries in remote areas. It is an important actor in global geopolitics, one that can still make waves in international affairs. But I'm not sure that the person driving this heavily armored tank is qualified for the job. Instead this lumbering giant might just be piloted by a scrawny, inexperienced teenager.

I didn't see Russia; I saw Russias. On the streets of Moscow I peered in restaurants where oligarchs and their progeny snarf down $100 mayonnaise-covered salads and saw one country. I saw that place again in the Sony store, where everything costs twice the price in the United States and there were two salespeople for every customer. To dodge the cold, I wandered through the GUM Department Store. Once a few mostly-empty Communist shops, the turn-of-the-century structure has been renovated and subdivided into dozens of fancy boutiques. This is the fanciest mall I have ever been to, anywhere on the planet, and inside the shoppers were privileged, mega-spenders with $2,000 clutches and matching designer boots.

Then there is the Other Russia, the one I saw mostly on transport. It was in van taxis, long-distance buses, on the subway and that epic train ride I came elbow-to-elbow with those not doing so well. The ones with cheap Chinese T-shirts and faded designs, carrying old backpacks back and forth from a block flat in a small suburb. They live lives without flash or glamor, eating out infrequently and . Dying early from poisonous liquor and poor working conditions. Subsiding on a pension that wouldn't be adequate in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Then there are the have-somes, the Sergeis and Vasilys that are doing O.K. Things are better than 1998, when the currency collapsed and the International Monetary Fund forced economy policy down Yestlin's throat like he was in charge of Sierra Leone. Their lot's improving, but life is still a slog.

These Russias should be in open conflict, with daily protests as the poor try to institute the Orange Revolution on a massive scale and those with a stake in the current system fight back with their superior resources. Instead, people from all walks of life accept Vladimir Putin as the driver of the country. He and his cronies get to decide where to point the tank, at defiant ex-Soviet Republics and democratic elements in the West.

I personally believe that the people with grapes should take them up with the driver. Make him pass a more difficult test before renewing his license. Try someone else at the wheel for a while.

But I'm no longer in the car, I just came for a test spin. I couldn't buy Russian. For all the friendly people I met here, meals I shared and wonderful literature and art I exposed to, I could never live here. The Russian deposition is too solemn for my extroverted personality. The skies are too gray and too cold someone who loves the beach. The quality of life is shit. It's a police state, somewhere where I had to worry about being written up for small infractions by an underpaid man in uniform. Most services are corrupt, so if I got in real trouble I wouldn't know where to go.

Russia is lurching in three directions. It may explode or prosper; I'm not sure. After spending some time here, it's no longer a black spot on the map. I'll be closely monitoring how things develop here – from a safe distance.

Previously: "Do Svidaniya"

The Best of 2007

2007-12-31T23:39:00.000-05:00

ALBANY, N.Y — Blogging every day, or the majority of days in a year, produces an incredible amount of text, a virtual avalanche of verbosity. This year I wrote 180 entries, each with about 600 words (things got longer as the year went on). After mashing on a few buttons on the Windows Calculator application, I can claim to have written 108,000 words on this Web site.

That's a lot to wade through, especially since Blogger is blocked at many places of employment. As an introduction, I've selected a dozen entries which I feel represent the best of what I've written this year and provided links and a short summary below. In the newspaper business, or at least the corner of the newspaper business I used to operate in, this would be called a "Clip 'n' Save" post. Feel free to print it out and send it to your grandmother in Arizona.

"Monika"
I meet a sharp-tounged fellow student while staying in a claustrophobic hostel.

"Standing Up to A Bear"
A Lithuanian student of politics explains why Russia is really, really scary.

"Do Svidaniya, Russia"
Sneaking out of Russia with a vanful of Mongolian sheep herders.

"Please Observe All Signs and Regulations While in the China"
A friendly police officer defends China's draconian penal code.

"Straight Outta Ulaanbaatar"
Mongolian gangsta rap brings tears to my eyes.

"Two Bombs, One Song"
I check out Qinghai's newest tourist attraction: The Nuclear Weapons Testing Bunker.

"Celvin"
A chicken-wing salesman falls in love.

"Running the Border"
The monsoon ruins a dubious plan to run the border into the closed kingdom of Bhutan.

"Bandages, Thermometers, and a Spider"
My Chinese comes in handy when a friend gets sick in a small town.

"The Ladykillers"
I'm robbed in the night and the prime suspects are Thai transvestite prostitutes.

"Man-Meat"
A Kazakh pimp wants me to "entertain" rich Beijing women.

"The Capture of Jiang Zhendong"
A criminal case in Beijing brings back memories of a tough assignment several months earlier.

Two Plates of Dumplings

2007-12-30T22:50:00.000-05:00

ULAN-UDE, Russia — At a dinner party, when a new acquaintance discovers I live in China, they usually smile and rack their brain for the easiest line of inquiry. Inevitably, "How is the food there?" comes out. Then, to show that they've been to college and know a bit about the world, this caveat is tagged on: "Of course, the food is nothing like the Chinese food we have here..."

I stumble to answer this question, regularly not getting much more out than, "it's good," and mumbling something about there being plenty of culinary variety inside China. Sometimes this turns into a total meander, as I start listing off the tell-tale flavors of Cantonese, Sichuan, Fuijian and Heilongjiang schools of cooking. Then my inquirer's eyes begin to glaze over and their feet start shuffling toward the hors d'œuvres table.

The problem is party-goers believe they're asking a simple question, when instead they're stumbling into the complicated field of Chinese food around the world. There are many, many restaurants that serve a over-salted, watered-down version of Chinese food. But at the same time, the constant flow of immigrants from the Old World to the new ensures that more authentic tastes usually aren't hard to find, no matter how far from the Middle Kingdom.

Here in Ulan-Ude both flavors are easily available, and in the spirit of investigation and a rapidly diminishing tolerance for Russian food, I checked them both out.

My visit to the Siberian-Tibetan Temple awakened my hunger for Chinese cuisine, so after getting back into town I went looking for a Chinese restaurant. I didn't need to look far, as I saw Chinese characters on the building just beside the Hotel Udon. I went inside, down three stairs to what I expected to be a dining room. Instead I found a low-grade dance floor, complete with spinning yellow, magenta and blue lights and a tiny Mirrorball. The couple tables remaining were pushed to the side of the room, and were empty. Bad disco music blared from a very loud sound system. A busty woman in a tank-top and too much eyeliner motioned me toward the dance floor. Instead I went for the exit.

I grabbed chips, dried apples and a Coke from a small grocery store and went back to the hotel for a cold dinner. As I passed through the lobby, I saw a sign posted next to the desk. It was in Chinese, and said there was a restaurant on the hotel's top floor. I didn't even bother to drop off my fake dinner before going up there.

The restaurant was heaving with people, all Chinese. The restaurant's dining area wasn't much bigger than my single room, but the owner managed to cram a half-dozen oblong tables inside. Christmas lights and prints ripped off Russian Orthodox calendars hung on the walls. Each table was full, except for a tiny one near the kitchen door, which had a half-eaten bowl of fried rice on top. A waitress, a middle-aged Chinese woman gestured for me to sit down. She then cleared the bowl, wiped the table down with a foul smelling rag and placed a menu entirely in Cyrillic in front of me.

"I'd like to see a Chinese menu," I said, in Chinese.

The waitress did a strange thing: nothing. Didn't blink that I spoke in her native tounge, rather than Russian or my native English. Instead she got a Chinese menu to replace the Russian one.

I ate a very standard Chinese meal: kung pao chicken, fried rice, and a bowl of dumplings in soup. It was all quite tasty, and when the chef came out in the middle of my soup, I complimented him on the food. Were there many people in town, I asked.

Yes, the chef said, quite a few traders. Then he thanked me for coming and asked if I could make way for the next diner.

It was a completely normal Chinese dining expierence. Replace the Russian kitsch on the walls with some posters of Guilin and Lucky Cats, and I could have been in Sichuan Province. There is really is authentic Chinese food outside of the country.

The next day I woke up late, still suffering from a strange form of jet lag caused by my irregular schedule on the Trans-Siberian and the nosy comings and goings of the businessmen and hotel guests on the hall. I started walking the rough sidewalk toward the train tracks and downtown Ulan-Ude, not really sure of a destination. At a corner where I needed to turn right, I saw something that I'd walked by on my previous trips: a mostly-underground shopping plex, a concrete building designed based on what must be stolen blueprints from the Montreal Olympics. It was all gray, irregular slabs, topped off by an ugly cone rising from the entrance. I went inside.

The mall had two largely open levels. Most stores were filled, with music shops and places hawking cheap Chinese clothing. On the bottom level I noticed a small restaurant jutting into the atrium. The restaurant's name was in Cyrillic, but on either side were large Chinese dragons.

It was a mall food court restaurant minus the court. Food was ordered and paid for at the counter, and then customer brought it to an open table. At the counter I was presented with a Cyrillic menu.

"Do you have a Chinese menu?" I asked the woman behind the counter.

This time she stared at me blankly. I studied her features: flat face, pale skin, thick eyebrows. This woman wasn't Chinese, she was a Buryat, and didn't know Chinese from Martian. Thankfully the dishes were being prepared in the front of the stall, and I pointed to a few dumplings and some rice.

My first bite was strange. The dumpling wasn't wrapped in rice, instead it was fried in a thick dough. Inside wasn't pork, but instead a thick beef stew. This was Chinese food for Russian people. All the customers appeared to be citizens of the Federation, a typical Siberian mixture of Buryats and the Rus.

The food wasn't bad, just a bit bland; it was actually hardy in a way that traditional Chinese food is not. The lesson I draw from these back-to-back meals is that the Chinese adapt the menu to suit the audience. Not a terribly profound moral to this tale I know, but it makes a quick and easy answer at a dinner party.

Sad, Sad Jazz

2007-12-29T15:49:00.000-05:00

ULAN-UDE, Russia — I'm a bit homesick.

That can happen during dinner at a place called the Fast Food Café, a Russian establishment that specializes in bringing America to the cold, dark taiga.

I wound up here because I couldn't find any other tasty-looking options in Ulan-Ude's main area - other than a giant Lenin head.

At the Fast Food Café, food is ordered cafeteria-style. The diner takes a tray and pushes it down three parallel metal rods, stopping to take any food that looks edible. On offer are Russo-ifed versions of American favorites, including fried chicken, hamburgers and hot dogs. Healthy dollops of Russia's national condiment and spice, mayonnaise, is sprinkled on top of everything, including the fruit and Caesar Salad. I have to request a custom order, which is difficult when your Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook is back on the Trans-Siberian, speeding toward Vladivostok.

"Nyet mayo," I say, hoping for cognate. The kitchen worker, about 18 with her hair in a messy ponytail, doesn't get it. I point to a hot dog with three huge kosher pickle slices and a thick squirt of mayo on the top. "Nyet, nyet, nyet," I say. This time she starts to move, although shoots me a look that seems to say that she can't understand why I'd desecrate an American treat by eating it without sauce.

I grab a bag of chips, pay for my food and then go to the bar, where there's Budweiser, Heineken and Baltika on tap. I choose the native brew (#7), and look for an open seat. I find a line of empty stools facing the street windows, and take one in the middle.

The café is obviously a popular weekend hangout for the city's teenagers. And why wouldn't it be? The food is reasonably priced, and minus the mayonaise, pretty tasty, there's bunches of Ikea-knockoff tables in various sizes for small, medium and large groups and friends, and an attached movie theater and video arcade. As I take my third bite of processed pork, the house band starts to play. It's a jazz-quartet of balding middle-aged men in black T-shirts and leather coats.

They play the theme to "Titanic," then "The Bodyguard." The young patrons keep chatting away, but I stop doodling in my brown trip diary. The music choice is mawkish, but it's redeemed by the incredibly tight playing in the group. And here, in this artificially American environment, my mind turns to schmaltz. I'm 9,000 miles from home, in an incredibly foreign city. I haven't had a proper conversation in 10 days. The Internet Café blocked Skype, Gmail and AOL Instant Messenger, so I can't have even an electronic conversation with my friends and relatives. I'm cut-off, on assignment far away from my former life.

Eventually it's time for "Young Hannibal," the third sequel to "The Silence of the Lambs," in the attached movie theater. The film is slow, suspenseful and punctuated by random acts of violence. The atrocities on screen are horrific, . Lecter's enabler is Gong Li, the ravishing Shanghainese actress who made several key Zhang Yimou movies, including "Raise the Red Lantern," "Ju Dou," and "The Curse of the Golden Flower." A key section of the narrative takes place in Kaunaus, Lithuania, a town I passed through just a couple weeks ago. The film is dubbed into Russian, and with no recognizable dialog I stay stuck on the remembrance of things past.

After the film I grab another drink from the Fast Food Café bar. I scribble a few postcards, feigning being excited by my adventures when tonight I'm worn down. The band is between sets and a DJ is spinning songs popular during high school. Aalyiah's "Try Again." Pink's "Lady Marmalade" cover. Eminem's "My Name Is."

In China half the bar would come up to the strange redhead and practice their English. Russia is not China, here they leave the tall man writing in a worn, stained brown notebook alone, and don't ask if he needs help getting home after three beers and an equal number of hot dogs.

It's a cold, uphill two kilometers through half-lit streets back to the Hotel Udon. I don't want to risk riding a bootleg taxi at night in this foreign city, so I pull up the fur lined hood of my down parka and start the trudge. As I walk the jazz music echoes through my head, and eventually the cold is replaced by melancholy for things left behind on the road.

Model Minority

2007-12-26T20:05:00.000-05:00

ULAN-UDE, Russia — Pity the indigenous Siberian.

Ruled by a government five time zones distant, the native population has had its religion muzzled, culture destroyed and witnessed mass migration of hundreds of thousands of Europeans.

It's hardly unique to the people in Siberia. Native Americans, Outback Aboriginals, and the Incas didn't have so easy, either. But here in the capital of Buryata, one of Siberia's largest ethnic minorities, the population is a taking an interesting turn from the type indigenous tale of woe and mistreatment. I don't want to say this to loudly, but the natives here appear to be doing just fine.

I saw my first Buryat on the Moscow Metro, a young woman with long, skinny legs and a slender frame. Her face was a revelation – a completely new type of visage. She had a long, very flat forehead, a broad nose and very small eyelids. She looked almost Korean, but her skin tone was much lighter, just a shade darker than a pale Russians. At first it seemed to be an impossible look, and I thought that this person must be an Kazakh Albino or just exceptionally light-skinned. But every day I would pass a couple people with the same features, and I realized there wasn't anything unusual about her look, just that there are very few Buryats found outside of Russia.

In Moscow that distinctive face can be dangerous. Right-wing, nationalist street gangs prowl the night, taunting, beating, and sometimes permanently disabling Asian faces in the city. The primary target is illegal migrants from Central Asia, Uzebks and Tajiks who come to Moscow to escape dire living conditions at home – conditions exacerbated by Russia's stranglehold on these countries' economies. There's a jingoistic undercurrent to this violence, and anyone who doesn't look Russian is a possible target.

A Moscow Times story describes what happened to a young Buryat, Yury, coming home to apartment one evening:

"About six teenagers, smaller guys, jumped me on the metro. I managed to throw them off me and it wasn't that serious at first," he recollected during an interview in his dorm room. "Then one of them yelled 'What are you waiting for?' and another stabbed me as they ran out of the car," he said, displaying a three-inch scar near his left kidney. As Yury, who declined to give his last name for this story, staggered around the metro station looking for help and bleeding profusely, the police stopped him for a document check. They helped themselves to all his cash and then decided to call the paramedics.

There are only 5,000 Buryats in a Moscow over 10 million. Here things are different. Buryats make up more than a third of the population, with more than a quarter-million in the Republic. That proportion seems low in the capital, Ulan-Ude, where most people have the distinctive face.

I spent most of the day passing those faces, walking the streets of the city. Ulan-Ude is in the middle of a cold snap, which in the middle of Siberia means it's really, really cold. Temperatures were more than a dozen degrees below zero during the day, and quickly plunge to -40 once the sun is down. There is no humidity in the dry, crisp air, so everyone must cover up to avoid the cold. This makes Buryat spotting quite difficult, as there is little difference in the way the two groups dress outside. Everyone wears a long fur coat, men in dark brown or black, women often in a cream. On the head women wear more fur, usually a peaked hat. Men sport something resembling a thick wool beret, which seems to keep the head warm but I'm not sure offers the ears any protection. Shoes and pants are muted colors, and draw the eye up to the dead animal warming the person above.

Fancy wool coats are a mark of luxury in America, and while they are less expensive and more of an essential here, hopelessly broke people don't own them. And the coats look rather new and well put together.

At the post office, mailing some postcards that say "Moscow" and "Warsaw," I wait in line behind several, uncovered women. The one in front of me is especially attractive, hair recently curved and her pale face covered with a layer of cover up. She wears a fire-engine red shade of lipsticks, and carries a fashionable black handbag. She appears to be off to a party after dropping some bills in the mail.

My winter stroll left me hungry, so I stopped into several restaurants looking for food. I found the offerings too upscale for my taste, including a sushi restaurant in a hotel lobby; a Russian restaurant, located underground and down a steep, winding staircase; and a tapa bar that also served sushi. At each place a dinner would be over $20, but the restaurants were all mostly full, primarily with Buryat customers. These middle-class patrons are served by an almost exclusively Russian wait staff.

Buryats run the convenience stores, the hair salons and the travel agencies. On the pedestrian shopping street, Buryats mingle with rusting Socialist statues celebrating the Double Helix and scientific progress, carrying bags of new clothes from the post-holiday sales. I go to a music store to find cheap, bootleg Siberian music and instead find fancy cell phones and iPod Nanos at nearly double their American price. There is a line at the register.

A consistent theme of Russia journalism in the Western Media is the presence of "Two Russias," Moscow and the poor countryside. Here in Siberia the capital's wealth appears to be spreading, impacting people in provincial cities and historically-repressed minorities. It's amazing and completely unexpected. I wish I had the services of a Russian guide, and could look up at academic at the local Buddhist university. I want to know why things seem O.K. here, and if this model could help the fractious relations in the multi-ethnic republic to the south.

I'm not naive enough to believe things are fine here; life for the Buryats is not easy. The countryside is still very poor, the birthrate is not high, corruption is widespread, costs are increasing for everyday items with the surplus of foreign currency. But these are problems of the entire Russia, not just the minority populations. In this world, that's a real sign of progress.

The Arrival

2007-12-25T22:55:00.000-05:00

ULAN-UDE, Russia — Daylight comes quickly and painfully. Sergei wakes the rest of the cabin up, and demands that we all look out the window. Outside there is blindingly white nothingness. It is the southern end of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. Now completely iced over, the lake reflects the bright winter sunshine, ratcheting up the pain of my hangover headache.

It's monotonous and strangely beautiful, a vast, empty expanse. The other side of the train hugs steep mountains, their slopes covered by wispy mounds of snow blown by the wind and then frozen into shape. The scenery is other-worldly, a huge contrast to the endless stubby pine trees and rolling hills that I've seen unceasingly since Moscow.

I begin to gather my belongings, taking back the iPod from Vasily and stuffing the remaining pieces of bread into a pink plastic bag. I find five socks on the end of my bunk, and a sixth on the floor under Olga's mattress. The large rolling suitcase is removed from the storage place and put into the hall, along with my overstuffed blue pack.

As the Baikal fades into the distance, the carriage attendant comes over with my ticket stub. I thank her, but realize that I don't even know her name. She's been two doors down for five days, but I can't say I've learned a single factoid about her life on the rails. It must be incredibly monotonous, slowly rolling from Moscow to Vladivostok endlessly. I suppose this must be a prestigious position in the railroad company, something that requires slaving away on tirgid local lines for several years before getting the assignment. But this endless travel must get boring.

Suddenly I realize that my journey is almost over, and that I probably won't have the luxury again of taking a week out of my life to travel the rails. I feel a deep sense of regret about the things I didn't do: I never went to the restaurant car, took a makeshift train shower with two cups of tea water, spoke with the young family three cars down or bought mittens from the Tuvans selling them compartment to compartment.

Instead my Trans-Siberian is in the tiny compartment. Olga issuing dietary commands. Vasily bopping his head side to side because of hip-hop. Sergei and his expressionless face, not moving.

If this journey was just a three-hour flight or an overnight hop, we would have parted as strangers. Instead the trip went on much, much longer, and they had the opportunity to slowly reveal their personalities.

For them the Trans-Siberian is a means to an end, the most practical way to get to another place. Times are good, but not too good. They can travel, but it takes a long time. They have enough money to visit family (Vasily), to go on a vacation (Olga) or commute to a new job (Sergei), but not much. They don't have to travel third class, platzkart, with its stained sheets and lack of curtains. But there's not enough money to avoid this taxing trip, which seems to carry little novelty for the three of them. On my first day, Olga asked me why I didn't fly to China. I wanted to see Russia, to have an adventure, I said, and then asked her why she didn't fly. "Money," she said, and Vasily, sitting next to her nodded.

For me there was romance on this train. Flying is soulless and uninteresting. The most I can hope for on a flight is a couple hours of banter with someone about their condo in South Florida. Here I got to know three people, somewhat intimately, and all the while I was headed toward somewhere. I wouldn't have taken a plane if it was free.

The Rossiya lost time during the night, and Ulan-Ude is not in sight at the scheduled arrival time of 10:18. The endless taiga returns, with its uniform hills and occasional painted wooden cabin. An hour and a half later, the city finally comes into view. Ulan Ude occupies a wide, bowl-shaped valley. The train snakes around the bowl's lip, hugging a frozen riverbed and a string of rusted, shuttered factories. The city is in a beautiful location, but the skyline looks the same as all the sad Russian towns we passed the last four days.

The train decelerates and stops. I throw my pack on my shoulders and grab the rolling suitcase, and head down the narrow hallway. As I begin the turn around the carriage attendant's cabin, my suitcase bangs the side, just as when I boarded. But this time Sergei is right behind me, and he takes the back and goes around smoothly.

Outside the three stand beside our car in a ragged line. We hug; I hug Olga twice.

"Dasvedanya!" I shout in a Zhivago moment, then I turn my back to the train, walk toward the station and don't turn around, not even once.

Fish Heads and Pinstripes

2007-12-24T00:57:00.001-05:00

IRKUTSK, Russia — The Trans-Siberian is meant to be an endurance test, not only a person's mental faculties but also the liver. Russia invented vodka, and they know the best way to consume it is unmixed and to the point of blacking out. And there is no better place to imbibe the national beverage than in a confined space where there's nothing to do the next day or the day after that.

But there's been something strange about this particular voyage on the Rossiya. There's been no vodka on board, not in this cabin or the ones or either side. The carriage attendant hasn't tried to sell us any, neither have the babushkas rail side.

In fact, these past four days I've been in the strange position of being the cabin's lush. Most nights I buy a pint can of Baltika beer and sip it a few hours after dinner. The beer is always ice cold, and comes in a variety of flavors: #0, non-alcoholic; #1, light; #2, pale; #3, classic; #4, original; #5, gold; #6, porter; #7, export; #8, wheat; and #9, extra. I'm trying to drink through the numbers, although #1, 4, and 6 aren't sold out here in Siberia. I'd say #7 is the best, but #3 is also pretty good and about half the price.

My cabin mates seems perplexed by my casual sipping. I'm not sure if the glass of wine after work is really a tradition in Russia, I think here it's drink hard or not at all. Olga doesn't seem to mind, but I get strange looks from the guys when I'm drinking my brew. On the second day, I try to buy Vasily a drink but he refuses.

The fifth, and final, night, aboard is more festive. At an evening stop in Slyudyanka, Sergei sneaks out for a smoke and comes back with a bag of smoked fish. The train is closing in on Lake Baikal, a crescent-shape gash on Siberia that is the world's deepest lake, and that means new food. The fish is omul, about the size of a flounder with sharp, high fins.

Uncharacteristically, the train stops again a couple hours later, and this time I get off as well. I go to the small kiosk to buy my nightly beer, and am surprised to see Vasily behind me. He buys three beers, the first he's bought all trip, and then I decide to buy another.

Back aboard, the three men each crack open a beer, and start doing what men do when they can't talk: play cards. Throughout the journey we've been playing this Russian card game. I don't know the name, the rules or how to win this card game, but we continue to play. The first day I couldn't move without Sergei or Olga saying, "Nyet." But slowly, very slowly I started learning what things weren't allowed, such as playing a three after a seven. Dozens of rounds later, I frankly still don't understand the strategy, but I can get through a round with only one or two nyets.

The rounds start getting longer, as we keep getting distracted. Vasily takes the Russian Phrasebook, and turns to the section on sex. He starts pointing and then saying the dirtiest expressions in the book, including "How much for an hour?" and "Do you like missionary, or some other position?" He stutters them out in English, and then says the Russian translation, much to the delight of Sergei.

The commotion attracts a visitor from the next cabin. It's a man that I've seen several times during the journey. He is almost comically large, several inches taller than me and easily 300 pounds. His hair is lone gone and he's worn a black-and-white horizontally striped wife beater the entire journey from Moscow. He can't speak English at all, but he's friendly and we've had several conversations of my broken Russian and hand gestures on my goings to the bathroom from time to time. Now we invite him inside and offer him a place on the bunk next to me, as Olga is away talking with the carriage attendant.

I soon learn that the Zebra stripes belong to Sasha, destination Chita, about a day to the East. He works in automobile repair and this is not first voyage on the Trans-Siberian. Sasha is giant-sized Vasily, goofy and excitable.

He brings over his own supply of beer, Sergei gets out the smoke fish, and I try once more to finish my supply of chips. After a few brews the Russian men lighten up about their body image and take a crisp. I start speaking nonsense Russian around beer three, combining my studies at the Sweet Moscow Hostel and thumbing through the phrasebook.

"Amerika, da! Russiya, da! Yzumitelno! Yzumitelno, Yzumitelno!" I say.

Sasha starts listening to my iPod, which is almost dead. He another hip-hop fan, and starts bouncing his head in an endearingly awkward way. Vasily mispronounces "condom" and "tampon." Olga comes in and takes a few sips of my beer. I realize that looking ridiculous is absolutely O.K. This is the ultimate guy's night out, where what transpires won't matter or be remembered in the morning. It's a happy, almost transcendent moment.

The crew is up until dawn, bonding. We didn't even need a drop of vodka.

The King of Herbs

2007-12-22T00:15:00.000-05:00

TAISHET, Russia — It's late afternoon, at least by the watches on board that still believe we are in Moscow. The real time is much later, as we've now traveled 2,000 miles to the east and the sun ended its brief mid-winter appearance several hours ago. But on the train at least, there are still a couple hours until dinner, and I am perched on my bed, reading a book.

Vasily, seated on Sergei's lower bunk, interrupts my reading with an offer.

"Jon! Jon! Come look!" he says.

In his hands are several photographs. I sit down next to him as he leaves through the three by five inch images. The first is of a young woman, obvious Russian with dyed-magenta hair and a long, thin nose, approximately the same age as Vasily.

Through hand gestures, his scattered English from grade school and frequent consultation of my Russian-English phrasebook, Vasily manages to explain why he is on the train. He's getting married next month, but before doing so, he's taking a trip home to Khabarovosk, on the Pacific Ocean. His fiancée is staying at home and working, so he is traveling alone.

His trip makes mine resemble an afternoon drive through the countryside. Vasily's home town is just a few hours north of Vladivostok, the last stop on the Trans-Siberian and nearly eight days from Moscow. And he didn't start in the capital, rather Vasily works ("in business") and lives in Astrakhan, a small city on the Caspian Sea. That means it will take 10 days point to point - or almost three weeks round-trip to see the folks. I hope they're appreciative.

Russians are supposed to be too poor and too busy for families, but Vasily will be married before his 23rd birthday. He works a good job (although I'm not really sure what he does) and wants children soon.

He obviously cares for his fiancée, showing his affection by looking at her picture frequently. They speak on the phone at least once a day, using a brand-new cell phone Vasily attaches to one of his belt loops. Vasily figures out ways to bring her into our limited conversations, frequently asking about my current relationship status, former loves and whether I find Russian women attractive. With Olga in the cabin, I decide it's not the best time to talk about the "babushka theory," wherein Russian woman are extremely attractive for their teens and twenties, and then seemingly overnight morph into wrinkled, overweight grandmothers with scarves around their necks. Instead I tell him that Russian women are beautiful.

Family matters aside, Vasily strikes me as a very normal person. He loves hip-hop, and is constantly asking to borrow my iPod to listen to the stray 50 Cent, Jay-Z and T.I. songs scattered among my German electronic music. On the train he wears blue jeans and a couple different sweaters with a white T-shirt underneath. He appears to have spent some time battling acne, and there are still a few pox marks on his cheek.

Vasily is the Slavic equivalent of the name Basil, which means "royal" in Greek. In antiquity Basil was the king of herbs, with a strong flavor prized in Mediterranean cooking. Basil is powerful, but it is also fragile. Dried basil is mostly flavorless, and the herb is usually added at the last second to preserve flavor. I wonder if I am encountering Vasily just as he begins to dry out. Will his marriage, children and the responsibility that comes with it destroy his excitable nature? Perhaps Vasily will have a "babushka moment" of his own, and transform into a crotchety old man with little notice. That would be unfortunate, as dour Russia can be a bit on low people who just want to hang out and listen to 50 Cent.

Dreams of My Office

2007-12-21T00:14:00.000-05:00

NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia — Sometimes I fantasize about turning this vacation into an assignment. To that end, I imagine what my imaginary editor in New York would want from my four days on the train. Probably a discussion on how ordinary Russians feel about the seven year presidency of Vladimir Putin.

***

Vasily, 23, is not a temperamental man, he spends most of the day staring out the window. But the young man gets impassioned when questioned about his country's president.

"Putin?" the reporter asks in his limited Russian.

"Da, da." he replies. "Putin good."

But what is so great about Putin? That he revived the economy at a time when the price of oil, a key Russian commodity, has tripled in price? That he keeps the country's various political factions and ethnic minorities in check with a rapidly expanded surveillance bureau? That most people Vasily's age can't afford their own housing, and are forced to live with their parents for decades thanks to spiraling housing prices? Vasily hides behind that simple four-letter English word, and doesn't say more to an outsider.

***

Hmm. It's a little thin, even for a speculative trend story that tries to read the mood of a nation by talking to a few random people.

Perhaps I should leave work out of this vacation.

Olga's Caramel Treat

2007-12-20T17:46:00.000-05:00

KRASNOYARSK, Russia – The Russiya rattles into this Siberian industrial center with plenty of warning, hissing and whining as it slows down. I calculate from the Cyrillic timetable in the hall that I have 26 minutes in this place, in which I must find and locate supplies for the night.

I use these stops as a way to pick up snacks, drinks and things to nibble on late night between our regularly scheduled meals. I buy ice cream cones, which in Russia come unwrapped and in one flavor, vanilla soft serve. There's rolls of digestives, a bland cracker, liter bottles of Sprite, and an occasional beer. I've budgeted $20 each day on the train for food and expenses, but most days I don't even spend $10.

Back at Sweet Moscow Hostel, there's heated debate among guests about how much food is available along the way. Some people describe a Russian feast, with dozens of babushkas rushing to each station to sell soups, sandwiches and fresh meat. Others report being tempted to gnaw on their own hand out of hunger, with food found only one or two stops, and even then only stale bread was for sale.

My journey has seen neither of these extremes. The Russiya makes longer stops - more than 10 minutes - about every six hours. At nearly every station there has been some food for sale, primarily at a kiosk or small store on the side of the track. There's nothing exceptional about these stores, but they are easy to get in and out of and not be stranded by a leaving train.

Krasnoyarsk is different. Olga starts putting in her winter layers several minutes before the train stops rolling, as if she knows that there will be more options this time. Usually she doesn't even get off at stops, as she has enough provisions for a return journey. But here she lead the way off the train and into the Arctic air outside.

Siberian stations are wide and open. The Russiya pulls into a middle track, meaning that passengers must use a long, high staircase to reach the main platform. Nobody bothers. Here the vendors are babushkas, old women with goods in plastic buckets. They appear to be ethnic minorities, with dark, flat faces covered with wrinkles.

People stream off the train and meet the vendors. There's no need for them to yell and hoot, we passengers know they are the only game in town. I stick by Olga, who goes to a woman two cars down. She has a styrofoam cooler stocked with cold drinks and a pile of thick brown sticks.

Olga points to the sticks and says, "Skol'ko?" How much. Then she takes out a crisp 100 ruble notes and in exchange reaches a handful. She gestures towards me and points to the sticks. I understand this, Olga's recommending I buy some.

Olga clearly sees herself as the leader of our ragtag bunch, so much so that for a day or so I believed that she was the older sister of Sergei and Vasily. She decides when it is time to eat, when we turn off the lights and play cards. Her authority isn't overbearing, she simply makes decisions as the oldest and most respected member of our tiny compartment. I'm happy for her advice, because without it, I would be even more clueless than I already am.

I take her advice and purchase four of the mysterious snack. When I have the bag in hand, I can see that the outside is a waffle cone rolled into a long tube, filled with what appears to be caramel. Olga is set in her opinions, even though they aren't always logical. She buys sweets and candies with abandon, yet lectures me when I munch on a few chips after dinner. She asks if America is a dangerous place, yet she just traveled by herself to Moscow, a place with a sinister reputation.

Olga's trip to Moscow was a vacation, her first time to the west. It was wonderful, the Kremlin, the spires and the history all met her expectations. Now she's going back to Vladivostok, where she works as a nurse.

Of the four of us, Olga seems the most content with her life. She doesn't talk about getting rich like Vasily, or running away with Sergei to other countries. The vacation was nice, but Olga accepts that her life is back on the Pacific. She doesn't mention her husband or call him

Olga isn't dour. After we buy the caramel treats, I pull out my camera to get some shots of the station. It's twilight and the sky is clear. Sergei comes out of the cabin and I ask him to the take a shot of Olga and I. She's happy to pose, and makes goofy faces at the camera. Her laugh is strong and vivacious, it rings out in the crisp air.

Back on the train, we quickly break into our stash of caramel treats. They are incredible, probably the best piece of food I've eaten this entire trip. I can see why even Olga, a bit of a health nut, would consider these a must-purchase. There are some things in life that simply must be tasted, calories be damned.

Chomp, Chomp, Chomp

2007-12-19T00:10:00.000-05:00

TYUMEN, Russia — I'm lying on my bunk, attempting an afternoon snooze, when Olga calls my name.

"Jon. Jon," she says. "Food."

I fumble around for my glasses and then take a look at our compartment's small table below me. Spread across the surface is a feast: big hunks of light yellow cheese, two loaves of dark bread and piles of hard candy.

As I'm getting ready, Olga flips back her mattress and starts fumbling through her luggage. After a moment she brings out a white silver ball, approximately the size of a basketball. She peels back the outer layers, which appear to be paper towels, revealing the main course underneath: an entire rotisserie chicken.

I grabbed a fork and foldable bowl from my pack and scurried down to the table. Thus began the cabin's tradition of eating meals together.

I didn't expect communal dining on board. I've ridden on many trains, and usually don't share more than a bite or two with people in the cabin. Many Chinese eat food bought on the train, as costs are reasonable and fuyuans constantly troll the cars selling fruit and noodles. The trains in Poland didn't even have water, let alone any food to sell.

Yet dining is now our tradition. Olga is the ringleader, she decides when it is time to eat by taking out what remains of the chicken from her suitcase. The two men then rummage through their things and take out whatever they have. The food is placed on the table and eaten as one meal. Sometimes Olga will send me to the provodnista to buy dried noodles, so we all can have a bowl to slurp.

Less popular are the items I brought. I have two shopping bags worth of food, mostly purchased at an elitny supermarket near my hostel in downtown Moscow. The store caters to an upper class contingent, with fruit so expensive that appears to have been imported from Japan with tariff stops in several Euro-Zone countries, and a wine section that covers half of the voluminous basement. For $25, I managed to get some spreadable cheese, two apples, crackers, a couple bags of mysterious candy and a can of sour cream and onion Pringles.

None of this seems particularly appealing to the Russians, who always politely decline my invitation to share. The worst item I brought appears to be the chips, which Olga hates. On our first full day I offer her chips, and in response she sticks out her tongue and places her hands a few inches away from her hips. Chips, it seems, are too fattening.

The fear of a couple round chips seems strange considering our train diet. We eat copious amounts of meat, big hunks of cheese and hardy portions of crusty bread. There are few fruits or vegetables and nothing fresh. We are consuming a high fat, high carbohydrate diet and burning almost no calories each day.

I could care less. Often there is nothing to do on the train besides eat, and these communal meals help bring structure to the day. Upon waking, be it at nine o'clock or two in the afternoon, there will be a small meal. Then several hours later we will have a magnificent feast, and late at night we will chomp away at some leftovers. In between there will be sunflower seeds and endless cups of strawberry tea from the samovar.

The sunflower seeds appear to be a Russian train tradition, I see people in each tiny compartment cracking the black seeds open throughout the day to reveal the tiny brown bite inside. Young and old, seeds are for all. They appear to be a form of entertainment, for instead of reading a book or listening to music sometimes Sergei and Olga will just crack open seeds and stare out the window. Eating food is adequate stimulation, as long as digestion is nearly continuous.

Although these meals are mostly silent, I feel myself integrating into the lives of these three people by eating day after day with them. We are something of a family now, gathering twice a day to break bread and share in our bounty together. And while the conversation isn't quite up to a typical day at home in New York, I must say this – Olga's roast chicken is much better than my mother's.

Sergei the Submarine Man

2007-12-18T00:09:00.000-05:00

KIROV, Russia — Sergei is the quiet one.

He is pale-skinned and without hair, wears a leather jacket and a pair of brown pants. He is short, just a couple inches over five feet, but well-built, clearly in shape. This sounds menacing, but I've yet to see Sergei get angry or even mildly annoyed. More than anyone else on the train, Sergei has been able to create a Zen-like front on this long journey.

He spends his time doing crossword puzzles and studying the train timetable. He never rushes, never fills in words and changes them. He eats the least and chews the most. The observer of Sergei sees a methodical man, someone who does things only after they have been considered for quite some time.

As befits such a quiet man, I know little about Sergei. He is 26 and single, not in a serious relationship or engaged. He was in Moscow for work, and wouldn't say much more about his trip. His final destination is a military base in Vladivostok, the home of the Russian Pacific Fleet. Sergei works on a submarine.

If you've ever given the Russian Pacific Fleet any thought - and there's not much reason for the average Westerner to waste energy pondering the subject - it's probably been over the division's poor combat record. The Russians were trounced by the Japanese in 1904 (after losing, the Russian Baltic Fleet was dispatched to the Pacific. The Japanese decimated them shortly after arriving in Asia). The unit's poor performance started a series of events that led to the overthrow of the Czar, the rise of the Soviet Union, militarism and expansionism in Japan, and both front of World War II. That's a pretty a heavy weight hanging around the neck of a young naval cadet, but Sergei seems proud of his assignment.

I wish our language skills permitted a more in-depth discussion on the subject. Unfortunately, the Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook contains none of the vocabulary that would be necessary to talk about life aboard a submerged metal ship. I have to trust Sergei that when he says that he likes being aboard the submarine.

Even if we could chat in the same language, I doubt Sergei would give up anything interesting on the subject. He appears to be a very disciplined man in the very secretive Russian military. I'm sure he wouldn't give up the farm to an inquisitive American reporter.

So on Sergei, the passenger with the most interesting profession and probably the most compelling life story, I have the least the say. If keeping secrets is part of his job, he must be very, very good at it.

Purgatory

2007-12-16T00:07:00.000-05:00

PERM, Russia — The Trans-Siberian is as close an experience to Purgatory as is possible in the Earthly realm.

This is especially true of the middle days in the journey, the ones where there is no arrival nor departure. The day begins and ends on the train. There is nothing in particular to look forward to, everything that exists at the reveille where be there at bedtime, and the day's only marker will be that the destination is now just three days away as opposed to four.

Being stuck on a train for so long means that at some point, the traveler must surrender the idea of the destination. It would be madness to countdown the minutes in an 84 hour journey across the tundra. Instead the train must be accepted as a new way of living.

No longer I am bound by expectations or goals, there is no point to life on the train. The car will move 1,000 miles today whether or not I brush my teeth. I could not move from my bed, and it would still be a successful day. The key to making it to Ulan-Ude is forgetting that there is an Ulan-Ude, and then just be.

My entire existence is a train car, and most of the time there I am confined to the compartment. The four of us are not overly compressed inside, and I am especially fortunate to have a top compartment. This means I have the luxury of returning to my own personal space at any time, where I can lie flat or sit Indian style, face the window or the door. During the day I spend most of my time on the bottom bunk, with doubles as Olga's bed at night. Usually I sit closest to the door, Olga near the table, but sometimes this can be reversed. If Sergei is out sometimes I stretch my feet across the aisle, legs flat. This is my favorite position, it feels like a recliner.

What do I do in these various seating positions? There are first and foremost the distractions I brought aboard. My iPod is best, with its 3,900 songs and 200 Podcasts. I learn about a new digital camera with 10 megapixel resolution from David Pogue of the New York Times, investigate North Korean counterfeiting with a reporter from the BBC, and wonder with the Slate Gabfest crew if Barrack Obama's campaign will fly. There are songs, too, my favorite being from the group Peter, Bjorn and John. It's called "Defects on My Affection." The chorus asks a single, piercing query:

"The question is
Was I more alive than I am now?
I have to happily disagree.
I laugh more often now,
I cry more often now.
I have to disagree."

I play the song twice, but then save the third repetition for inside my head. There's no way to charge the device on board, or at least now way that I can figure out. That means I'll have to make the trip on only one tank. I shift my iPod use to maximize battery life: backlight turned off, no skipping songs, no games, no video. I carefully make playlists and don't deviate from them. Even with careful rationing, the battery looks like it won't make it past day three.

I also brought books. I could see my mother's brow furrow when I decided to bring eight books and an equal number of socks. She tried to convince me that I might not need a book about Eritrea. Combined the books weigh about 15 pounds and take up quite a bit of space in both my suitcase and pack, but I don't care. They're worth every ounce. Today I pounded through this year's Booker Prize Winner, The Inheritance of Loss. I bought this for my sister at Christmas, but after she pounded through the copy I swiped it and brought it out.

The novel centers around several people tied by an estate in the Indian town of Darjeeling. The patriarch lives a lonely existence on the fringes of the Himalaya, content to be alone while the other people pine for Delhi and New York. Although written by an Indian-Englishwomen, the book is Russian in scope, chronicling three generations of despair. These are lonely, desperate people, who live broken lives and yearn for an emotional payoff that never comes. Reinforcing the link to Russian literature is a strange plot detail: the little girl who figures in most of the story is the daughter of Indian astronauts both killed on a mission in the Soviet Union. Since this act sends most people in the book into the pit of misery they will stay stuck for the rest of their lives, it could be said that Russia is these people's undoing.

And that's about it really. Besides reading and listening to music, I eat, go to the bathroom and stare out the window. It sounds terribly boring, and somewhat quixotic. Why go all the way around the world to do something easily accomplished on the couch with a bag of Doritos? But inside today's nothingness there were moments of transcendence, when everything felt all right with the world. Even though I'm not doing anything, it still feels like I am on an adventure, crossing the terra incognito on the map. I may be in purgatory, but I'm strangely alive while serving my time.

Introductions

2007-12-14T00:06:00.000-05:00

NIZHY-NORINGRAD, Russia – The carriage attendant is surprisingly friendly as I prepare to bring my monster load abroad. She helps the 70-pound rolling suitcase make over the gap between the platform and the Rossiya. I'm mortified that I can't lift my suitcase for a couple feet, but there's none of that Russian rudeness in the attendant's return expression. She places her hand underneath the bag, and then I'm aboard. My Trans-Siberian odyssey has begun.

I will be traveling from Moscow to Ulan-Ude, 3,000 miles to the east, aboard the Rossiya, the primer train in the fleet. It should take 94 hours, or just under four days. This is the longest transportation ride of my life, and it started with me banging me bag.

Things don't get much better on the train car. The train hallway is quite narrow, and immediately curves to the right at the entrance to avoid the attendant's cabin. My bag bangs the sides of the hallway in several places, and the compartment is so narrow that my pack get stuck. I'm too big for the train.

My cabin light is on. I turn the corner to see a man seated on the bottom left bunk. He is short, with a shaved head and large almond eyes. I can see the outline of tiny hair bristles, which show that although his hairline is receding, if he let his mane grow out he would not be bald. He might be 25, possibly 30.

I panic. Up until this point, my compartment was completely hypothetical. I didn't know if there would be Russians or Czechs or elephants in the place with me. But now with this short man in a green sweater and brown pants, this cabin is real. I will spend the next four and a half days in this cell, with people deposited here by the luck of the ticket machine.

I smile, I don't say anything. For some reason, I don't want to them to know that I am a foreigner. It is preposterous, I'm sure this man knew two seconds after I rounded the corner that I am American, but suddenly I don't want to be the foreigner. I want to know what to do, to fit in on this train. Instead I'm just a klutz, who doesn't know what to do with his voluminous bags.

My rolling suitcase is far too heavy to lift off the ground, so I place it in the main storage space under the bottom bunk. It takes up most of the space, and that's less than half my belongings. I also need to share this place with the person who will sleep on this bunk, who has not yet arrived. Worse, when I go to close the storage area, it won't close. My bag is too tall.

I hem and haw for a couple minutes, trying to force the bag into an area that doesn't fit. Then another person arrives, a young man with a cleft in his chin. He points to the upper bunk opposite mine, and neatly arranges his couple bags where the bald man is sitting. Then he takes his seat opposite me and watches the continuing bag show.

I throw my pack up above the beds in a small crawl space.

A few minutes later the fourth passenger arrives, a woman several large parcels. She will sleep beneath me, and we need to share luggage space. One look at the nearly full baggage compartment and my over-sized rolling suitcase, and she frowns. This isn't going to work, there is simply too much stuff. But somehow this woman makes it fit, moving each piece of luggage as if it is a Jenga piece, and the wrong movie will send the whole tower crashing to the table. Soon each piece has found a position, and the four of us take a seat on the lower beds.

There is silence for some time. I stare at the two men across from me, and occasionally to the woman on my right. The train starts moving without warning, without a whistle or cheers from relatives on the platform. Our journey may be epic, but it begins with a whimper.

A while later, I point to myself and say my name.

"Jon."

Then I do it again. "Jon." I'm pretty sure I'm imitating some horribly racist documentary where an anthropologist goes into deepest Africa and encounters a lost hill tribe.

Thankfully my companions get the idea and soon I'm struggling to learn three names. Chin man is Vasily, Baldy is Sergei and the woman Olga.

But who are Vasily, Sergei and Olga? I'm not too sure. After a couple hours, mostly spent configuring the cabin and establishing our names, Olga reaches for the light switch. It's after midnight, and Vasily and Sergei also unfold the brown comforters at the end of their bunks.

I'm not tired, so I make my bed and then go into the hallway. There are no seats here, unlike on a Chinese train, and so I lean against a small protrusion and stare out of the window. The scenery is limited and unchanging: short, stubby pine trees and undulating hills off the side of the track. There are thousands of miles to go. I'm not sure how I feel about the people in my cabin, they are strangers still.

This is exactly how I imagined it: an adventure unfolding very, very slowly.

Babushka With a Side of Fries

2007-12-04T00:51:00.000-05:00

MOSCOW — I wanted my dozen or so meals here to be representative of the cuisines and tastes of the Russian Federation. As the capital and largest city, Moscow is in the best position to showcase Russian cooking as more than just smelly borscht. I wanted to go low, high, and find some tasty treats.

Me and my plans. The reality has been that I've been so busy running from one side of the metro station to the other reading Cyrillic and quizzing people on scholarships that food is an afterthought. Moscow on 800 rubles a day leaves no room in the budget for a splurge at a fancy, elitny restaurant. The only oligarchs I spotted on this visit were zooming by in their Black Bentleys as I stumbled around to the nearest subway station. Thankfully I've not gotten so lost in Moscow to run into a place where it's possible to eat out of a tent, although I hear that these "refugee restaurants" exist in some outer ring roads.

No, I've been sticking to meals on demand, and during the day that means blinki (a savory crepe) joints near museums and monuments, and at night, restaurants along the Arbat. I've made it twice to Mu-Mu, the canteen where I had an interesting meal with Helen, once to a Turkish place with a great Donner kebab, and another time to the ultimate Russian restaurant. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called McDonald's.

I dine at the Golden Arches once in every country visit without apology. There's so much to learn about a culture by seeing how they've refined the ultimate American tradition to suit local conditions. The brutal Russian winter prevented me from visiting the most historically important McDonald's outlet – Pushkin Square – where thousands of Soviets camped out overnight on January 31, 1990, for their first taste of an American made meal. This massive facility, which seats 900 people at once, is a shrine to capitalism's arrival in Russia.

The Arbat outlet is little different. It has recently been remodeled, much like the one in Pushkin Square. The sleek steel counter tops and faux-mahogany wall panels resemble the bridge of the Enterprise more than my McDonald's down the street. There are 17 cash registers, all open during dinner hour visit.

Some McDonald's innovate with different cuisine offerings, spinach curry puffs in India and lobster rolls in Maine, but McDonald's Russia offers a straightforward American burger and fries. While the decor is fancy, it is standard-issue McDonald's Europe, and soon will be found in restaurants from Reykjavik to Istanbul. Uniquely Russian is the attention to the queue management and the flow of people. On entering the restaurant, an attractive young woman assigns diners to a line. On my visit, the line is quite long for a fast food restaurant, and it takes about 15 minutes before I get to the front.

(There's an even crazier feature to this restaurant, which I unfortunately did use: a walk-through window. I know some restaurants in cities have an ice-cream machine on the street, but this is a full-service, two-window affair that resembles the drive-through, except its for people wearing fur coats, not behind the wheel.)

I order, but get only my fries and then am sent to a stool near a window. There are few private tables at this McDonalds. The main door is at the middle of the restaurant, and besides the kitchen and line space the rest is reserved for four eating areas. Most parties mix together, pensioners and young couples, tourists and locals at the large tables and stools without backs. My situation does not seem to be unique: most people seem to be given only part of their meals and pointed to a certain table. I hate to draw an analogy too far, but it seems very centrally-planned. Why can't I sit where I want? Is the number of hamburgers deliberately kept low in order to control where people sit?

At least there's been no attempt to mess with the food. Or maybe there has. The fries are crispy and perfectly salted. The hamburger, when it arrives, seems bigger than normal, and has just the right amount of ketchup and mustard.

McDonald's has an incentive to get it right. As recently as eight years ago, the average Russian ate out just once a year. Thanks to rising oil prices, things are a little better now, but people don't eat out all that often. A meal at a restaurant is special, and McDonald's still counts as a special expierence. So there's extra attention put into the food – and where people sit.

Monika

2007-12-02T04:48:00.000-05:00

MOSCOW – Monika is quarrelsome; I say three things and she finds fault with two.

She's Polish, and winces when I say that I've only visited Warsaw. The capital, she says, echoing a common Polish lament, is so ugly, why didn't you go to the coast, or to Krakow? She doesn't care for all the drinking in the hostel, which spills over nightly from the tiny gathering room into the bedroom she shares with five other guests. It's infurirating that she finds so much to criticise, especially since I'm her roommate.

But if I didn't have Monika at arm's length to complain, I wouldn't be close enough to see the contents of her suitcase, laid across the lumpy top bunk in neat stacks. On top is the Intermediate Mandarian Chinese Reader, and below, several thick grammar texts.

Monika is here en route to Tianjin, a large Chinese city on the coast not far from Beijing. She studied last year at Tianjin University, and received a fellowship from the government to return for another six months. When she uses the common phone to contact a Chinese acquaintance here in Moscow I hear the crispnessness of her tones and instantly know her language level is far above mine.

I compliment her language.

"I speak quite poorly!" she replies, sharply.

I believe her language standards are a little too exacting. Monika will only travel to countries where she knows the languages. Granted, she is a bit of a polyglot, with some knoweldge six languages, but this seems to be a crazy standard. Why must a person spend years in a classroom before they are allowed to step foot in a foreign land?

Too frequently I am fooled by Monika's appearance, which nails every librarian stereotype effortlessly: a big, bunchy earth-toned sweater; dark, round glasses; sensible shoes; an ochre-toned face with little exposure to the sun. This is true, but Monika has no pressed-leaf collection, nor does she aspire to a secretarial job at a local paper facility.

Monika's parents believe that after Christmas, she went to Warsaw and boarded a plane toward China. This is true, but that plane stopped here in Moscow. She got off, and Monika is using funds the Chinese government gave her for a plane ticket to fianance this trip. That means living at the Sweet Moscow Hostel, eating meals from the supermarket, and travelling to Tianjin on the cheapest train, the dreaded platzkart class. Moscow alternative weekly the eXile describes platzkart as "long distance transportation hell," where 54 people are crammed into one train car. Monika gave up a free plane ticket to spend an entire week in this car, where she won't have any money to buy fresh food and will probably be crammed between chain smoking Chinese businessmen and vodka-downing Russian businessmen. Definitely not librarian style.

In tight spaces and cold climates, Monika and I have many opportunities each day for conversation. I find it hard to develop a routine with Monika. Maybe it is her foreigness – although I didn't have this problem with other people I met in Poland – but I keep bumping into sore spots in our relations.

One afternoon she's on the hostel computer. I ask when she will be finished – so I can blog – expecting a mean look. Instead I get an invitation to look at an e-mail she's sending to a friend in China. Monika types to her Chinese friends in pinyin, a romanizined version of Chinese, and claims it's easier to type than characters. I'm curious, so I start to read the message.

Zhe liang tian qian hen shao. These past few days qian is very little.

"What's qian?"

Monika's cheeks rouge. "Oh, it's -- it's personal," she says, and then I turn red when I realize that qian here means money, and this sentence is informing her friend that funds will be tight this semester. I pretend to keep skimming the e-mail, but after a minute forget about blogging.

Sweet Moscow is close to several tourist attractions but there are no obvious clubs on the street. With nighttime temperatures well below zero, most guests come back after dinner and spend the evenings indoors, venturing outdoors only to the small grocery across the street to grab a snack and bottles of Baltika beer. On Monika's final night there are only four people in our bedroom, the other two being a boisterious British pair, Tom and Sam. By the third bottle of beer – well after midnight – Sam is asleep and Tom and I are deep into an argument about whether Putin will step aside at the end of his term next year. Monika is above the conversation, as she sits on her top bunk and studies her Chinese books while we debate the future of the Russian state.

Tom tries to bring her into the conversation, asking her what she believes.

"I'm not sure I have an opinion about the political situation here," she says, her Eastern-European accent making a stronger than normal apperanence in this rebuff.

Feeling miscevious after a few drinks, I decided to press Monika further. What about the Chinese government, what do you think about the lack of elections there?

"I'm not sure I know enough about the situation to have an opinion," she says. Another dodge.

But surely, I ask, things are better in Poland now that there are elections? Monika can remember the first real elections, the rise of Solidarity and the collapse of an imperialist rule based in this very city.

She nods, and silently conceeds the point.

Emboldened, I keep going. I'm troubled by China, I say. I love China and I hate it. I am fascinated by Chinese culture, I have met many interesting Chinese people and inside the country had some of the best conversations of my life. The People's Republic of China has brought more people out of poverty than any government in history, in less time. It's a miracle, yet the state is still run by thugs, and every time I go inside the country, and have my passport stamped, I'm validating the rule of these thugs. So my question is, are you, as someone born into a repressive regime, worried about taking money and sponsorship from another one?

She's quiet for a minute, and then speaks up. "I want to learn the language. I like this university. They gave me the money, so I will go back."

Tom steps in with an ill-informed comment about Tibetan independence. It's not true, but Monika and I are both grateful for him to take the reigns of conversation and rail on about the Chinese for many minutes. I'm afraid that I squashed rather than merely stepped on Monika's toes this time, and make a point of waiting until after I hear her leave the flat for breakfast to get up late the next morning.

We see each other one last time, in the foyer as she is leaving for the train station. Unexpectedly it is Monika who speaks first.

"I think you will be a good journalist," she says. "You ask good questions. And you listen."

Again, I miscalculate Monika's emotions. Whereas I thought my questions came off as probing or meddlesome, to Monika we were exploring our different perspectives on life. We exchange e-mail addresses and phone numbers in China, and I find myself wishing as we hug goodbye that I was on her train to Beijing. I have so many more questions.

The Metro Code

2007-11-30T22:09:00.000-05:00

MOSCOW – At the Sweet Moscow Hostel, one amenity that seems to come with check-in is a comfortable familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet. A Swedish couple staying on a queen mattress on the floor in the next floor said they figured out how to use Cyrillic in two days. A Brit on winter university holidays says he could do the basics in one. The hostel manager, also a Swede, who arrive three months ago from managing a property in Thailand, can read whole chunks of text. Perhaps someone will check in tomorrow will memorize it in the taxi from the airport or from a podcast they will listen to in REM sleep the first night in the six bedroom dorm.

Taking Cyrillic and turning it into normal letters is essentially a Cryptogram, those switching puzzles that some pale eight-year-old boys love to solve instead playing of contact sports, or at least they used to before World of Warcraft. The Cyrillic letter "р" – written the same as the Roman/English letter "p" – is actually the same as the letter "r." Their "c" is the same as our "s," our "n" the same their "h," and so on.

Using substitution, the mysterious and impossible Russian looking "ресторан," becomes something near and dear to every American: a R-E-S-T- O-R-A-N. In Russian, it doesn't even have the crazy French verb "au." Here it's simply "o," just the way it sounds.

It sounds so easy, but alas, I still don't have it down.

If only Cyrillic was just about taking the letters and mixing them up, some strange equation to memorize in 26 parts (If P = R then R = T and C = P). The reality – that it's much more complicated – arrives in three stages: б, я and Г. Here's a more detailed look at each individual stage:

Stage б: Apparently there are some characters in Cyrillic there aren't the same as English. But that one kinda looks the as a "b" so it's not too bad.
Stage я: Eh, not only is this character backward, which is pretty freaky, someone at the hostel told me that it's a vowel. Whoa.
Stage Г: Holy fuck! What is the hell is that? Put down the Russian dictionary and spend $7 on the International Herald Tribune at nearest Western supply store. Read about Paris Hilton over a Big Mac at nearest McDonald's.

Yes, Cyrillic has crazy bonus letters that don't correspond to a single English letter or sound. There's my personal least-favorite: Ж.

My restaurant example makes it sound like a simple substitution process, but a single letter can represent any number of sounds, depending on the letters grouped around. With my non-existent Russian, I have no way of knowing whether an "O" is an O or a U, for instance.

Oh, and even if I was able translate these words into Roman letters, they would still be in Russian, with its complicated grammar, unfamiliar verb forms and random diacritical marks in the middle of words. The only reason I want to convert is so that I can attempt to pronounce them to people on the street, or see if the word is a cognate. There's a fair number of English words in use, so there's always a chance that I can convert and figure it out. As a bonus, Russian, thanks to the Francophile Catherine the Great, uses tons of French. "Restaurant" isn't originally English, you know.

As a political scientist, I might be interested in the word "самиздат," if it appeared somewhere on the streets of Moscow. If by some miracle I could convert it to letters, I would get "samizdat," which doesn't help much. Wikipedia says this refers to "the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries," but again, how would I know that just by taking the Cyrillic letters and making them into Roman ones?

But I don't have time to find glasnost-era relics (or more appropriately I should say Гла́сность-era relics). I'm too busy trying to use the subway. Moscow isn't the most tourist friendly city in the world, especially if you're traveling on a budget that doesn't allow for a private helicopter rental. The metro system is labyrinthine, with more than a dozen lines snaking around the city in pixelated lines. Destinations are labeled only in Russian-Cyrillic.

The biggest problem for the Cyrillic-challenged on the metro is deciding which direction to go. After descending 15 or 20 stories underground (these stations were designed to serve as fallout shelters), I, the rider am faced with parallel tracks a couple of hundred meters apart. They are quite wide, as Russian metro stations are Baroque masterpieces, the most beautiful example of Soviet public art.

The distance makes even the tiniest, most insignificant outpost appear to rival New York's Grand Central Station, but also complicates choosing your destination, as the list of stops is listed only on the wall past where the train stops. The current station is shown as a large white circle, and then all the remaining stations are listed in order.

In order to make a decision, first I must pull out the name of my destination, which inevitably is one incredibly long word, something like, "Замоскворе́цкая." I have to look at this word slyly, as more than a glance will be a tip-off to police in the station that I'm a tourist and they should start concocting some sort off "offense" and issue me a "fine," and then I have to determine if that station is on this side of the track.

Замоскворе́цкая. There's that one that looks the backwards three, and then an "a" and then I forgot. Another glance, and a check to the left and right for police. So there's an "m" and about halfway through there's an apostrophe. I go back to the list of stations - there's so many of them. Moscow is huge, and some lines have over 40 stops, and over half of them appear to start with the backwards three.

Whoosh! A train arrives. Moscow is the opposite of every other metro system in the world in that trains come far too often. They arrive every 90 seconds at most stations, which between passengers embarking and disembarking, doesn't leave much time for scanning the wall for station names. So most of the time, I'm racing against the arrival of an oncoming train. If I don't see the station name, or what I think is the name, I start dashing (not running, that might attract the police) to the other side to catch the train.

All this trouble just because I'm not functional in Ж and those other strange letters. Since everybody at the hostel claims to be so good at using these stupid things, tomorrow I should bring someone along on the metro, as my personal decoder.

Falling Off the Map

2007-11-30T15:40:00.000-05:00

PSKOV, Russia – I take my seat on the express bus to Moscow and already I'm nervous. My pre-assigned seat is next to a middle-aged man with several boils on his cheek (suspicious) who is wearing a long, gray overcoat despite already having taken his seat. From my high school days in the aftermath of the Columbine school shooting, I associate long coats with terrorists, and considering I'm about to enter Vladimir Putin's Russia alone, I don't need any suspicious seat mates.

The bus takes a circuitous route out of Vilnius, the prosperous capital of Lithuania: one last chance to admire the comfortable surrounds I am leaving. Here I made friends easily, and slept first in a comfortable country estate and then a cozy urban hostel. Now I must embark on the most uncertain part of my journey. Russia dwarfs the Eastern European countries where my journey to China begins. It sprawls around a globe, refusing to be taken in by just one glance, as if the territory of a much smaller country leaked out of the sides to the far eastern and western periphery of the globe. One man can't be found in all that space.

As the bus reaches the outskirts of the developed world, I know that if something goes wrong on this trip, there isn't a familiar face for eight thousand miles. I don't have a cell phone or the address of the American embassy. And I can't be comforted by the fact that I'm traveling somewhere particularly safe. Russia's international reputation is plunging, with plutonium assassinations and fuel lines shut-off at the slightest criticism of the Kremlin. Gangsters and oligarchs run amok and public services are extremely corrupt. I'm not sure if these things are true, but this is the Russia I have heard about in America, from friends and acquaintances, from people I ran into over the past few days in Eastern Europe, and from newspapers and magazines. This is all I have.

Tickets and passports are checked as we near the Latvian border. The vast majority of people on the bus are Russian, a few are Lithuanian, and there is exactly one non-Slav – me. When we arrive, my passport is passed around for special examination among the half-dozen assembled police and security forces outside the bus, I don't believe for security reasons. Rather it seems the young guards want a glimpse at a Chinese visa and the gold lettering Americans use on the front of their passports. Each time the small book is passed to another eager set of hands I imagine it slipping into their owner's pockets, never coming out. Somehow it makes it back to me, and I stuff it deep into my jeans.

We stop again sometime after dark. The men get out and smoke cigarettes. I urinate on the concrete wall of a shuttered convenience store. Just before the rest area I saw a sign for the border: 60 kilometers. Under an hour. There won't be another chance to leave. My iPod is on the bus, so is my passport. My bladder is empty. I retake my seat next to the man with the long overcoat.

I miss the signs that announce our exit from the European Union: they are obscured by the trucks. The line of trucks starts five miles before we exit Latvia. Commercial traffic must only be allowed to cross at certain hours, so these carriers of plastics and cheeses and consumer goods wait on the right side of the road for a few hours, with sleeping drivers, waiting for the checkpoint to open in the morning. The Latvian border guard stamps directly underneath my Latvian entry stamp; he must be used to foreign tourists using his country as a shortcut on the way to somewhere else. He is neat in his stamping.

The frontier is a disappointment. I am expecting rows and rows of razor wire, or perhaps high fences alternating with moats filled with acid. Instead it is just more "Latvia" – a field. Parked on the side of the road are a military truck or two, but these wouldn't stop the adjacent village from invading, let alone the forces of the European Union.

My nerves kick in again as I see the outpost come into view. It's a full-on Soviet establishment: bright fluorescent lights, slabs of concrete and depressing Modernist flourishes thrown together at the worst possible angles. Imagine the Jetsons as designed by a fax machine working in the mail room of a middling 1968 Detroit paper company. I don't know what that means: it looked ugly and imposing in the way Russian things built in the last half-century do. Across the top, in large, evenly spaced letters reads, "Russian Federation." That would be intimidating, but it actually says something much worse:

Росси́йская Федера́ция

The Cyrillic alphabet is a strange and frightening beast.

Now if I could separate into halves, the person experiencing this event a complete neutral, rational observer - the Vulcan - would point out that procedures at this border checkpoint are nearly identical to those at the Canadian checkpoint between Albany and Montreal, which I used to cross while riding on Greyhound Buses when I was in high school, going to visit friends at McGill University. We filed off the bus– in silence – and into the station. We passed through two queues. At each my passport was examined and at the second, it was also stamped. No one asked me any questions; in fact, no one said anything. I kept waiting for something to happen to break the tension, but nothing did.

Through immigration, I converted $50 into rubles and went back on the bus. By now it was almost midnight and there had been no dinner stop, so we pulled into a small store a few hundred meters into Russian space. The parking lot was filled with trucks waiting for morning and Latvia. I could see why we didn't stop before: gas and food is much cheaper in Russia. The store was overly lit and hours of being on edge left me with a headache and feeling drained, so I wandered the narrow aisles of the store in a dazed shuffle. I crossed the threshold, I went over the horizon.

After a few minutes inside the store, I settled on a pack of Skittles, a piece of sausage and a Gin and Tonic in a can. Two months ago in a Washington bar, I spoke with an English woman about her trip through Russia. She and her girlfriends just drank these mixers as they cruised around Moscow. As my coach headed deeper into the Russian night, I tried to think such comforting thoughts. But instead I could only nervously sip my slightly alcoholic beverage, which brought me toward restless dreams of me as a tiny green blip, fading from a view on a gigantic radar screen.

What's This?

2007-11-20T20:29:00.000-05:00

ALBANY, N.Y. — Regular readers of the blog, or those following along in chronological order, will notice a large gap between the last China entry and this one with no explanation. I'm here, after a break, to provide one.

I had to leave China unexpectedly due to health reasons. My headaches started in Hong Kong last summer. They came and went through the fall, forcing me cut short my road trip back from Kansas. This meant no Mount Rushmore or car camping in Wyoming. I went on a medication early in the winter, and was still tapering up as I traveled through the Russian taiga. The pain seemed stable for several months, until it wasn't. By the summer I also had chest pain and a ball of worries. I wasn't sure what was wrong with me, and my scatter-shot visits to the doctor had been inconclusive. On vacation in South Asia, I went to a couple of dingy clinics and modern hospitals - experiences that one day I plan to share here - with little results. Back in Beijing, with a new semester looming and no pain relief, I made the decision to come home.

Examinations continued here at a steady clip. I had my blood drawn, spinal fluid examined and brain cut into tiny slices on an MRI. After several months of investigation, a bevy of specialists have concluded that I am quite healthy, and have no major system failures, neurological damage or cardiac problems. What's causing the consistent pain, tingling and dizziness apparently is a misaligned jaw, which has thrown other muscles off-balance. Correcting this is possible but it will take time. I'm getting physical therapy and will have strange things done to my jaw. The good news is that I can and probably will feel completely better someday.

In the meantime I will be home in Albany, resting up and being thankful I have a roof to come back to in times of crisis. I want to keep writing. I could blog about Albany, but I'm not sure if the entries I produced last fall at home were my strongest. This time, I'm going to start by doing something different. I'm going to blog about past experiences that didn't make it to my blog. In truth, I've been doing some of this all along. Occasionally I'll write an entry a couple of months after the fact, and then pre-date to the date that it actually happened. Sometimes I can't finish an entry on the day I started it and it will remain a draft for over a year before I finish it. For now I'm going to publish the new entries when they are finished, so they will appear on the main page as new material. Some day I might decide to put these in chronological order, but that's a decision for down the line. I also might eventually return to writing about Albany, as interesting things develop and my well of untapped stories begins to run dry.

Who knows? You'll just have to keep reading to find out.

The Driver Ms. Daisy

2007-09-15T14:48:00.001-05:00

BEIJING — Call me sexist, but I always choose female taxi drivers.

I will cross a street, jump a fence or break the taxi line to give a female drive some business. I don't hate male drivers, but it's a rare day I see a woman behind the wheel in Asia, and on those days I want to talk.

I found my latest conversation in front of a noodle stand in Zhongguancun. I tapped on her window and waved; the driver sheepishly stuffed a bun between the seat and the window. All Beijing taxis have a list of regulations that patrons should expect in the cab, no eating is on the list.

I got in and started chowing a bowl of noodles and sesame sauce.

"You can't eat in the cabin," she said.

"I just saw you eat in here. Don't worry I'm a clean person." We both laughed at the joke, and from there the beats of our conversation proceeded regularly.

"When did you start driving?"

"A cab? In 2000."

"Seven years now. Nice. When did get this car?"

"About two years ago."

Beijing's taxi fleet changed from Xiali rust buckets to modern Chinese made cars in preparation for the Olympics. The cars were switched quickly; a few months after their introduction it was hard to find model that dominated the capital's streets for over a decade. I wonder what happened to the old car; had she or the cab company sold it?

"No," she said. "They used it for parts."

Perhaps this green-and-yellow automobile contained an old Xiali carburetor under the hood. Perhaps not.

What I can say is that this driver, Ms. Zhao, brought me to Tsinghua University with a minimum of fuss, in a clean cab with pleasant conversation. As a representative of the small but growing class of female drivers, she did well.

Just a Number

2007-09-13T14:03:00.000-05:00

BEIJING — In Zijing Dormitory No. 20 I am friends with a fuyuan. Her name is No. 137.

This name did not come at birth, rather it was assigned when she decided to a take a job at China's best university. She cleaned dorm rooms, moped the hallway of the fifth floor and made sure foreign students did not sneak fireworks into the building. She did this for many months, working efficiently, impressing her bosses so much that they promoted her to desk worker. The job comes with a slight bump in pay and a significant reduction in the amount time spent bent over.

But her promotion did not come with a customed name tag. She remains, to the hundreds of students who walk by her desk each day, just a number. What a terrible metaphor for the dehumanizing elements of Chinese working life.

Nearly every service worker in China wears a uniform. The fuyuans here at Tsinghua wore blue when I first arrive, but switched to a pastel pink around the time the air conditioning turned on. They are expected to perform as a unit. Each morning at 8:05 a.m., all employees must line up outside each dormitory and march in a line. The building boss barks excercises and criticizes the previous day's performance. This is standard practice at a Chinese hotel, barber shop or department store.

People are expected to blend in, provide equal levels of service and work as a unit. This happens in America, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. This is the twenty-first century and we believe in homogenization. So I guess what really throws me over the line is the name tag. The name tag is the one element of the service worker uniform that is supposed to distingush the employee. To inform you that this is Ellen; the person that spilled the soda on your blouse yesterday was Linda. Please don't yell at me.

This evening Ryan served me an order of garlic breadsticks at Pyro Pizza. He brought the order out hot, removed it right after I finished my last stick and refilled my glass of water several times. A pretty fine server, especially for someone not working for tips.

I know his name is Ryan from the fight outside Propoganda a few nights back. He's a friendly guy, with pretty good English. I wouldn't mind grabbing a beer with him sometime after work. But here at Pyro (a business owned by an American) he's just "Trainee." At Pyro, they don't even get numbers.

When, I asked Ryan, does one graduate from trainee status?

"I'm not sure," Ryan said. "Maybe three months."

I hope that full-waiter status means a nametag, and while they're printing one of for him, make some for the fuyuan in Building No. 20.

Her name is Liu Meimei.

Searching for Wang Bing

2007-09-11T13:20:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – The hunt for Wang Bing is in its second week.

True, search parties have only combed a small area near the Wudaokou Subway Station, and these searches usually occur on the way home from a late-night snack, but there is nevertheless a corps of troops looking for the missing chicken wing salesman. I am one of them.

Wang Bing usually works in front of 7-11 on Wudaokou's pathetic strip of bars. With the closure of Zub in May and its replacement with a pizza joint, there is really only one bar, Propaganda. The chicken wing sellers keep coming each day, drawn by the hundreds drawn to that underground dance floor and hoping their name recognition will mean a few students will stop by for a wing or two after a hard night out in a more happening district.

But upon returning from Laos I couldn't locate Wang Bing. There was no sign of him, nor him eager assistant, Calvin, from Zach's birthday party a few months back. Instead a man wearing a polyester black-and-white Polo shirt stood and Wang Bing's position.

He introduced himself as Wang Bing's younger brother. Wang Bing, he said, now sells wings in another place. All of his old costumers are now encouraged to patronize his sibling.

"If you're his sibling," I said. "Where was he born?"

No response. Wang Bing's from Chongqing. I learned that on my eighth wing. This man may have known Wang Bing, but he wasn't family.

I moved down the line of vendors, asking about Wang Bing's fate. I heard a couple different stories. Some confirmed that yes, Wang Bing had moved on. Others said no, Wang Bing's just home visiting relatives. He'd be back soon.

A week passed. I became a prostitute and waited for my new credit cards to arrive. I stayed at Dongshengyuan – East Rising Apartment Complex – in a friend's apartment. Each night I passed the line of roast wings, stopping frequently for a wing or two.
One night a group of shirtless Chinese spilled out of Propaganda, running after a Frenchman. They circled him, lunging forward, kicking and punching before retreating. A couple of the Frenchman's compatriots joined in, and the Chinese responded by breaking bottles. A waiter at the new pizza restaurant, Pyro Pizza, tried to break up the fight and wound up with a piece of glass in his left forearm. The police eventually had to be called, and with the sounds of sirens the shirtless Chinese scattered.

"Huai ren." Little Wang Bing said. Bad people.

And with the new semester about to begin, that's where the bone lies. Wang Bing, the great personality of last semester, is missing. Perhaps no one at Tsinghua will ever see him or his third thumb again. The story is frustratingly incomplete, and I should accept there is a good possibility that Wang Bang has disappeared into the vast ocean of Beijingers, and that he won’t surface near my life again.

Previous Mostly Red Entries about Wang Bing:

Celvin
Wang Bing’s Long Day
His Wings Still Flap
Birds of a Feather, Grill Together

A Nice, Fatty Slab of Man Meat

2007-09-10T13:16:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – Here in China, I get what I want.

When I shout "fuyuan," the waitress comes running across the restaurant to see if I need more dumplings. Outside of Beijing's trendiest club districts, the owner of a bar will not only admit me at any time, but frequently take me to the Very Important Person room, complete with free drinks. People line up just to converse with me on the subway, train or even while eating a bowl cold noodles.

There's nothing special about me, I'm just a foreigner in China. People here treat me with a degree of deference that would be unheard of in America. It's outrageous, really, and I found how demeaning it can be to serve rather than be served; I became a prostitute.

Zack arranged the position. My travel mate through South Asia, not four days out of the hospital (and as it would turn out, only a day away from another visit) sat in the middle of Beijing Language and Culture University Bla Bla bar's courtyard, intoxicated. At his table sat Evan, our American friend, and two Asians. I sipped my first beer as our new friends explained why we needed to leave soon.

"Do you want to drink beer, sing song, meet beautiful women and make money?" the skinner one asked me. He claimed to be Kazakh-Chinese, or perhaps Chinese-Kazakh, and went to People's University here in Beijing.

Zack didn't believe him, but he couldn't say "what's the catch?" in Chinese: The four had been talking past each other for some time before I arrived. The Kazakh wanted us to go to a club in the Xizhimen district, about three miles away. We would earn money because few foreigners go this club, and they want us to talk to the women.

I agreed with Zack, it sounded too good to be true. I wanted to sip beer with my friends, share stories recent vacations, of Laotian drug dealers and Indian computer nerds, not blast off to some crazy club. But the more we sat there, and the more the two pleaded, the more Zack want to go. I said no to Zach and explained to the Kazakh
I just couldn’t take him up on his business opportunity tonight.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at the club. It was a massive structure, attached to the Tianfan Hotel off the Third Ring Road. The club – actually a karaoke bar – rose four feet and was covered with neon strips on three sides. There was a massive enclosed valet area, and our taxi was opened by a man dressed in a pressed, starched shirt.

The Kazakh convinced me to come, as he thought I had the best Chinese in the group, and would be needed to translate. Zack really, really, really wanted to go, and Evan seemed up for it, so reluctantly I agreed to go and look around.

"If things look bad," I warned the Kazakh. "We're leaving."

The first room resembled a hotel lobby, with a large arrangement of fake flowers and twisted branches, and a spiral staircase leading up to the second level. We went upstairs and were led into a room overlooking a dance floor. Standing in the room were several dozen Chinese, all male and young.

"These are all nanji," the Kazakh whispered in my ear. The word means roosters, but it’s also slang for male prostitutes. What? If everyone in the room is a prostitute, who were we?

One of the young men came up to Evan and me, wanting a picture. I obliged, sitting on a red couch with the young professional between us. After he finished another came over with his camera phone, and another. Some spoke to us while getting their snap. Where were we from? How did we get to China? Where did we learn Chinese? The usual spiel, but here I found myself talking about my sister in the strangest of circumstances. One broad-shouldered man, much larger than the others, asked if we'd been to Henan Province and said he had studied at the Shaolin Temple.

At 1:30 on the dot, all the men moved across the hall into a small room, some kind of staff lounge for the club. We couldn't get inside, but after a couple minutes the Kazakh tried to led us along with several of the young men into a nearby room. It was a karaoke booth, a small room with a long couch around one wall, an entertainment system opposite and a glass table in the middle. Gaudy brown and white wallpaper peeled on the high corners of the walls and dusty fake flower arrangements were placed at random locations in the room.

Inside I could see three women, all dressed in skimpy dressed and loads of makeup. Their permed haircuts reached the middle of their backs. They looked young and empowered, the men who stood in front of them just young.

The Kazakh explained more as I looked on from outside the door. The men are paraded in, six or eight at a time. The women ask questions, and then choose their entertainer. Soon the former Shaolin monk sat next to a customer with a black patent leather purse.

Our funhouse tour continued. Now we were led into an empty karaoke room. On the couch sat a man around 40, with a squared-off haircut and a black suit. This was the boss, and he began our meeting with a cigarette. "What exactly did these two tell you about this place?" he said, gesturing toward the Kazakh and his silent assistant.

I told him our story so far, how we'd been plucked from the foreign student university's bar and dragged out here just to take a look. The boss seemed pleased.

"You get here at 11," he said. "You can leave at 4, but if you still have a costumer if you have to stay until they leave. Each night you will make at least 500 RMB. You can start tomorrow, but wear nice pants and real shoes."

I looked down at my flip-flips and hairy feet covered in dried, crusty sweat and felt embarrassed. I promised to look better the next time we returned, and thanked the man for his time.

We left the room, and I told our hosts that it was time to go. But instead of taking us toward the exit, they led us into one final room. Now we were the ones on
display, put in front of three hungry women. They wanted man-meat.

"Where are you from?" One asked me. "How old are you?" said another.

"Can you dance?" asked the third.

I felt mortified. To these people I was an exotic monkey with a miniature symbol, a cute toy that would liven up a night on the town. These costumers probably spent years making a fortune in real estate or manufactured, now they wanted to be fawned over. Staring at these ravenous people, I knew that I couldn't never work here at the karaoke club, even if I never established whether or not I would be expected to "entertain" these people back at their hotel suites.

Prostitution is dehumanizing. Being any kind of servant, required to dance when someone says ‘dance’ and bark out an awful version of Aerosmith's "I Don't to Miss a Thing" on cue is terrible too. Even services that I take for granted are vaguely unsettling. Why should a woman run across the room just because I need a package of salt? Maybe I don't always need to get what I want.

Dog Fights

2007-09-05T05:33:00.001-05:00

CHANGSHA, China – Translating a Chinese name into Roman characters can obscure personality traits. Guo Sanjun, or Sanjun Guo, written in letters means little. But 郭三军 goes a long way towards explaining why this man seemed so happy to explain the advantages of Russian fighter jets at a quarter past midnight.

San or 三 means three, jun or 军 an all-purpose character for military things. Take together "三军" is Third Army. What a presumptuous name! Did his parents know that he would grow up to be a towering giant, over six feet tall with a wide frame? That he job would require him to participate in meetings with Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao and other members of China's crème de la crème?

I could have asked Mrs. Guo, but the timing seemed wrong. She appeared in the hallway of the soft sleeper train car in her pink nightgown. When her mouth opened to speak there were only four teeth, each one a solitary piece of enamel in an empty quadrant. Like many older Chinese women she seemed timeless: I would have accepted her age
being 55 or 90. She appeared annoyed.

"Why are you still awake?" she said to her son. "You talk too much. These people aren't interested. Come to bed."

Sanjun, the largest man in the compartment, bigger than a billion of his countryman, at first responded to the rebuke with sheepishness, his face pointed down at the floor. But then, perhaps realizing that he is 35-years-old and no longer 12, lashed out.

"I'm talking to these foreigners!" He gestured toward Zach and I. "We're discussing things!"

Mrs. Guo didn't looked impressed. Her son meekly ended his tirade by promising to come back to the sleeping cabin soon.

The pair was returning from a vacation in Yunnan, to see the Old Town in Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge, by some measurements the deepest gorge in the world. When the T-62 finished its 38 hour journey from Kunming to Beijing, Mr. Guo would resume his job at the Ministry of Athletics. He introduced himself as a secretary, playing off the duel meanings of the word. He supervised Olympic preparations but served as a stenographer when high Communist Party officials held meetings.

He works, in his own words, like a dog. Six days is a short week, seven is a long one (the Chinese are striving, but have not yet succeeded in creating an eighth day). As the Olympics get closer there are more of the latter than the former.
"I am serving my country," he said. "This is my chance to be in the history."

That last quote featured a bit of Chinglish because this conversation took place mostly in English, the first since crossing the Laos border. At the hospital, on the bus, on the train, I used Chinese. I mention this because this man's education (at People's University, the third best school in Beijing) and language abilities ("I'd better know English," Sanjun said. "I paid a fucking lot of money to learn it.") set him apart from the ordinary Chinese I have been meeting on this trip. This is a man of some privilege, and his blunt opinions surprised me.

We met in the dining car. Zach and I played a card game called "500," a variation of Gin Rummy. At Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, six armed policemen escorted a pregnant woman with child off the train. Later in the evening, after the fuyuans pushed us out of the dining car to make way for overflow passengers and we went into the soft sleeper car's hallway to converse, Sanjun told us the woman had been caught smuggling drugs.

They found 470 grams of heroin hiding against her swollen belly. She would get 10 years, Sanjun said, and then told us about Chinese drug law. At the national level, getting caught with 500 grams – a little more than a pound – is a death sentence. Some municipalities are tougher. In Beijing 100 grams buys a free bullet, the same in
Shanghai. But Chinese are not without compassion; a pregnant woman is not killed.

Sanjun explained that drug traffickers take advantage of this loophole, luring hundreds of pregnant peasants as mules from the Burmese border of Yuannan Province toward the major shipping ports along the Southeastern coastline. The Third Army man had little sympathy.

"They're all dogs," he said. "Fucking bitches."

Then Sanjun brought out the military hardware, a thick pile of Chinese military magazines. He held me read through the latest issue, one with a line of Russian soldiers on the front. The F-18 is now outdated. There are mechanical problems with some Israeli equipment deployed in the West Bank. The magazine's longest article was a profile of three "Heroes of the Nation," a family of physicists. Readers are breathlessly told how California Institute of Technology staff said they would rather shoot the brilliant scientists than allow them to return home to the Motherland. But they did, and they proved key when China's hydrogen and nuclear bomb programs.
Sanjun helped me translate with relish, filling in words such as "advantage," "traitor," and "celebration," quickly. I liked this man, his clearly drawn sense of morality and crisp humor. If he believed I belonged to a class of American devils, he didn't let on.

“Third Army” isn’t a ridiculous name in the People’s Republic of China. The Third Army fought bravely in both the Chinese Civil War and Second World War (known here as The War to Resist Japanese Aggression. Edgar Snow’s classic Maoist account of the Revolution mentions a failed mutiny right here in Changsha. “However, the revolt was quickly suppressed, due to the loyalty of the Third Army,” he writes.

With his name carrying such a history, Sanjun’s unfettering support of the state is not a surprise: it’s foretold in his characters. He justified his militarism to me with a joke: "Other people do drugs. Some people like pussy. I read this." I laughed and accepted this position. When we parted shortly after the appearance of his nightgown-clad mother and did the customary exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, I thought this time I might actually hang out with this man and argue military tactics among the dogs of Beijing.

Working the Electronic Corner

2007-09-02T01:53:00.001-05:00

KUNMING, China - Prostitutes aren't stupid.

One rang me up at the Golden Bridge Hotel just a couple hours ago. "I heard you're staying until six this evening," a female voice said. "What are you doing? Do you want a massage?"

I declined, not wanting the elicit the services of anyone working at this dive-y hotel next to the railway station. The shower didn't work, the sink held several years worth of mildew and my pillow had a yellow stain on the right corner. I'll take my foot rubs somewhere else.

But how did the prostitute (Let me clarify something here: When a woman calls a hotel room in China soliciting massages, she's always a prostitute, or at least a madam.) know I'd decided to spend a couple extra hours at the Golden Bridge?

Her call came only ten minutes after a furious argument at the front desk. After arriving at one in the morning, Zack and I made it out of the room at 12:40, over half an hour after the official check out time. Now I'm not a morning person, and I frequently make it out just after the official leaving time. I've always been able to cajole my way out of paying the extra fee. Not here.

"Foreigners and Chinese are the same!" the fuyuan at the counter said. "Everyone pays the fee!"

"You're cheating me!" I howled back. "We stayed here not even 11 hours."

"It's the all the same!"

This went on for several minutes, until I was forced to make a tactical retreat. I accepted paying the half-day charge, but swore to be in my room until 6 p.m., the maximum time alloted. I would get my revenge my disrupting the routine of the cleaning woman. It's a petty move, but sometimes I'm petty.

And the hotel staff had their revenge. While I stormed back up to the fifth floor with my backpack, they placed a call to the hotel's massage liaison. There's a couple of waiguoren in Room 526 looking for some action.

Crash Test Dummies

2007-09-01T13:03:00.001-05:00

JINGHONG, China - The bulldozer turned sharply, rotating 90 degrees in two seconds to completely block our way forward. The operator lowered the bucket halfway to increase the meance of the construction vehicle. At the same time, a dump trunk drove behind and cut out off the rear. The highway gang had us trapped.

The bus driver should have known better than to try and shave an hour off the 200 kilometer trip between the Laotian border town of Mengla and the capital of Xishuangbanna, Jinghong. Instead of taking the winding road through minority villages and tropical mountains, he decided to take us over the unfinished four lane highway.

By unfinished, I mean the construction crews still deployed on every mile of this soon-to-be major aetary connecting Laos and Yunnan Province. Workers were still living on the road in old military tents, laundry was still drying on clothes lines hitched up on the shoulder. Mudslide barriers still needed cement to be poured. Some areas were paved, others weren't.

I especially enjoyed the tunnels. By going through mountains instead of around them, tractor trailers will be able to bring trade goods to Northern Laotian towns such as Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng like never before. But the trucks shouldn't leave the dock yet. As of yesterday these tunnels had no tile, no lights and piles of dirt at random intervals. Our bus driver turned on his brights and plowed through, narrowly missing a couple people driving the other way on motorbikes.

Chinese construction safety standards haven't quite reached Western levels. Our bus driver asked construction workers periodically if could enter a tunnel or bridge. "Mei sur," they all said. No problem. Never mind that hundreds of men were deployed along the road, along with heavy equipment or that the road hadn't been through safety inspection. The friendly men and women are pleased to have the 3:15 bus passengers from Mengla to Jinghong serve as test drivers.

Everyone except one pain-in-the-ass supervisor. He wore a straw hat with a red badge around his neck indicating his managerial status. He waved his hands and face furiously as soon as he saw the bus. No, no, no, no. We couldn't pass. The bus driver sent out his ticket collector to negotiate. No success. The bus driver tried again. No change. Then he decided to try and pass anyway, as not going through would mean a ten kilometer detour back to the last connecting path to the old road. That's when the man deployed his heavy machinery and created the standoff.

We won. After a couple minutes the bulldozer backed away and continued clearing a pile of dirt. The man in the straw hat continued to wave his hands, but by then we were headed toward the next tunnel. One hundred meters up the road we came to another dump truck. In passing, our driver asked if we could continue into the tunnel.

The dump truck driver smiled. "Mei shir."

Bandages, Thermometers and a Spider

2007-08-31T00:25:00.001-05:00

MENGLA, China - Under most circumstances, I would invite the two young and attractive Austrians out for a Tsingdao or a couple pieces of fried tofu. But I needed an ATM and then had to get to the hospital.

Zack's still sick. His symptoms include fever, headache, body chills, body sweats, difficulty breathing and a pain in his right foot. We took a rest day in Luang Prabang and then another here in Mengla, but he doesn't feel any better. As Mengla has no airport and Zach really didn't want to begin the six hour bus ride to Jinghong, the nearest city with one, that meant when Zach felt even worse during the evening, we paid a visit to Mengla Country Hospital.

We never found an ATM, and went to the hospital with 300 RMB between us. That's about $40, or $460 less than required to walk in the door in an American hospital. Of course American hospitals treat and then send the massive bill through a collection agency several weeks later. Here in China you pay for the treatment even before you receive it.

Mengla County Hospital is three buildings arranged in an open square. Two are built in a Southeast Asian style, concrete boxes with pointy roofs and a yellow paint job to show they are from Yunnan Province. The other was two story and brick, and this is where the taxi dropped Zach and I off.

My Chinese is better than Zach's, and with his illness he was talking less coherently than normal, so I did most of the talking. I explained to the nurse on duty that he'd been sick for a few days, feeling worse and want to know what was wrong.

The nurse took a thermometer out of a metal box, filled with disinfectant I hope, and stuck it under his armpit. One-hundred and four degrees: Not too good. His blood pressure and breathing tests came back fine, but they took one look under his foot and sent him to the dressing unit.

The story of Zach's foot wound is this: on our second day in Vang Vieng, the same day our tuk-tuk crashed, Zach, myself and the Australian-New Zealand duo of Chris and Veronica decided to celebrate our good fortune in emerging from the accident uninjured by drinking ourselves silly. On the Vang Vieng are a series of riverside bars, where tubers can stop and enjoy a $1 Beer Lao, $1.50 plate of noodles or a $1 joint, and then help themselves to unlimited jumps on a high rope swing. This sounds incredibly dangerous, but only a couple people have died in the last five years on this river. Given the drunk, high debauchery that occurs everyday here, that's a minor miracle.

Anyway Zach didn't injure his foot by going head long into the river or passing out from too many Beer Laos. He scraped his foot in the most mundane way, on a rock in the river, walking back to the shore after a jump. It looked a normal cut, a few inches across, red, but after a week it hadn't healed. Zach changed the bandage daily and started applying liberal doses of First Aid cream, but it still looked white and pussy when the Mengla nurse opened it up.

The surgery room was disgusting. Zach sat on an operating table covered in a cloth with several blood stains. A large spider crawled around the closest wall. The surgeon, who spoke no English, wore a dirty coat. First came the infection test, a few drops of blood drawn from the finger with an incredibly long needle. Then the surgeon cleaned, cut and dressed the wound, all while Zach winced in the pain of hydrogen peroxide.

Before any of this began, I was dispatched to the payment counter and ordered to pay $3.40 for the wound care and blood test. Only then did the treatment commence.

The blood test came back normal - no infection - and the surgeon sent us to the brick building. There I talked with the nurses about what we should do now. They wanted to know how Zach felt, when we were returning to Beijing, and how I spoke Chinese so well. I waved this off, as there's scarcely been a less appropriate time for faux-flattery then here at the hospital. They decided to administer a couple intravenous medications, and dispatched me to the pharmacy to pay and collect them. They came to $7.50, and I had to be careful with the small glass bottles as I carried them between the buildings.

They put Zach in Room 101, perhaps the best room at the hospital. There were two beds, and the man in the next bed didn't look well. He grasped in stomach and shook his head when I said hello. I think he needed an appendectomy. Later his son came to visit and the nurses hooked him to some kind of pump and he felt better.

The room had bad fluorescent lights but cable. For two hours, Zach watched a CCTV-9 documentary about children trying to escape the Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese War (or the War to Prevent Japanese Aggression as the government puts it) and slept. It was after midnight by the time we walked back to our hotel room, through dark streets and a beer garden.

Zach looked better after his visit to the hospital, at discharge his fever was only 99 degrees and his headache had gone down. The Chinese staff had been prompt and friendly in servicing us, obviously favoring us over other patients. They ran a number of tests and administered themselves in a professional manner, except when they bothered me about my Chinese skills. The total costs were just over $10 - essentially nothing. But Mengla is no place for a serious illness. I wouldn't want to go under the knife on that bloody table, or have one my internal organs explode while hooked to that strange pipe.

Our visit to the Chinese health care system was informative, but next time I'd rather not have the health of a friend be at stake.

Another First Impression

2007-08-30T10:40:00.001-05:00

MENGLA, China - What's black and white and fat all over?

Me, trying to model Chinese clothes.

"It's very fashionable," I said to the fuyuan minding the stall. "But it's just a little small."

Then I spent five minutes trying to worm my way out of the black clubbing shirt with small white designs on the right shoulder. I could imagine myself wearing this to a nice club in Beijing or Hong Kong, after I lost 40 pounds.

As I struggled with the top buttons, more fuyuans gathered. Soon I had nearly observers, making sure I didn't fall down and crack my head open. I started asking questions. To the woman hlding a baby I wondered how the old child was. Problem is I said "How many years does this child have?"

The assembled crowd laughed, and the mother replied. "None. He's only been here for eight months." That surprised me because this baobao - a wonderful word that can mean baby or package - had a full head of hair looked twice as old.

I moved onto the person trying to find a shirt large enough for me. Was she from Mengla?

No, she arrived not long ago, two months on September 4. She came from Hubei Province, nearly a thousand miles away. She lived with friends from home, and came here for the job. Things in Mengla so far are going fine, but I could tell by the tone of her answer that she hadn't been here long enough to decide whether her journey across the country had been smart or irrational.

And they had questions for me. Where did I learn Chinese? Did I dye my hair?

Then it came to drink. A little deeper in Mengla's market catacombs I asked a woman what she was barbecquing and less than a minute later was sitting on a small yellow stool drinking a Yunnan liquor that tasted just like paint thinner. I tried to stop my host - a local farmer seeing a couple friends after a day's work - after one glass. I said "no" 37 times, but when I turned my head a bit he snuck a bit more in there.

With an appertif in me, it came time for food. A bought a banana for five cents, and then kept wandered through the stalls. After I finished I asked someone where the nearest train I could put my peel in was located. "Wherever you want," she replied, and smiled when I dropped the peel immediately.

At a restaurant next to my hotel I attempted to order dinner, only to be stopped by three middle-aged men. "Come, sit with us," they said, and I enjoyed a dinner of fish soup, a spinach-like vegetable in vinegar, stir-fried egg and tomato and buckets of rice. The three were all here for business, one from Hubei, one from Guangdong and another from Sichuan. I asked if any had been to Laos, two hours south of town.

"It's not a good place," the man from Sichuan said, looking down at his rice. He'd been there, found it poor, and came back quickly. Now he reguarly comes to this Sichuanese restaurant and holds no regular job. I wondered why he came to Yunnan in the first place.

"Because I heard an American would be here!" And the whole table burst out laughing, myself included.

Approaching the Chinese border from the Lao town of Muang Nam Tha this morning I felt dread bubbling up in my stomach, that I didn't want to leave behind the colorful worlds of South and Southeast Asia for the monochrome Sino existence. But walking around today proved to be a refreshing reminder that a country with 1.4 billion people can't be a total drag, especially if you're blessed with a little Chinese to communicate with them.

Irrational Exuberance

2007-08-29T01:19:00.001-05:00

LUANG PRABANG, Laos - Zack woke up this morning at 11 a.m. with an announcement.

"I'm too sick to take the bus tonight," he said, and then went right back to sleep.

With an unexpected day in the former capital of Laos, I rented a bicycle and went in search of unseen corners. I found evidence that contradicted my previous blog about Chinese influence in Laos. I started with a destination, but after passing scores of homes with red tin roofs, roadside stands selling baguette sandwiches and school children walking back toward country villages, I saw a sign for the northern bus station. Since that's where I am planning to catch the bus to Kunming, I decided to go for a pedal.

Luang Prabang, like most of Northern Laos, is hilly. The landscape here contours in a way I've yet to see elsewhere, with long, tree-covered hills rising a couple hundred feet in all directions. Sometimes they come to a point, or rise steeply to form a small cliff. It is beautiful year-round, but I think especially lovely now in the height of the rainy season.

My Lonely Planet Southeast Asia on a Shoestring claims that the bus station is four kilometers outside of town. I pedalled steadily for almost an hour before reaching the dirt parking lot, and that was at steady pace. I felt I handled the hills with aplomb, not having to get out and walk my cheap Chinese bike to the top once. But yet, I apparently set a land speed record for slowest pedal through the Laotian countryside.

At the bus station I found a helpful and English-speaking ticket agent. He told me what the travel agents in town had told me about tickets to China was frankly bullshit.

"There's only one bus a week," he said. "And sometimes there's not enough people and it doesn't come."

So much for those improved transportation links between Laos and the Red Giant. Getting to Kunming still requires three bus rides and a taxi ride across the border. In other words, it's a third world border crossing.

I grabbed a bowl of pho, Vietnamese noodle soup, and started back toward town. The wet season is beautiful, but there's the problem of rain. I made it about halfway back, over the largest hill and past a hilltop golden stumpa before the sky cracked open and started ruining my copy of P.J. O'Rourke's "All the Problems in the World." I sought refuge in the nearest roadside building.

It was a non-descript building, a bit larger than most with a parking lot out front and a sign that said, "Bowling Club." In Asia, where English is not always standard, I don't take English signs at face value. Bowling Club could be a nightclub, a cafe, a guesthouse or a place where people played snooker. Here signs don't have to tell the truth. But I knew this place, because it's rather famous around town. It's a bowling alley, the only place that serves alcohol after 11 p.m. Zack went here on a bender a couple nights back after several shots of Lao Lao Whiskey. I retreated home with a nasty case of the hiccups. I missed clandestine drinking at a bowling alley thanks to the hiccups. You can't make this shit up.

I arrived at four o'clock and there were no customers. There were plenty of staff, all getting ready for the night ahead. This involved unloading truckloads of Beer Lao and stacking them behind the bar. Massive quanities of the beer, hundreds and hundreds of bottles.

With nothing to do, I decided to play a game. It's 10,000 kip a game, including shoes and thin legging socks. The shoes were standard red, white and blue American floppers and the balls were also made back at home. But these place was built by Chinese. "Bao Ling Qiu Guang Lin Huan Ying Nin," was written in letters above the eight lanes. Why it was written in pinyin and not characters I'm not sure. Maybe to appeal to foreigners, the Chinese-speaking but not character reading kind. I'm not sure, but it means "Welcome to the Bowling Alley," or "Bowling Welcomes You," in more direct Chinglish.

Chinese-made means cheap in most places, and I suspect the Chinese won the bid to make this place because they cut a couple corners. The electronic scoring machines used only a couple colors, like early Atari game consoles. All the lanes were made with the same cheap wood, and it had all been polished. This means that the bowling lanes were as slippery as the place where the bowling releases the ball. The first set I nearly landed ass on the ground.

It's strange how quickly you finish a game bowling by yourself. I wonder if the author of "Bowling Alone," a seminal work of sociology, ever tried it. It's not bad really, and the best part is no one has to know you bowled a 72, unless you blog it.

After the game I went over to a table where a older man and two young staff were sitting. From the alley I heard echoes of Chinese, "hao," "wei," "lao" and other syllables. I wanted to practice the language and ask why only the bowling alley is allowed to serve alcohol long into the Mekong night.

"Ni hao."

No response.

"Zenmeyang?"

No response.

"Hello?"

"Hello."

"Chinese?"

No response.

"China?"

No.

My thought about the spread of Chinese in Laos was wrong. I pushed off from the bowling alley without discovering its secrets. Chinese money went into building the place, but whoever coordinated the deal obviously is not working Tuesday afternoons. I made it back into town in time to meet Chris and Veronica, the Australian-New Zealand couple from the tuk-tuk accident a few days back for curry. Delicious curry.

So to summarize my afternoon bicycle ride, getting between China and its neighbors is still rather difficult, and just because something is Made in China, doesn't mean it speaks Chinese.

The Little Red Tide

2007-08-28T01:49:00.001-05:00

LUANG PRABANG, Laos - Chinese are coming to Laos for several reasons. Some are here on business. Some are on vacation. Others know people already living here. Yo-Yo is all three.

Yo-Yo is a 22-year-old female from Dali, a city in China's Yunnan Province. She just finished her university degree from Yunnan University, one of the best schools in Southern China. Now she works for a daily newspaper in Kunming, the provincal capital. Her English is quite good, probably helped by her college's high number of foreign language students. She's attractive, intelligent, in short, everything you'd expect from a member of China's young, globalized generation.

But I ran into Yo-Yo doing a pretty menial job, mixing fruit shakes at Sakura Restaurant in Vang Vieng, Laos' riverside backpacker hangout. She's here for a couple weeks on a working vacation, assisting her parents, aunt and sister, who own the restaurant.

I'm not sure why it's called Sakura (Japanese for "cherry tree") but it's been running for three years now and is a find among dozens of cookie-cutter restaurants. There are both tables and Thai style pillows to lounge on. At the nightly happy hour there's a free Lao Whiskey shot for anyone who has been tubing that day (everyone) and another free drink to anyone who brings their iPod. This brings in a fresh mix of music, and ensuring that people are stuck listening to the three Jack Johnson records an American hippy left behind a couple years back. I ate here twice, and there were a good number of costumers each time.

The streets of Vang Vieng haven't changed since my last visit, but the stores on them have. There's a better selection of goods, more crackers and fruit juices, more screwdrivers and playing cards. And the people selling are increasingly Chinese from Hunan or Yunnan Province, attracted by a sleepy local commerce that hasn't woken up from three decades of state-planned markets.

These people arrive not speaking Lao, and a good number don't speak English, either. Like centuries of Chinese migrants before them, they travel abroad to bring the products of their native land at a reasonable price.

China needs Laos. Thanks to the French, who successfully added this part of Thailand to French Indochina in the late nineteenth century, China and Thailand have no land border. Therefore all trade must go through either Burma or Laos. The Chinese are funding highway construction in Burma, but the route is longer, more mountainous, and passes through unstable territory in the hands of Karen rebels. Going through Laos is a more attractive option, and the Chinese are pouring millions of dollars to upgrade the roads.

I can see the improvements. The road from Vientiane to Vang Vieng now takes an hour less than it did a year ago. The sharp mountainous turns south of Luang Prabang have a few less potholes.

The Chinese are also building a separate infrastructure to support this new trade. A trade magazine I picked up here in Luang Prabang had many advertisements in Chinese. In Vientiane a new hotel promises Chinese television, Chinese restaurants, Chinese speaking staff and a karaoke room stocked with Chinese tunes. In Luang Prabang there's the "China-Lao Restaurant," "A Taste of China," and the "Luang Prabang China Restaurant." These aren't for Western or local tourists, a couple don't even have English or Lao menus.

I appreciate what the Chines have done here. There's now a direct sleeper bus that runs from Vientiane to Kunming, in China, that will shave two days off the journey. We're planning to hop on here in Luang Prabang and use it to cross the border, riding the Chinese Tide back to the Motherland.

A Bend in the Road

2007-08-25T23:35:00.001-05:00

KASI, Laos - Can visiting a place for the second time be a homecoming?

Maybe it can when things develop at Laos' rate. Three years after I stopped in this town for lunch on the way to Vang Vieng, our Korean made coach stopped for a bite to eat on the way to Luang Prabang. We were promised a free lunch, but when the bus driver pushed us onto the street he did with the command, "you pay!" They promised us free lunch last time, too.

Kasi is one-third of the way from Vang Vieng, where my tuk-tuk tipped over, and Luang Prabang, the old capital. It's the lunch stop because it's the town of any size on the route. That's saying something because Kasi is just one street with a couple dozen thatch huts and a couple canteens centered around a tiny parking lot. The other villages are what I like to call "Bend in the Roads," ie, they fit into a bend in the road.

Zach left the bus slowly. On days with bus trips, Zach does most things slowly. Zach's a good sleeper, just ask Brown, my grammar teacher from last semester. Many, many times she, another classmate or I would have to call Zach on his cell phone and summon him to the 8:00 a.m. class. Some days she'd have to call for the 1 p.m. class.

Exacerbating this is Zach's recent discovery of Valium. One day on Ko Tao, Zach, Katy our friend from Beijing Alex and Katy's man friend Phil went for a snorkeling trip around Ko Tao. Snorkeling usually just results in salt water in my eye, so took a walk around the island. Alex and Zach wore no sunscreen, and came back at sunset with lobster red burns. They hobbled to the pharmacy, asking for a painkiller. The pharmacist, who spoke limited English, gave they Valium. Zack popped three and slept for 14 hours, and now whenever he's facing a long trip he chomps a couple down and is out for the whole journey.

And so Zach was pretty useless in Kasi. He didn't bring in money off the bus. He couldn't find baguettes. He was hungry. He needed help, so I went to one canteen, ordered two bowls of noodle soup and paid. I don't think I've thought about Kasi in three years since I've been here, but coming I remembered so many little details about the place. The restaurants use disposable Chinese chopsticks but use them again and again. On the left side of the street buses pull up and park (the parking lot is on the other side of the road) and throw exhaust into the soup of people sitting too close to the street. The baguettes are darker here than in other parts of Laos.

Kasi seemed quite pleasant; it was nice to be back. But again I could not and did not really want to linger. Kasi was just a stop-over onto bigger, more colorful places, where we would have "experiences" and visit "attractions" and learn about "culture."

After lunch, I saw a street-side vendor, a very old man. He sold metal objects, mostly small knives and farming tools. To attraction costumers he ran a cow bell he'd tied to the stand with a piece of red string. I tried to buy his bell. He wanted 15,000 kip, about $1.50. I didn't want to go over $1, I also had no Lao currency above this amount. (In Laos, you carry large amounts in U.S. dollars, which frequently can't be changed at small roadside places.) The metal-worker wouldn't budge, so again I can only take away memories from the tiny town of Kasi.

Rafter No. 99

2007-08-24T01:30:00.001-05:00

VANG VIENG, Laos - Life is an adventure; a sneaky adventure that can lull someone living it into a false sense of security, make them forget that danger can inhabit the smallest, unnoticeable places. Take, for example, the passenger-side back wheel of an aging túk-túk.

Vang Vieng is one of those places that is famous among certain set: backpackers, mostly people under the age of 30 who have spent time in Southeast Asia. Not everyone makes over here to Laos on their holiday, but everyone encounters at least one person who did and they hear at length about this riverside town and its tubing.

Laos is trying to develop responsible tourism, so the tubing is controlled by a community development board. The Lonely Planet describes this as a "cartel," which I think is a bit harsh when describing a bunch of middle-aged women who suffered through the Second Indochinese War. They charge $4 a trip, and that includes a ride up to the starting point, a tube, and a life jacket for the safety-conscious.

Our túk-túk -- basically a motorcycle which two benches and a cage built on the back -- held seven people: Katy, Zach, myself, a Kiwi-Australian couple on an around the world trip, and two British women. Two other people in the British party stood on the bar at the back of the túk-túk.

The Kiwi in the couple was Veronica, the Australian Chris. They sold the house (in New Zealand), flew to Europe and went east. In Armistar, where I watched the incredible lowering of the flags ceremony on the Indian-Pakistani border, they walked through the border during the actual event. They went to the Tribal Areas in Northwest Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is probably hiding. These are some of the most dangerous places on the planet.

And then we spun. I heard a crunch sounding and then túk-túk started to veer and wobble. We went to the left for a fraction of a second, then the driver made a hard turn to the right. It seemed as if we would tip over first on the driver's side, then on the passenger side. Adrenaline made time slow down, enough for me to grab tightly onto the handrail at the top of the túk-túk. I clamped down and braced for impact.

We went off the road, off the sidewalk and right towards a small Laotian restaurant. I imagined the plastic chairs and cheap wooden tables flying, careening through the corrugated tin walls and down into the river. But then we stopped. We hadn't tipped over.

The túk-túk's wheel, for no discernible reason, had fallen off. The rest of the vehicle looked fine, but the part without a wheel was buried in a couple inches of sand.

One person was hurt. One of the British men hanging off the back jumped off while the túk-túk was still on the road and now was limping toward the sidewalk. The side of his hand had a few cuts and it looked quite painful when he walked. We flagged down a túk-túk going back toward town, and he got on with his three friends.

Nervously, the rest of his went in another túk-túk up to the top of the river. Four dollars is a pretty good deal, but adventure travel comes with a bit of risk, too-often in this world of discount budget airlines and Skyping from Myanmar do we backpackers forget this.

But in this case, everything worked out. On the river, we ran into the British party, minus the man who'd fallen off the túk-túk. He was fine, they said, sipping Beer Laos back at the guesthouse. Resting, not riding.

Hello & Welcome

2007-08-21T21:34:00.001-05:00

VIENTAINE, Laos - In small countries, they are proud of their greetings.

Big countries have large accomplishments: Great Walls, Pyramids and economic revolutions. Laos' national symbol is a gold, vaguely phallic Buddhist symbol with peeling paint. There's one good paved road in the country (although to be fair it does run nearly the entire length of this rectangular republic). It's the poorest country in East Asia.

Laotians don't have much. They have the excellent Beer Lao and they have "sabadee." It means hello.

This morning I got off a night bus from Bangkok to pass through Thai customs, Laos Visa and then Laos Customs. We switched from a plush double-decker air-conditioned bus to something with fold down middle seats that block the aisle. But our handler - the man designed to make sure we actually get to Vietnaine - said "Sabadee."

This isn't just a Laos thing. In Nepal, everyone said "namantse," also hello. Tourists are expected to learn this word, to respond to it when people offering it as a greeting on the street. The locals will learn English, make products just for tourists and open up the country's historical treasures, if only they learn this one word. And they do.

Bigger countries have bigger worries. "Namantse" is also hello in Hindi, but I didn't hear it once in a month in India. China, and far too many other third-world countries, have adopted "hello" as an all-purpose way of attracting a foreigner's attention. I come from America. We have if anything too much "hello" there. Hence the proliferation of "hey," "how are you," "s'up," and "yo."

So in Laos, I say "sabadee," frequently and without prompt, in the hope that perhaps a Laotian or two will think a little better of their country.

Journey of My Discontents

2007-08-20T01:16:00.000-05:00

BANGKOK – Traveling in Thailand can be so simple that I can move down my list of complaints, away from infectious diseases and racist insurgencies, all the way down to overly efficient transportation systems.

After a half-century of catering to thousands of farang fortnightly, the Thais have made the journey from the island paradise of Koh Tao to the megapolis of Bangkok so painless that all I can do at the end of it is sit here and nit-pick. To wit:

* The ferry sales on the island are controlled by a price cartel, but a particularly effective one. I found a 100 baht discount, but only after going to more than two dozen shops. Set the prices or let them vary the price. This was just boring.

* On board the movie below deck was Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But the boat docked and they didn't let us see the final action sequence in the home supply store. Criminal.

* Made to wait at a concrete pavilion, some passengers discovered the long row of squat toilets came with a pet:a white macaw. He could make several noises, none of which seemed natural for a bird. My favorite sounded like this: THR-R-R-R-R-I-I-I-LL! This was diverting, but this macaw couldn't speak a word of English or Thai, at least none of the eight words that I know.

* For a journey back to the capital city, we had a remarkably complicated timetable. We arrived in the city of Chumphon with three free hours. The twenty passengers from the Ko Tao ferry remaining (some transfered to buses bound for Malaysia or beaches and islands on Thailand's east coast) were led into a holding facility. I'm being too harsh on the bus company. There were three rooms: one with tables, chairs and a menu of standard farang Thai-fare, another dimly lit with tatami mats and triangle pillows for a seista, and an alcove with computers. The hours passed quickly, at the very end I was in the bathroom. I found myself at the very end of the line for the bus, and consequently, facing backwards in a non-seat.

I lost the game of Russian Roulette that is a long-distance bus ride assignment.This gaffe I should/could/am want to blame on Mr. Zachary Raske, who didn't save the seat across the aisle for when I returned from the bathroom. My seat, to put it mildly, stank. It didn't recline, had no light, and featured a view of eight feet from the riders in the first row several inches from my face. I spent the first few hours of the trip in the stairwell of the bus reading, getting through a page or two before someone upstairs would need to elbow by and use the restroom.

* We got off the bus again, this time at a familiar place. Part cantina, part concentration-camp, I'm going to go out on a limb and call the standard rest stop of the Golden Ticket Travel Agency the worst restaurant in Thailand. The standard garnish here is flies - which come free. Everything else is at least three dollars. On the way to Ko Tao I ate pasty noodles with an unrecognizable vegetable or two, this time I try a bland take on Vietnamese pho, noodle soup. The best part about this restaurant is the theme: captivity. Patrons are required not to leave. Staff members and bus drivers participate by yelling at any foreigner who tries to take a walk or heaven forbid, make a run for the 7-Eleven down the street. As a souvenir, I buy a five dollar bag of Sour Cream and Onion Chips and hope for no return visits.

* The journey reached a sudden end just before four in the morning. "Last stop! Last stop!" I heard. Despite facing backward and eating a half-pound of fatty chips, I fell asleep on Thailand's four-lane highway. We arrived two hours early, and we ejected onto the chilly streets of Bangkok in flip-flops and pair of board shorts with a slight rank of mildew from the evening prior. The bus left patrons in the middle of an anonymous street, where the only English spoken appeared to be from taxi sharks, offering to take tired souls to the backpacker nexus of Koh San road for $10.

I walked here, on the strip, in under ten minutes. I'm too familiar with this stretch of the capital to be fooled by these tricks. But the only reason I'm able to avoid them is that I love this country so much that I keep returning and having wonderful experiences, even if the bathroom parrot has yet to master Esperanto.

Soaked

2007-08-19T01:53:00.001-05:00

KO NANGYUAN, Thailand - Our boat had two new occupants for our brief trip back around the head wall and our beachfront hotel on Ko Tao. Both were German, and one held an expensive camera pointed at the coral-lightened waters.

Zach, sitting behind me in the middle of the boat, suggested that he might want to store the camera in the captain's dry bag. Stiff winds and an approaching thunderstorm meant we'd been hastily removed from the islet of Ko Nangyuan before the rain came.

The German rebuffed Zach's advice.

"It will stay dry," he said. "You will see."

We set off in a Thai Longtail Boat, which is about 20 feet long, and made of thick wooden planks. One plank extends over the front end, this is the "tail." The boats are low and designed to work with the current of the ocean, not go against it.

Our fate lay in the hands of our captain. He was a product of Ko Tao's diving scene: long, curly hair and gap in his smile where two front teeth used to be. He drove well: taking the smaller waves head on and then pausing the motor so we could avoid the occasional large swells. We weren't in "The Perfect Storm," but the coming cold front kicked up swells several feet high, enough to make me nervous sitting just 18 inches off the surface of the water.

Fifteen minutes later I was on Ko Tao's beach with a cold bottle of water. Our new friends the Germans were nowhere to be found. Several waves crested the front of the boat during the trip, and his fancy camera was soaked.

The Plage

2007-08-16T03:37:00.000-05:00

KO TAO, Thailand - Mr. J is fond of slogans. They are plastered around his storefront. Some are practical. "Mr. J has the best condoms in the world! Buy 10, Get One Free." "Buy one book from Mr. J, get a free chocolate." Some are whimsical. "Mr. J flight from Ko Tao to Alaska. First flight free!"

Mr. J looks Thai, about 60, with half-grey, half-black cropped hair and a button-down shirt kept open on the chest. When customers enter, he usually shouts at them.

"Hello! Welcome! Buy one book, get one free chocolate! On vacation, spend money no problem. Make Mr. J happy, spend money!"

Mr. J's store and bungalows are the logical place to begin a tour around the tropical island of Ko Tao, a place where white-sand beaches and perfect coral formation have transformed a tiny fishing village into a tourist destination, but not yet enough development to drive the eccentrics out.

Zach, Katy and the rest of our growing cadre of friends went on a snorkel tour today. Snorkeling for me means leaks, salty eyes and desperate attempts to save my glasses from falling into a sea urchin, so I stayed on shore.

I walked out of my cabin on Sairee, the island's biggest and most developed piece of sand. I passed the restaurants where for the past three days I've woofed down chicken basil and fried tofu triangles and peanut sauce. Further on are the bars, where at night I sit propped up by a triangle-shaped pillow with a large bottle of Chang Beer in my right hand, listening to either reggae, jazz-inflected hip-hop, or urban techno and debating whether dreams contain "real" emotions. After a pair of palm trees that craned for nearly 100 feet toward the beach, I was in virgin territory.

I came to the police station, its three desks deserted and the front door unlocked. It's located curiously away from the island's main population centers and nightlife, as if the Thai police would rather not know how the tourist baht is pumped into their country's economy. Next door a general store was open, and a grabbed a strawberry Italian Ice, and I arrived at Mr. J's just in time to throw the wrapped in his wastepaper basket.

I didn't want to be weighed down on my journey, and Mr. J's cheeky calls for money weren't persuasive - "On vacation, spend money no problem! - so I left.

My original aim was to reach to ferry port of Mae Ham and enquire about chartering a longtail boat for an hour, but I followed a concrete road toward the island's interior. Here, as elsewhere on the island, the businesses are a mixture of Thai and European, the foreign ownership always proudly noted in the sign out front. "Livres francais," a creperie boasted; another restaurant claimed to serve Fish n' Chips and "Danish Specialities." Two days ago I had my second terrible oyako donburi - a simple Japanese dish of chicken, egg, onion and rice - of the trip, so I kept walking. Most countries don't export their finest chefs to small Thai islands.

After about a mile I toured onto a small dirt track that promised to reach a beach in 1.5 kilometers. It started flat but soon I was panting and gasping up a steep headwall that separated the main basin of the island from the shore. This road appeared at one time to have been paved but now that had been replaced by coarse sand with deep ruts. After I reached the top and started to descend I ran into a middle-aged American wearing a "Vermont Isn't Flat" T-shirt. He was on a bike ride, and appeared to have reached to the point in the ascent of the hill where one wonders why they are spending their well earned vacation from a high-pay, high-stress job in Maryland (something in finance) to push a set of wheels up a third-world road. Presumably his wife is having a better time back at the hotel pool, cocktail with umbrella in hand.

At the shore there was no beach, only the Banana Bar. I was the only customer, and to be served I had to stop the caretaker from rolling his joint. He gave me a soda water and retreated behind the bar to his sweet smoke. Banana Bar (this being a Thai island, there are also bungalows) sits in a place that so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter that you can't swim here. The cove is flanked by high rocks, and the surf is constantly smacking into them and throwing white mist in the air. This is the landscape of Maine's coast, but here the water is turquoise and the weather tropical year-round.

Banana Bar serves no food, so I moved further up the coast to Cookie Bungalow. I ordered a squid phat thai and a strawberry shake and started talking to a pair of Frenchwomen. They came to Ko Tao last year on vacation and were back for a second visit. They will travel together through Laos and then back to Bangkok. From there the younger one will return to university in Lyons and the other will travel to Shanghai. She knows a French designer there, who has offered a place to stay and to help her find work.

She wanted to know about China. Is it nice, is it exciting? Yes, but in its own, laid-back way, so is this place.

On The Beach I Observe

2007-08-11T08:24:00.000-05:00

KOH SAMUI, Thailand - On the beach I observe.

Sometimes I watch my copy of "The Vanishing Road," a tale of a Nigerian boy and his encounters with spirits. But more often I see the people on the beach around me.

There are hawkers. Some sell plastic beads and and long hemp necklaces. Ice cream comes from men carrying a heavy Styrofoam cooler and a sign with pictures of the different frozen treats. The prices have been taped over, replaced with a heavy fee for carrying it from the store to the blistering hot beach. Some flavors are not available, on these the price tag is changed to read "NO." To avoid the sun, they wrap a dark blue towel around their head and place a baseball cap on top. They wear long sleeves and cloth pants, exposing only the front of the face.

To my left are the Germans. They are three: wife, husband and son. The son is not always there, he floats in and out with a pair of white iPod headphones, wide American sunglasses and a visor. I hope their vacation is almost over, because the husband's back cannot stand many more days in the sun. Every square flabby inch is crimson, covered in freckles. Throughout the day, the wife and her dyed red hair peel large strips of skin off, exposing a more pink epidermal layer.

To my right are the British. It is a young couple. The closest is the woman, with a black bikini bottom and nothing covering her tanned breasts. She wears sunglasses and rotates 180 degrees every half-hour. Her boyfriend sleeps mostly, sometimes talks about the economic book he apparently is reading (I never see it). Once they take a walk northward down the beach, but they return 15 minutes later looking cross. The boyfriend sleeps again, the girlfriend removes her top.

There are the two we call "The Playboys." One is American, the other might be Italian. They move frequently, from the bar behind our chairs to the massage tent and often go en promenade. Both have tattoos, the American only one: a red-and-blue yin-yang. Both the yin and yang have jagged, lightning bolt contours. The Italian has more than I can see as he walks from the beach to the massage tent. Several are in Chinese of questionable calligraphy.

The Playboys are popular with the local woman. We hear them talk to the three massage ladies. Two nights ago the Italian slept with a fourth, not present massage girl. Last night he slept with the girl with the platinum-blond hair. In the middle of their lovemaking session the girl from the previous night made an unwelcome appearance, and tried to smash a plate over the blond girl's head. The Italian intervened, and it seemed that things at the beach are now O.K.

Soon the woman will have to do without these men.

"I go to Japan for a week. Then I come back," the Italian said.

As time goes on, the beach seems darker, more mysterious than on my first glimpses of the white sand. The corn salesman also sells marijuana out of his barbecue. A long-haired backpacker makes a pass at a woman's purse while she swims in the ocean. An Israeli man is stumbling around after too many cocktails.

Around 5:00 p.m. the resort employees come around to convert my beach chair and the one to my left into a flat table. They place a small centerpiece with a candle and several napkins where arm lies and two pillows at my feet. My day of watching the beach is over.

One Two Connect Four

2007-08-10T08:26:00.001-05:00

KOH SAMUI, Thailand - With the darkness on the white sands of Koh Samui's Chaewang Beach arrive an unusual breed of snake-oil salesmen. They are young children, some still in their neat school uniforms. Beachgoers at Chaewang's sea-side dinner and drink establishments are inevitably approached several times in the course of the meal. The question is always the same.

"You want to play Connect Four? You win I give you 100 baht, you lose you give me 100 baht. Come on buddy, let's go!"

And then a young girl or boy throws a red plastic checker down the middle row as a challenge.

I played twice. The first time it took my opponent, 12-years-old with pigtails, about ten moves to beat me. Someone at my table convinced me to go again - on her time. The only condition was that I went slow and concentrated. I treated the match as I would a game of chess looking at each possible move and the effect it would have in three, four turns. It took me several minutes to drop each checker. I wanted to win.

Three moves in, it was over. I'd been so distracted with hypothetical future turns that I failed to see that I'd left the bottom row open to four tiles.

"I win! I win!" The girl screamed as she cleared the board.

It's an ingenious scheme. Connect Four is a relatively simple game, and there must be a few strategies that mean these they win 95% of the time. The deck is stacked further because the child always goes first, taking the center, and most important square. Most of the competition is not sober. On the off chance they lose, what tourist accepts money from a child in a third-world country?

Not me. Tomorrow I'll probably play again.

The Ladykillers

2007-08-08T06:50:00.001-05:00

KOH SAMUI, Thailand - New Hut is accurately named: it consists of a couple dozen thatched-roof bungalows 50 meters from one of the world's nicest beaches. That it still costs $5 a night to rent these when the Thai baht is rapidly appreciating and budget long distance travels means it's easier than ever for Israeli, Swedish and German backpackers to get these is a minor miracle.

Yesterday I arrived with Zach, my traveling companion, and Katy, a 22-year-old Brit who recently decided to drop out of the University of Nottingham and travel for several months. We met on the ferry, where downstairs the Spike Lee movie "Inside Man" screened in a cabin air-conditioned to meat locker levels and upstairs a couple hundred people craned toward the boat's bow to catch the first glance of the Koh Samui. After a couple hours of conversation (interrupted by visits to check on the movie's bank heist), we decided to look for accommodation together.

New Hut's bungalows look the same from the outside, but this belies a plethora of sleeping options. I saw a twin bungalow, a double bungalow, a bungalow that slept four in different, a bungalow with an attached bathroom and a bungalow with an additional fan. We settled on two: a twin for Zach and I and a double for Katy. This decision had consequences.

This morning I woke up around 10:00 a.m. to an overcast sky and an empty beach. August is the end of Thailand's monsoon season, and so far paradise has been cloudy.

Zach went to the bathroom. He came back with a brown leather object in his hand. "This was sitting outside," he said.

It was my wallet, empty of cash. Thankfully there hadn't been much to take: about $10 in Thai currency, and less than a dollar each in Indian, Chinese, Bhutani and Nepalese currency.

We inventoried the bunglow. I couldn't find my shorts (the location of my wallet) or my iPod. I hung the shorts on a clothing hanger near the bungalow's entrance prior to sleep. Whoever stole the cash must have grabbed the shorts, removed the money and left. But I wondered how they could have stolen my iPod which I fell asleep listening to underneath my mosquito net.

I went to the owner of the guesthouse and told him about my loss. He was Thai with an accent that emphasized nasal sounds in his vowels and therefore a little like Daffy Duck.

"I sorry," he said, and looked around the front of our bungalow. "Maybe three o'clock, four o'clock, after bars close Ladyboys come through. They want smoke, they need money, they take your stuff."

So here's his explanation: In the pitch-black, middle of the night, a bunch of transvestite prostitutes stumble home a couple kilometers from a bar, checking beach front cabins along the way. They find our door slightly ajar, reach into the left side and take a pair of shorts hanging on a nail. They also sneak into the cabin, under the mosquito net and remove my iPod and the long, tangled headphones, all without a flashlight or waking Zach and I. Pretty reasonable.

My instinct tells me that it was an inside job, that someone employed at the bungalow made an early morning run through easily-accessible bungalows, but then again, if I listened to my instinct, I would have realized that cabin of my dreams doesn't come without a price.

The Story Train

2007-08-04T13:09:00.001-05:00

BANGKOK - Two in the morning flights aren't good for my observational abilities, so it took another passenger on the express downtown bus to point out that the Thais were dressing strange this morning. The majority wore bright yellow shirts. Bureaucrats wore bright yellow Oxfords, college students bright yellow T-shirts with fashionable designs and the poor merchants wore bright yellow that looked second-hand.

The shirts invoke the sun and the Thailand's long-lasting minority, and its head, on the throne 61 years this month.

Welcome to Bangkok, Version 2007. The ubiquitous pictures of King Rama VI -- taking pictures, playing tennis -- are much more sinister than they were three years ago. Because although it's against the law to say so, I'm not sure I agree with the king's judgment. A military coup that he supported against the popular President Thaksin has been in charge for over a year now, and there's no real timetable for a return for democracy. So now I have to refer to the Land of Smiles as a popular tourism destination ruled by an autocratic kabal.

I treasure my memories of this city, where I started a lengthy backpacking trip around Asia. It was my first vacation that truly felt like an adventure. When we arrived and checked into a guesthouse with peeling lime green walls and a smell of mothballs I felt that I stepped out of teenage years and into the Leonardo DiCaprio movie "The Beach."

So when I read on the Associated Press newswire one afternoon in Kansas that the Thais ten year experiment with democracy had ended in failure, a cloud descended on those thoughts. I didn't want to believe my tourist dollars were going toward a crumbling government, and going back seemed out of the question.

But the almighty bucks beat my morals. When the travel agent in Kolkata told me it'd been $500 to Sri Lanka, $400 to Singapore or Kuala Lumpar but only $100 to Bangkok, I bought my ticket.

And really, how much does the political system matter on a beach vacation? What I really care about is how the backpacker strip, Kao San Road differs from my first visit. The place where I spent my premiere night in the country is now a pile of ruble; in six months a luxury hotel will replace where I spent a restless evening and my friend Jeremy got a couple dozen nasty bedbug bites.

Kao San Road is still a couple blocks of concrete that serves as the locus of Southeast Asian Travel. Here travelers arrive shell-shocked from London, Stockholm or Perth, drink a couple Beer Changs, down a pad thai on the street, buy a "Same Same But Different T-Shirt" and then buy a bus/boat combo ticket to the Full Moon Party on the southern island of Koh Phan Yang. At the end of their trips they return, tan, thinner and with stories to tell. Tonight I listened to a few.

James, half-Thai, is from Rochester, New York. He's interning for Morgan Stanley here in Bangkok. On weekends he comes to Kao San to meet foreigners, dance to a Filipino cover band at the Shamrock Bar and drink 80 baht Rum and Cokes. He has a Thai passport, but he's traveling on an American one, which necessities trips to the Burmese or Cambodian border every couple weeks. It's not far.

"If I drive 100, it's two and a half hours. There's no laws," he said. "It's Thailand."

Nick is here with James. They went to grade school together in a small upstate New York time, and now they share James' grandmother's apartment. James spent the summer working on a private island south of Phuket. The island had one resort, few customers, so he spent most of his time with the Thai staff, fishing and smoking copious amounts of marijuana.

An Australian with an ugly mullet promised a life-changing experience if we went to Sala, a town on the Chinese-Vietnamese border. He's been around the world "like six times" and this is favorite place.

Victoria, born in Vancouver but now living in Taiwan, told me how much she hates the way people in Beijing talk. Beijing Chinese tends to add an "r" sound to words. Fuyuan becomes fuyur, men ("gate") becomes mer. She thinks Beijing's clubs might be more happening than Taipei's, but she's too afraid of the Beijinger accent to make the trip over.

The political situation may be different than three years ago, but the military dictatorship is too dependent on tourists to stamp out the city's lively trade in interesting stories.

Fresh Encounters

2007-08-03T07:58:00.001-05:00

KOLKATA, India - Fresh and Juicy serves no fruit. It specializes in Indian food for the backpacker: garlic naan, chicken tikka and mango lassis. These are served quickly and cheaply, and for this reason I ate one meal here almost everyday in Kolkata.

With a flight out of India looming, Zach and I sat down for one final Juicy meal. We sat in the corner, under a whirring fan that blew out the warm evening air and dust. We ordered. We waited. Zach started talking in Chinese.

"Do you like monkeys?"

"Yeah. They're O.K."

"I saw a monkey yesterday."

"No you didn't."

"I want to eat a monkey."

"Then eat a monkey."

At this point, the Asian man at the next table turned over and very gently tried to enter the conversation. "Ex-ex-excuse me?" he said. "Are you talking in Chinese?"

My cheeks reddened, because yes, we were attempting to speak Chinese. If I'd known there would be an audience, I would have attempted correct tones. But the man at the next table didn't seem to mind.

Roger, 19, came to our table. He was Taiwanese and here to volunteer with Mother Thersea's charity for three weeks. This was his first time travelling internationally without his parents, and he seemed excited. Tonight he left his three travelling companions to strike out on his own. He started at Fresh and Juicy, we took him with us to a bar.

There Roger had what might have been his first Bacardi Breezer, told his about he is bored in tiny Taiwan and wants to move away after he finishes studying to be a tour guide or hotel manager, and then announced how happy he was to meet us.

"I want to find things on my own," he said. "And I'm glad that I met you."

A New Mission

2007-08-02T06:41:00.001-05:00

KOLKATA, India - When someone taps you on the street in Kolkata, they usually want spare change or some milk for their eminanacted children, not offer a movie role.

Kolkata (Calcutta if you're feeling colonial) deserves reevaluation. Mother Theresa made it famous for her work with the city's poor. Thersea did her most important work right after the partition of India and Pakistan, when hundreds of thousands of Hindus created makeshift slums after fleeing what is now Bangladesh.

There are still poor people in Kolkata, they tug on shirts, shuffle between taxis with an outstretched hands and give heart-breaking speeches about how long it's been since their last meal. But there are also wealthy ones, the people I saw at the bar Somewhere Else dancing to a really good cover of The Cranberries "Zombie."

It's a cosmopolitan place, and when the house band took a break I chatted with members of the Nigerian national volleyball team, in town for a Commonwealth tournament. They had arrived earlier in the afternoon, and went straight from the airport to the stadium and lost to Singapore. Christopher, a lanky 33-year-old who played center and enjoyed spiking, predicted victory in the next day's match against the host team.

Harry Potter's everywhere. Since his final book is printed outside the city, it's available and cheaper than in other countries. A hardcover copy can be found for 550 rupees, about $13. He's also selling-out crowds in Kolkata's air-conditioned shopping centers, where the middle class beat the monsoon humidity. I saw "The Order of the Phoenix" in a rooftop facility with high-security. I was frisked twice before being allowed to enter, forced to spit out my gum (I tounged it) and forced to give up the rest of the pack.

And there's Jack, who mans an ice cream stand in the backpacker ghetto of Chowringee in the evenings, which makes recruiting for his day job of aspiring filmmaker easier. Jack served me an orange Popsicle and a business card my first evening here. He looks around 25, well-built and friendly, someone who probably does well selling food but isn't satisfied spending his youth on a Kolkatan street corner.

He wanted to know if I'd been in town later this week, and would be available for an early morning shoot.

"Just four hours," he said. "I'll pick you up from here and return three or four hours later."

I would portray a British solider, one of six who would be committing some sort of atrocity to a young, presumably defenseless Indian. For my work I'd receive 1,000 rupees ($25) and something for my video resume. I declined the offer, not out of pride for the British Raj, but because I'm camera-shy. Even in a non-speaking, strictly massacring role.

Running the Border

2007-07-29T08:14:00.001-05:00

JIAGON, India - We came up with the plan over dinner, chicken with a creamy cheese sauce with butter roti on the side. The plan required our party of three to divide in two groups: the whites and the non-whites.

Jeremy, a Chinese-Canadian, blends in with the local mix of Bhutanis, Nepalis and Hindus. He could just walk across the border, since local people were allowed to cross freely. As a precaution, he'd wear a plain white shirt, leave the Diesel knockoff shoulder bag in the hotel and stash his camera in his pocket. There'd also be a passport in his pocket, in case something went wrong.

After he made it through, Zack and I would make our attempt. Zack is from California, and just like me, he's rather white. No one would mistake either of us as locals any place south of the Tropic of Cancer. I'd been subconsciously preparing for this crossing the past couple weeks, reading travelogues where people drove overland through Latin America and West Africa. I'd learned much about the bribe and how to use it.

Zack and I would approach the border checkpoint casually. One of the security guards would blow a whistle and direct us to a sitting pair of officials on the left side of the gate.

One security guard would start thumbing through my passport, flipping past the seven Chinese visas and Latvian entry stamp, looking in vain for a Bhutani visa. Finally he would give up and ask: "Excuse me sir, do you have a visa?"

Zack and I would stand there, dumb-founded. "We need a visa? I thought this was a free town, and we could come here for the day. Our guidebook says so."

The security guard would shake his head, apologetically, and inform us the policy had changed.

"But we've come all the way from the United States, and we really want to see Bhutan. Is it possible to just let us in for the day, perhaps if we pay a small fee?"

We look crushed as our Bhutanese dreams begin to crumble, but at the same time I reach for wallet and take out some Indian rupees. I press them into the guard's hand, and Zack does the same, and then we walk through the crimson gate adorned with Buddhist iconography and enter one of the most isolated countries on Earth.

That's how we'd do it.

Our journey to the border began in the Indian town of Silguiri in West Bengal aboard a white and green Bhutan Transportation Services bus. Jeremy and I shared a seat while Zack conversed with a large Bhutani woman, who insisted she had once been engaged to American also named Zack, but had to break it off for some convoluted reason. She said Phuntsholing, Bhutan was a wonderful place, where we could expect to see temples, alligators and crocodiles. For a small fee, we could also feed these large reptiles.

It sounded exciting, especially as we wouldn't be able to venture past Phuntsholing. The tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan is barely discrenible on a middle-school size globe: it can easily be seen as a smudge on the east side of Nepal. But despite its small size, the terrority has erected some of the largest barriers to tourism in the world. All tourists - except those from the country's patron state, India - are required to book a tour and spend at least $200 a day in the low season, $250 a day in the high season. There's a limit to the number of visas and those with the cash aren't guaranteed entry.

But the current edition of the Lonely Planet describes a wrinkle in that policy. Five years ago, the Bhutanese decided to open the border town of Phuntsholing to day trippers, who could come without a visa or spending outrageous amounts of cash. A Google search produced photos and travelogues confirming that some amount of smelly backpackers had crossed the border. We added the town to our interinary, desperate for the unusual passport stamp and bragging rights to be the first among friends to visit.

The Bhutanese bus made no stops in the tiny towns of West Bengal, not even a bathroom break. I gulped a Mountain Dew shortly after getting on, so by the time the tea estates ended and the small textile shops of Jiagon, I'd christened the route the Bladder Busting Express. When we arrived I sprinted to the nearest toilet, which turned out to be in a hotel/restaurant. We took a room, and with the guidebook claiming the border would be open until 10 p.m., headed for dinner in Bhutan.

Jiagon is a couple long streets which slope downhill toward the border. At the bottom is a sign, "Welcome to the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan." Turn right at the sign, go under the gate and you're in.

"Sir, can I see your passport please?" It was a border guard.

They were not expected; Lonely Planet promised free entry into the town of crocodiles. Instead aman in a teal uniform told us that the policy had changed, pointed to a sign that said visas were required for all foreign nationals, and sent us up the hill, back into India.

The Ashoka Hotel Restaurant's selection of Bhutani dishes seemed a small consolation for what lay on the other side of that Buddhist gate, but the chicken was quite tasty. Zack, Jeremy and I drew up our plan, and later in the evening, as we watched Bollywood music videos on our 13-inch television set, I separated my money into 400 rupee denominations, to make for easier bribing.

I woke up a little before 11 the next morning, to the sound of torrential rain. Outside Jiagon was under several inches of water. The monsoon raged now, throwing buckets of water down each second. I went down to the restaurant, where I found Zack and the day's Kolkata Telegraph. Roads were out throughout the northeast of India, landslides had washed away the rail track to Darjeeling and another foot of rain was expected in the next 36 hours.

Jeremy arrived at the same time as my masala omelet soaked to the bone. He put down a small plastic bag on the table. Inside were three postcards. He'd gotten up early, snuck across the border. He showed us pictures of the other side: men wearing capri pants, signs warning about the high rate of malarial infection, Buddhist temples with broad roofs and gold spheres on top. For breakfast in Bhutan they have pork, which we hadn't tasted in three weeks.

But he had bad news. Security in Phuntsholing was tight, there had been police at most intersections in town. Even if we could make it past the border, we'd have no paperwork to pass these check points. Besides, the rain continued to fall so fast that my passport might disintegrate before the border guard made it past the fourth visa.

We needed to leave before we were stranded in this No Man's Land. I left with a postcard to send my parents, a stomach full of chicken and cheese, and 10 glorious seconds in Bhutan, standing under the arch, hoping that there would be many more.

The Fast Talker

2007-07-27T02:58:00.001-05:00

KAKARBHITTA, Nepal - "Excuse me,. but do you mind if I take this seat?"

It was 11:30 p.m. on the deluxe bus from Kathmandu to the Indian border. The bus, I'm afraid, had few luxuries. The windows all opened and closed, and so did both doors. Most seats had padding, although a couple arm rests were missing. But the box in the front meant for a television had been locked, and posters of Jennifer Lopez and Avril Lavigne covered the hole. Shocks would have been beyond the pale.

I hadn't expected to keep the empty seat for long. At first, a big Nepali man with a ponytail sat beside me. He took up half my seat and kept falling asleep on my shoulder. Then a skinny Nepali man took over. I had more room, but he also kept falling asleep. This new potential seatmate looked wide awake and not terribly big. "Sit down," I said, and he did.

"Can I ask where you are coming from?" he said, but he said it with a Subcontinental accent that did not change pitch or stop between words so I heard, "Caniaskwhereyoucomingfrom." I had him repeat the question, twice.

"NewYork. IhaveasisterlivinginVirginia."

He was 23, working on a degree in arts and planning his escape from his war-torn, poor but very beautiful country. The number one choice was America, where he could earn $10 an hour in a big city. Perhaps he'd go to a smaller city to continue his education with less money. He thinks Colorado and Virginia would be good chocies.

"Canyouunderstandmywords?"

"Yes," I said, not knowing what else to say. "It's pretty good."

From there, he launched into a serious of statements on random topics, many of questionable fact:

"India is at a higher level of development than the China."

Ehhh.

"The universities of Australia are more prestigious than the universities of America."

Not really.

"New York is the second biggest city in the world."

That one hasn't been true for 30 years.

"Right now studying Nepalese language and culture is very popular in America."

Perhaps. I haven't met anybody engaged in any serious research, but I suppose there are academic professionals who are. This man claimed two weeks ago to have met an American who spoke fluent Nepali, which I imagine led to this not quite true extrapolation.

"America is a strong ally of the Nepal."

I'd had enough. This statement had to be challenged. I brought up the American ambassador, who in his farewell speech last month attacked both the Maoists and the king, the two major sources of political power in the country. The Bush Administration, whatever its faults, correctly condemned both the Maoist violence and heavy-handed response by the king. I think the general attitude in America about Nepal is a cautious hope that the country doesn't take a wrong turn that destabilizes the region.

The student nodded, and accepted my concerns. But he added that he still supports the Maoists, "because they will help the poor."

"But Communism hasn't worked in any other country, what makes you think it will work in Nepal?" I said.

"China is a Communist country. They have good economic development."

Sigh. If it weren't past midnight, I might launch into why China's not really a Communist country any more, and why the country's economic successes are not because of its command elements. But that would take hours, and I wanted some alone time. I doubted I could sleep on these rough roads, but for now, I'd had enough conversation. I was ready for a sleeping shoulder.

The Power is On

2007-07-26T04:56:00.001-05:00

KATHMANDU - When blogging for pleasure, there are few deadlines. But typing yesterday's entry about the trip near the Tibet border for some bungee there was a deadline. When I returned from the border, after three and a half bumpy hours on the road, I found the entire backpacker ghetto dark. The power was out.

In our hotel, the man who works 12 hour days was still at his post. At the desk he had a candle, half-burned. The power apparently had been out for some time. I asked him when he expected regular light.

"I do not know," he said. "Maybe eight."

I squinted and saw the clock above his left shoulder: 6:30.

Our room had no light, not even enough to poke around for the cheap Chinese flashlight I had in the bowels of my bag. My iPod had no charge. We had nothing to do: I went to find an Internet cafe.

Thankfully the Nepalese power grid is sporatic enough that several places have generators. I found one down the street from Cosmic Hotel, and started playing around on Facebook, reading the New York Times and slowly typing a blog entry. With 90 minutes to kill, I didn't do too much typing. Then I heard an annoying screeching sound, like the sound a microwave makes when done cooking, only this was a constant note. After 30 seconds, it went away, and I went back to typing.

A little while later it started again, only this time it didn't stop.

"Sir," the manager of the Internet cafe said, "little power. Only five more minutes." The generator was about to go out, shutting down the computer and deleting my prose. I typed franctically, adding several paragraphs in just a couple hundred seconds. I felt the surge that I did at a newspaper, with a half a front page story to finish and an editor stoppping over every few minutes to see if it was complete.

I finished the piece (although it probably would have benefitted from an edit or two), and the power soon came back on. Now, the next day, I have another deadline: a bus to catch back to India. And with 30 seconds to spare, I can say that this is another deadline that I hit.

On the Way to the Land of Snows

2007-07-25T09:13:00.001-05:00

BARABISE, Nepal — Driving north from Kathmandu, the road to Tibet is a series of sharp turns around blind corners, ascents of steep hills with subtropical vegetation and breathtaking views of quaint Nepali villages. Four hours north of the capital the paved road abruptly stops, disintegrating into a mess of pebbles, stones and small rocks. About 100 meters into this section there is a yellow sign on the left sign of the road. "Welcome," it says, "to the Last Resort."

The Last Resort is the playground of the Westerner on vacation. Here, 8,000 feet above sea level, is excellent river rafting on deep, fast streams, luxury tents with thick mattresses and oil lanterns, a full bar with a selection of several dozen cocktails and a restaurant that makes a mean macaroni and cheese. I came for the bungee jump, the second highest in the world. My travel companion Jeremy paid $90 in Kathmandu to walk off a 500 foot high bridge and plunge very close to a raging river. He did this willingly, placing his life in the hands of a Swiss-made rope.

I came just to watch. The bungee bridge connects the road to the resort, and also provides access to the couple dozen villagers who live on the other side of the deep canyon. Between jumps the villagers carry heavy baskets of hay or herd goats across the bent beams of steel. Then another Swede spends four seconds in free fall.

Calling it The Last Resort is accurate, because it is one of the last businesses before the Chinese border. After The Last Resort the road rises even further, and by the border it's left the subtropical Nepalese climate and entered the frigid Himalaya.

The resort is popular with tour group coming and going to Tibet, as its huge bridge makes for the most entertaining pit stop in a fairly monotonous seven hour drive from the border to Kathmandu. This is how I met a party of seven Chinese men who stopped at the Last Resort for lunch.

I heard their Mandarin as they worked their way past me on the road side of the bridge. I was there waiting for Jeremy to bungee. After he went I crossed the bridge and found the party at the resort's outdoor restaurant, playing cards and sipping herbal beverages they brought from the Motherland. I introduced myself, in Chinese, and they invited me to sit down.

They were from Guangzhou, the huge city of trade near Hong Kong. They worked in different companies, but were on a trip to Nepal that mixed business and pleasure. There were a couple business meetings, dinner with contacts, but mostly the trip had been about seeing Nepalis dance and good food in Kathmandu.

I tried to figure out the card game they were playing, which involved dealing 24 cards and then throwing them down in an aggressive manner (the harder the better). Twos seemed to be good, but not as good as threes, although sometimes a player would save the threes only to lose the game. They bet with Chinese money, and a couple hundred renminbi changed hands each round - a fair chunk of change for the Chinese.

"He doesn't get it," one man said to another, gesturing over to me. I didn't, so one man took me aside for some additional conversation. He showed me pictures of his wife and son, who recently performed in a talented competition in Macau. He played the drums, and in the pictures the boy of seven or eight looked thrilled on the set of the television program.

Later today the men would travel to the border town of Zhangmu, where they would reenter China. There they planned to visit a couple friends from Guangzhou who now worked in the Tibetan government. They were Chinese, and the man said they were helping to develop an undeveloped region.

"Wen Jiabo and the Chinese government care about Tibet. They have given aid to build schools, hospitals and roads there. I'm proud of my government."

This was close enough to the border that Chinese politics found their into innocent conversation. A couple hours later I got back in the bus, heading south, away from China.

Red Dances

2007-07-24T10:31:00.001-05:00

KATHMANDU - Nepalis are not a tall people, but it appears that the dancing performances in downtown Kathmandu attract the giants. I fought for positions with several of these, trying to get a clear view of the stage a few meters away. The pre-recorded music was inoffensive, a keyboard melody and soft drumming, and so was the dancing. Eight people swayed back and forth, never breaking a sweat or looking at the audience for several minutes.

Hundreds of people, all but a few Nepalis, gathered to watch the traditional dancing of the country. It could have been anywhere in Asia, save for one crucial detail. These dancers wore military fatigues and bright red sash, proclaiming their loyalty to Maoist Party of Nepal.

I don't write enough about Communists here considering this blog is called Mostly Red. The problem is that in Red China, Communism is so infrequently a topic of conversation. But in Nepal it's definitely on the agenda.

Five years ago, the heir to Nepal's throne got drunk and killed most of the royal family. The throne passed to a cousin, a moody man who ratcheted up the long-simmering insurgency in Nepal's rural region through a series of violent crackdowns. The insurgents are Maoists, who apparently are fighting to form a government based on the political ideas of a man who killed 50 or 60 million of his own people. It's a little strange.

The king suspended Nepal's Parliament in early 2005, declared a State of Emergency and started killing ev en more Maoists. The Maoists responded by blowing up bombs around the Kathmandu Valley, which was supposed to be a safe zone. In response I, along with thousands of other tourists decided not to visit. For a country heavily dependent on tourist revenue this was a serious problem. The Maoists teamed with other political parties in a general strike, which convinced the king to restore parliament's power last year. A provisional government now is in power, and elections are scheduled for a few months.

(That's where I'll have to leave it for today, as I'm typing on a co mputer wi th a run away s pace bar. The perils of filing from the fi eld.)

Harry Potter and the Nepalese Holiday

2007-07-22T08:50:00.001-05:00

KATHMANDU - An middle-aged, mostly bald Indian man in a black and white striped Polo shirt approached the small cashier's desk at Annapurna Books Sunday afternoon with a question.

"You have the new Harry Potter?"

His daughter, who looked about eight, eagerly awaited the answer to the question.

"No," the owner said without looking up. "Maybe tomorrow."

Annapurna Books is the typical Kathmandu book shop, one long room of half-new, half-used titles on traveling, climbing Himalayan Peaks, classic fiction, and the complete works of Dan Brown, author of the Da Vinci Code. It's a place where backpackers deposit what they've devoured during two weeks of trekking, and stock up before 18 hour bus rides through the Tibetan Plateau. The books are cheap and the selection quirky. It's a nice place, something that any American city would have had 20 years ago, before the rise of the mega chain stores.

But the owner and his some of colleagues around Kathmandu appear to be some of the last people on Earth not affected by Harry Potter fever.

Harry Potter went on sale around the world (except in America) at 12:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time at Saturday, July 21. Here on Nepal's strange time zone, that meant 9:15 a.m. After sleeping in and have a leisurely lunch of buffalo burger and Mountain Dew, I set off in search of the title.

The first place I went was a tiny affair, and had a large German section.

"Got Harry Potter?" I asked.

"Over there." The owner pointed to the used book section.

"No, the new one."

"What?"

He obviously didn't get it.

Twelve million copies will be sold in the next few days and this man doesn't know about the biggest event in the history of the publishing industry. Where am I?

Barnes & Noble Books -- no relation to the American book chain, a function of Nepal's poor copyright laws -- was a little more friendly. It might be in tomorrow, they said, perhaps the day after that. Today was a holiday, so the publisher couldn't send the books.

In the interest of learning more about Nepalese culture, I asked what holiday.

"Weekly holiday," the bookseller said. Saturday? They couldn't get Harry Potter because it's Saturday? The man who squeezes juice on the street works on Saturday. The traffic police work on Saturday. A couple people in the publishing industry couldn't put in a couple hours of overtime to get a book to a half-dozen stores?

United Books might have the least imaginative title of Kathmandu bookstores, but they are the most organized. They arranged for several dozen books to be flown in from India, and started selling at 9:15 a.m.

"We've sold quite a few," the German owner told me, even though he's selling the book for 1,600 rupees, what an average Nepali makes in three weeks.

During our conversation, the Indian family wandering in. They'd seen a copy in the display window, and the young daughter clutched the book in her arms. She looked quite happy.

Stop If You Must

2007-07-21T04:09:00.001-05:00

SONAULI, Nepal - This is the easiest border I've ever crossed.

The border between Canada and the United States is more guarded. There most people are in cars, and the queues can be two hours long. The last time I went across, during my trip from Kansas back to New York (blogged here, although those entries are currently hidden. Someday I'll get around to editing them.), a suspicious American customs officer poked around my trunk for five minutes, looking at worn socks and empty Cool Ranch Dorito bags that made it hard to close.

He waved me through, but shot a disapproving looked that suggested he'd phone my mother to express his disgust with my dirty automobile. Thankfully he didn't have the number.

Here the bus deposits its cargo a couple hundred meters from the Indian gate. The border town is a one-street affair, a wide unpaved avenue with puddles of stagnant water leftover from yesterday's monsoon dumping.

The end of India is a large cream colored arch with a seated Buddha near the keystone. Just in front of it, on the side of the road is a small, hand-painted sign requesting foreigners to come into a small enclave and have their passports stamped.

Yes, it is requested. There is no barbed wire, drug sniffing dogs, bomb detectors or snipers on rooftops, only a man offering some suggestions about the border. Don't bring 500 rupee notes into Nepal, they're illegal there, and you'll want to have a passport photo, you need one for the visa on the other side of the arrival. He quickly makes a copy of my creepy grin in my passport picture for five rupees.

Stamp, stamp, stamp and I'm finished at the Indian side. I walk under the arch, leave India, cross a ten-meter strip of No Man's Land filled with grazing bulls and empty plastic bags, and then cross a much smaller taupe-colored arched, and I'm in Nepal.

The border post here is also off the main line of sight, down a path on the right side of the street. Indians and Nepalis pass without entering, they can travel the border freely if they leave by nightfall. I went to the post, where I was handed a short form and a blue pen.

I completed the form, handed the man $30 for a three month visa and was legally in Nepal. The man handed my passport to a middle-aged woman with a bindi and a long, black dress. She wrote some numbers down in a logbook and handed me my passport.

"Welcome to Nepal!" she said.

That's the first time someone's ever welcomed me to their country, and to her credit I think she meant it.

But This Bottle of Water's Free

2007-07-17T04:18:00.001-05:00

AGRA, India - With my wallet 750 rupees lighter after visiting India's most famous sight, the Taj Mahal, now seems like a good time to discuss the country's duel pricing system.

At the Taj here's how it works: foreigners (including those of Indian descent, although I'm sure this requirement is not enforced) and Indians are seperated into two separate ticket queues. The foreigners pay 750 rupees (about $18.75) and the Indians 20 rupees (50 cents). Then the two groups merge into a single to pass through a security checkpoint. A stern mustached man in a military unform rifes through bags to make sure no guns, explosives, iPods, headphones, cigarettes, playing cards or bottles of Jack Daniels are brought into this shrine to Muslim monarchies. Then Indian and foreigner are free to mix again freely, to enjoy the same fabulous views of this 400 year old wonder of the world.

To be absolutely clear, foreigners do enjoy a couple extras. For a fortnight of wages for an Indian working at the legal minimum wage, the entrance fee comes with a pair of shoe covers for walking around the base of the Taj and a 500 millileter bottle of water.

Is it fair? I think so. The average Indian makes less than a thousand dollars, while the average person able to travel to India might not make 35 times that at the moment, but certainly there is a high probably that they will in the near future (persuming they are not looking for a career in journalism). How much a person is charged for an attraction should have some relation to how much people pay, especially for a one-of-a-kind item like the Taj; this is how traffic fines are computed in some Nordic countries.

Duel pricing isn't unique to India. Plenty of countries, mostly developing ones, allow residents to enter attractions free or with a minimal fee while socking it to visitors. At Angkor Wat in Cambodia, nationals can wander the temples for free while visitors have to cough up $60. Entrance fees at the best game reserves in Africa can run in the hundreds of dollars.

But there's something about the system in India that bothers me, and that something is related to the origin of the second tier. Charges for many, many years remained equal. The system changed just seven years ago, when India was ruled by the Hindu BJP, a political party which pledges to uphold the 'Hindu Idenity' of the country. The government wanted to generate extra revenues that would be used toward keeping these monuments, statues and relics (several hundred tourist sites were allowed to charge duel admission under the bills). The law implies that foreigners are basically responible for subsidizing Indian culture upkeep. I don't agree with this, there are many rich Indians who are allowed to visit these sights nearly free of charge.

I find myself more in line with Chinese admission policy. There admission to historic sights is a flat rate, athough concessions for senior citizens, students and army veterans are in place. Attraction charges have risen steeply in the last decade - far too steeply, actually - but people are charged the same. This profiteering by local governments effects affulent Chinese along with foreign tourists. I believe things will soon reach a tipping point and admission fees will begin to fall, and when they do, they will fall for everyone.

While I respect the Indian government's right to charge through the nose to foreign guests, I'd rather the current government, led by Congress Party, reconsider.

Famous Books

2007-07-16T06:11:00.001-05:00

DELHI - After half a year in media-starved China, coming to India is a chance to reimmerse myself in literary culture.

Every place I've been there's been wonderful book stores. As an example, in Dharmsala I picked up collection of Russian short stories written by a young woman during perestroika. It cost 90 rupees, which is a little over $2. The bookkeeper slipped a bookmark in between the text with a long poem about a free Tibet printed in raised olive ink. He called it a "bit of propaganda" to go with my purchase.

Delhi is the center of it all, with hundreds of tiny shops on the streets peddling modern and classic Indian authors and contemporary work from overseas. Unlike most non-English speaking countries, where the books are imported and prices even higher than in the States, the books are printed locally and priced around 50% of what Barnes & Noble charges.

I've taken advantage of the bounty at hand, stopping each store, even if it means groans and rolled-eyes from my two companions. They're all pretty good, but one place deserves a special mention, Jackson's Books.

Jackson's is located on the main backpacker strip, Pahanganj, in a two story structure that resembles a garage, which probably what the building served as many, many years ago. On both floors are piles and piles of books, with new and popular titles kept in a plastic coating, and used books stacked on the floor.

Customers are given free range of the collection. On my first visit, I was allowed to climb the shaky aluminum ladder and access books on the second floor, many covered in dust and some decades old. I found old accounts of journeys in Nepal, encyclopedias, photo books and novels from obscure Latin American authors. Given enough money, I could have bought out have the store.

I grabbed a travel book about a Vietnamese-American travelling by Pacific Rim by bicycle, and headed downstairs to pay. On the way out, I saw a copy of Paul Theroux's "Milroy the Magician," an old and out-of-print title from one of my favorite authors.

I asked the man in charge the price, but instead I got a biography. The man, now 53, had been in book business for 35 years with his brother, who stood a few feet away talking to another customer. He loved books, he knew the Theroux title and also that it was out of print; he used that information to charge $7 for the book, about $3 more than if it had been a regular title.

He showed me a white binder of clippings from travel guides and newspapers. The Times of India quoted him in a feature on comic books. The Rough Guide says his shop is a great place to browse for rare titles. He claims to be in the Lonely Planet, but I have the most current edition and did not see a mention.

"This book store is not famous in India," he said, "but it is very famous outside of India."

I can see why: The selection is excellent, the owners informed, the location is extremely central, and I left very satisfied.

March, Scream, Clap But Don't Cross the Border

2007-07-14T11:37:00.001-05:00

THE INDIAN/PAKSTANI BORDER -- One day after the army stormed a mosque in the capital city, killing several dozen militants, and mass riots and retaliation expected meant the entire country stood on high alert, is probably not the best time to be here.

But from the wooden benches at the customs post, Pakistan didn't resemble a cesspool of Islamic extremism, it looked pretty much the same as India: flat rice paddy fields and the occasional palm tree.

I came here to watch a strange ritual in the complicated relations between these two countries. Every evening around sunset, the enemies perform at the only international border crossing open to residents from all countries (Indians and Pakistanis can cross elsewhere). Thousands of people come by bicycle, motorbike, auto-ricksaw, van and limousine the 25 miles from the Sikh city of Armistar to watch.

At 5:00 p.m. the border post gates opened, and the assembled crowd rushed down -- the most determined sprinted -- the several hundred yards to the stadium. There they met another line. The stadium opened the same way, without prior warning, sending a wave of people toward the narrow entrance passageway. The crush of people was intense, I felt as if I was a platlet, being squeezed along an artery.

Large bleachers have been set up each side of the border, the Indian part with concrete painted tan, and the Pakistani side with a much simpler, white facade. On both sides women and men were separated, this was especially apparent on the Pakistan part, black is in style for men, yellow and red for women.

As foreigners, we were directed to the VIP section, filled mostly with backpackers. Why, 60 years after colonialism, unemployed college students qualify as important people, I'm not sure.

To pass time, a man with access to the stadium's microphone led chants.

"HIN-DU-STAN!"

The crowd roared back in reply. "HIN-DU-STAN!"

Men in brown pants and dull short-sleeve button down and women with colorful saris ran in pairs from the entrance of the stadium to the border gate, each person holding an Indian flag. Not all went as planned. One young woman, who wore blue jeans instead of a sari, tripped several yards in, and landed hard on her head. A few grandmothers on the sidelined rushed over to take care, and the laps continued. A much older woman got her flag so tangled as her strolled in the border that a solider had to come and untangle it.

The Pakistan border stayed quiet, except for a sound system that blasted very chirpy techno music in Urdu.

The ceremony proper started without warning, as a half-dozen Indian soldiers with formal uniforms and a hat that resembled a Chinese fan marched with incredibly high forward kicking motions toward the border. Pakistani soldiers, dressed, unsurprisingly in black, rushed at the same frantic speed. The wrought-iron gates swung open, the two commanders shook hands, and the crowd cheered.

It's strange, this place. Each crowd is whipped into a nationalistic frenzy, trying to scare the other side with chants and screaming. But yet this is ultimately a ceremony about coming together, that while this border may never disappear, perhaps someday there won't be a need for so many guards. Or maybe just ceremonial ones.

Silly Luxuries

2007-07-13T03:37:00.001-05:00

PATHANKOT, India - Three types of buses serve the main routes in India: local buses, where a seat isn't guaranteed, deluxe buses, which are for tourists, and air conditioned buses, which supposedly exist but I've yet to see one.

There are things considered luxuries in India that even in China would be considered normal. Take for instance, water. I'm used to living in a place with limited hot water, but I'd never heard of a place where the actual water tap could be cut off. At our wonderful guesthouse in Dharmsala, a bright yellow colonial building with a dramatic view down a steep, pine-filled gorge, the water ran only six hours a day. Washing hands at three in the afternoon required bottled water.

Already I've seen dozens of Indians ravaged by diseases that China and many other developing countries eradicated years ago. The number of lepers on the streets of Dharmsala is amazing for a small town in the mountains. Here in this transit city we've seen so many people without legs, arms or with body parts blown up with elephantitis.

I arrived in this transit town on a local bus, the first one we've taken this trip. It was a warhorse -- the company name hand painted in white on the outside and a boxy frame with spherical headlights that would have been in style just after independence. But it ran fine, and after a series of stops at small towns outside of Dharmsala it was packed fill of locals with a few foreigners mixed in.

Another one of those "luxuries" one does without on the Indian transport system is a toilet (although given how many rural bathrooms smell in this part of the country, that's probably a blessing), and bathroom are determined by what roadside stall the driver wants to frequent. We were over two hours into a descent out of the Himalayan foothills before the bus released its air brakes and the hordes descended on the loo.

I went first for a samosa, asking the shopkeeper where I could find a bathroom. He shook his head.

"No," he said. "Go over there."

He pointed down the road to a broad, damp field on the bank of a small stream. I think the man wanted me to use this field as a bathroom, but it seemed wide-open to passing by local residents. I spied on the far side of the field a small concrete structure that resembled a latrine. On close inspection it did turn out to be a bathroom, with two large toilets labeled "ladies" on one side and two small stalls for "gents" on the other.

I went inside, and started to release two liters of water and an orange soda when I heard a huge DUNK! on the door. I would have wet my pants if that wasn't already in progress. Something hit the tin door of the latrine. I continued to go until 15 seconds later I heard the same sound again.

DUNK!

Right after this second impact I heard the unmistakeable sound of children giggling in the same direction of the projectile. I was being stoned by school children.

I left the latrine; I had no choice. The bus would leave any minute, and this primitive toilet had no emergency exit. I assumed a confindent gait and marched back toward the main street. It seemed to work, as I came out I saw three children in blue and white school uniforms sprinting away from the latrine.

School pranks are a luxury even Indians can't do without.

Unexpected Guests

2007-07-11T07:32:00.001-05:00

DHARMASALA, India - At dinner this evening, a man with a knotted, leathery face came into the Indian-Chinese fusion joint and started talking with another gentleman, eating alone in the back of the restaurant. I couldn't see their exchange but after a couple minutes I heard the sitting man saying in American-accented English, "No, no thank you. I'm not interested."

And then the old man headed for the door. He got stuck between our table and the one directly across from it, his several canvas bags wedging themselves on one side of the table while his body went to the other. Facial hair sprouted out of every corner of his visage, with bushy eyebrows and a beard half a foot long.

After he left, I turned to the man at a table, who an although much more conservative demeanor, and asked what the conversation concerned.

"He wanted to sell me some watches," he said. "But as you can see, I already have one." He rotated his left arm to show a gold-plated wristwatch.

Dharmsala is a hodge-podge. There are of course the Tibetans, many of them in full monk regalia. A sobering documentary I saw in a tiny screening room off the town's main drag made this clear. It showed the 33 day walk a group of six refugees made to escape (some rather horrific) repression in China. The Tibetans also man the shops, especially ones hawking "Free Tibet" shirts and incense sticks.

There is an Indian presence here as well. Most work as the town's backbone, running food shops and driving auto-ricksaws along the narrow streets.

This is a major pilgrimage site for Buddhists and believers in alternative religions, so there are plenty of Western people wearing robes, bindis, and Buddhist iconography. They come to see the Dalai Lama, take courses or just meditate in the pine-scented air. There are many backpackers, too, people on summer vacation or wandering around Asia. They can be hard to separate from the devotees, as they also have acquired plenty of mystic articles of clothing during their Indian stay.

The young, the old, the poor and yuppie, they all have a place in Dharmsala. There is even room for a group I didn't think I would encounter. They gave themselves as with their matching blue visors and parading down the rode to the Dalai Lama's monastery in a long, thin line.

They were East Asian, but I thought surely they must be Japanese or Korean. But then I saw the characters on their matching backpackers, and heard the standard Mandarin coming out of their mouths. They were Chinese, dozens of them.

I found out later they were a group from Taiwan, the same group that is sponsoring this week's teachings. The teachings are a dialogue between a senior Chinese Buddhist and the Dalai Lama, so it makes sense that the (Republican) Chinese are in town. But it still is strange to hear Chinese here.

Hippies with crazy beards and strange watches I expected, but "ni hao" I did not.

Teaching

2007-07-10T07:00:00.001-05:00

DHARMSALA, India - Flanked by half-dozen other monks and wearing his trademark Coke-bottle glasses, there he was. The 14th Dalai Lama, aged 73, just a couple of feet away. Flanking him were a half-dozen senior monks, all dressed in crimson colored robes. He stood almost at arm's reach.

At the sight of their religious and political leader, the crowd of Tibetans and international followers rose to its feet and bowed their heads and clasped their hands together. Even on this, the fourth day of a week long teaching, most people were in awe.

A low chant played over speakers. Some mumbled along as he made his way from the monestary entrance toward the center of the temple. He stopped at one point, grasping a white woman on the sidelines. He said a few words, I couldn't make out what, and then kept going. All around the woman seemed amazed.

The lectures are held here in Dharmsala and celebrate the Dalai Lama's birthday last week. They are free to attend, but participants must register with Tibetan Security Forces in town, present a primitive green paper ID card with a passport photo to enter. I was frisked twice going in to ensure I did not bring a gun, explosive material, cell phone or a camera into the venue.

I came with Casey, a woman my age who is taking a year off from Tufts. We met on the streets of Dharmasala yesterday, when she poked me and asked, "Were in my Chinese class?" The answer was yes. She knocked on my door at 6:30 a.m., and we walked through early morning clouds to the temple. The complex is not the Potala Palace, the massive fort that looms over the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, but it is a big airy building that marries Indian post-colonial styles and Tibetan ascetics.

Casey led me to her spot, in the main chamber 20 meters from the Dalai Lama's stage. Attendees mark places with a pillow or piece of cardboard, and tradition means that these seats are saved for the entire lecture. Casey mentioned a stop nearby that had no been occupied for a couple days. I went to the tiny square of concrete, folded my legs and waited.

Within ten minutes my foot fell asleep, and when a Chinese man came a half-hour later and said that this was actually his seat, and I was relieved. I went downstairs, where I caught the close glimpse of the Dalai and then leaned against a tree.

His Highness (official title) took his seat and the congregation sang a long, exuberant song. Then they did another chant. Monks, mainly teenagers, gave everyone a piece of fresh oval-shaped Tibetan bread and poured hot cups of tea. Then the teachings began.

The Dalai Lama spoke in Tibetan, answering the questions of a Taiwanese Buddhist in long answers. The Taiwanese spoke in Chinese, and an instant English translation was available on a local AM radio frequency. Having no radio, I just listened the man's deep, throaty voice for an hour and a half.

The lectures go on until around noon, but I'd had enough. I wandered to the back of the temple and prepared to go back to my beautiful cliff-side hotel room. I looked back toward the temple and on a television screen setup for people downstairs I saw him one more time, still teaching.

Peaceful but Steely-Eyed

2007-07-09T05:01:00.001-05:00

DHARMSALA, India - For every 10 people that visit China this year, just one will make it to the other Asian superpower.

That doesn't mean that there are same combinations of visor wearing tour groups, elderly Germans and wild-eyed church groups from Middle America that wander around China.

India attracts a different type of traveler, the kind relishes the 15-hour journey from Delhi to Dharmsala, the capital of the Tibet Government in Exile. Parts of the route follow the Great Trunk Road, an ancient highway that connected major cities in Northern India and Pakistan. The route is mostly paved now, but the trip still takes plenty of time thanks to prearranged stops and surprise matientance failures.

The first bus stops by a small lake in the outskirts of Delhi. There I start talking to Kara, already in India for five months. She wears baggy olive-colored stiff cotton pants and strings a large money belt on the outside of her button down shirt.

Kara decided against going to college home in Britian six years ago. It took her four years to get to Barcelona, then another two before she left the European continent. But after half a year off the grid, she seemed serene, convinced she'd made the right decision.

"I'm happy now," she said, and listed off adventures in Kashmir, Nepal and in Dharmsala. She was on her way back to Dharmsala to surprise a friend, and kill two weeks while her passport was replaced.

The document went missing on a long bus trip. "I actually should have lost it earlier," she said. "I had one of those bags with no zipper, just a strap thing."

All is not always calm. A Spanish woman yelled at the driver that she'd been promised a single bunk and did not want to be placed with a companion. She calmed down when an attractive and talkative Italian offered to share the bunk. Some other Americans were not pleased when the waiter the dinner rest stop tried to blatantly tack 60 rupees on the bill. But these incidents are soon forgotten. These people have seen it before and certainly will be come across it again during their extended stays here.

The bus didn't leave the roadside collection of outside tables and vendors selling Bollywood CDs, Menthos and chilled pudding until after 10:30 at night. The cabin's interior lights went out and conversation slowly died down. Someone in an upper bunk lit a joint and the sweet smoke drifted down to the passengers in the cheaper seats. Forty foreign visitors drifted toward the hill station of Dharmasala, peacefully.

Sloop Anoop

2007-07-08T04:54:00.001-05:00

DELHI -- The city's overstretched power grid keeps cutting out spoartically this afternoon, so I will keep this entry brief to increase the odds it won't disappear in a crash.

This morning I saw India for the first time in the light and it was everything I expected it to be and so, so much more: women in colorful saris, mostached men hollering for me to by sweet treats, counterfit books and jewelry, and very sad cripples looking for a rupee or two. After a mile on foot, I switched to auto-ricksaw, an enlarged motorcycle that is more and less what's called a tuk-tuk in Thailand. On the road I looked to my side rather than right in front of my face and saw even more. Cream white bulls taller than a man served as obstacles even the most audicious auto-ricksaw driver swerves to avoid. Most seem to spend their days snacking on large piles of roadside refuse, although a few pull wagonfulls of scrap materials from bazar to bazar.

Every new region requires a different parameter, rules that will guide the traveler as he goes from attraction to attraction. I am feeling out India's now, and making plenty of mistakes as I go. After clearing customs in the early-morning hours yesterday, I steered our group of three to the pre-paid taxi meter. There a middle-aged man with a crescent-shaped faced wrote down on the back side of a reicipt that it would cost 545 rupees to town, around $14. Split between three people that seemed reasonable, but the man checking us in the at Anoop Hotel told us we'd paid more than double the price. I'm not sure whether to trust him because as he filled out a lengthy entry in the hotel's registar (as Indian businesses seem to do) he appeared to charge us 50 rupees more than a comparable party of Germans.

This morning I capped things off by giving 80 rupees to that auto-ricksaw driver and then giving another man 45 for the same journey at a government pre-paid stand. The government ricksaw left the meter on for the five kilometer jaunt. The cost: 21 rupees.

And so I will need to have my eyes in front of me on the person trying to rip off and my eyes to side to the wonders wizzing by, as a search for a new way to look at this completly new place.

Special Edition

2007-07-06T07:22:00.001-05:00

BEIJING -- Right now over a dozen people are sitting, standing or squatting in different parts of Beijing's mammoth transportation system, all converging on this location. Well, almost.

Caleb is on the subway ring line from Xizhimen, Zach's in a couple with a couple other people, Jean is walking/skipping from Guomao and I'm not really sure the girls are.

If my life in China was a television program, today would be the season finale. With classes over, the plan is for things go on hiatus for a couple months. Most people are scheduled to return for the next season, some are the fence and a few have confirmed that they won't be renewing their contracts.

In the calculating style of television Sweeps Week rating events, tonight nearly every important person from the past four month is scheduled to come down here and send out the Spring Semester 2007 with some debauchery.

I have no phone, so I've made sure to get down here early. Here is the Sanlitun area, where we can find nice restaurants, sleek bars and fashionable clubs. There's enough sweets and booze to guarantee I won't have excess RMB to dispense at the airport tomorrow.

Walking here from the Indian Embassy (last-minute visa pickup), I passed many places that featured the past few months: the Mexican restaurant with salty chips, the Swisshotel that hosted the worthless job fair, a beverage stand where I once bought two yellow Gatorades. But there were also unfamiliar places. I realized I'd never taken this route to get from Ritan Park to Sanlitun. I wandered down a hutong in the direction of Sanlitun, only to be turned back by three security guards, jovailly yelling "No!" and pointing me another way around the building. Why couldn't I go in that way? What else didn't I know about this area of Beijing where I spent so much time the last four months? And If this the part of the city I understand, what about the thousands of acres where I've never set foot?

Stay tuned.

Closed, Looted and Demolished

2007-07-04T03:05:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – The tiny restaurants that form the backbone of the lower
middle-class Chinese professional appear timeless. Inside there is
usually only three or four tables, each with a quartet of stools,
perfect for slurping bowls of spicy noodles and woofing down plates of
dumplings before heading home to sleep.

But these places are not immune to the pressures of the pre-economic
boom. Today after a visit to the Kro's Nest – that pizza place with
the great pies and lousy service – my friend Andy and I went to
investigate a rumor from another friend that a favorite haunt at
Tsinghua's West Gate has closed.

Where I used to enjoy spicy Lanzhou noodles and lamb kebab skewers now
stood a pile of concrete slabs, haphazardly thrown around the
half-demolished shell of the building. The roof had been completely
thorn down, but the walls remained as they had the last time I ate
there, two weeks before. A poster on the wall advertised Beijing Beer
on draft for three renminbi. I saw the counter where the cold
beverages were kept. The place looked abandoned in advance of a
steamroller.

I went with Andy to the restaurant next door for answers. I found
someone at an outdoor barbecue, grilling chicken wings for a party of
middle-aged women seated outside.

"Go to the big building," he said. "They've changed."

Whew. Here I thought my friends at the restaurant had been driven off
murderous thugs or corrupt government officials. Perhaps they
relocated to better digs. The fuyuan said the new place was 30 meters
down the road, on the right side. It was a strangely precise figure,
and we set off south for 23 footsteps.

Ten minutes later, we'd found no restaurant so I went back to the
fuyuan for a second set of instructions. This time he dispatched an
underling to accompany us and in under half a minute we were at a
Muslim restaurant with a large green sign called Twelve Tree Card
Restaurant. Perhaps I'm translating that wrong.

He took us to the restaurant's laoban (boss), a friendly man with a
broad smile sitting opposite his establishment's front door, leaning
against a metal pole.

"Two weeks I ate at the restaurant over there," I said. "Now it's
already demolished. We often ate there. What happened?"

"They demolished it. It wasn't clean. The sanitation was bad. They had
to close it." He didn't seem concerned. "You should eat here. We have
spicy Lanzhou noodles."

I wasn't interested. There was something about that old spicy noodle
and kebab joint that made it ours. The way I found out one day while
exploring the west side of campus toward the beginning of the
semester. I came back most weeks, usually on Friday nights right
after class. We would drink beer, eat fresh roasted meat and complain
about Brown or some grammatical point the Chinese had put in their
language only to infuriate foreigners. We planned nights out downtown,
ones that would end many hours later, miles away. The sudden
destruction of the restaurant reminds me that those nights now are
gone too.

A Literary Journey

2007-07-02T12:46:00.001-05:00

To make up in part for the interruption of posts, I'm going to send
over a couple pieces that I wrote or partially-wrote in the last
couple months and for some reason didn't get put online. It certainly
wasn't quality control, because there's none of that here. This post
is from the very beginning of the semester, right after I finished my
Trans-Siberian jaunt. It's a reading list from the trip, with small
blurbs about each piece. After finishing it, it seemed a bit
superfluous, but considering this a Web site that frequently discusses
chicken wings, I don't think it's too out of place.

BEIJING - With classes starting, it's time to stop pretending that I'm
still travelling and on vacation and start spending some serious time
with those Chinese textbooks. As a way of tying up the trip, I wanted
to run down the books I've been reading in the last few weeks, when
I've been freed from the turgid pages of the "New Classical Chinese
Reader," and had dozen of hours to kill on trains, bus and disco-vans.

1. "A House for Mr. Biswas," by V.S. Niapaul

Acquired: Albany Barnes & Noble

Current Location: Sweet Arbat Hostel, Moscow

When I offered to trade this for someone else's book in Moscow, I
described it as the story of an unsuccessful man, controlled by a
dominering family, as he fails to make a life for himself over four
decades. Those may be the basic plot outlines, but it misses the
spirit of the novel, which is witty, quick and sometimes
laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't convince the person to take the book,
but hopefully some other travel with find it next to the computer.

2. "The Emperor," Ryszard Kapuscinski

Acquired: Local Bookstore, Warsaw

Current Location: Gave to Caleb in Ulaanbaatar, presumably in Hohhot, China.

Kapuscinski died a couple days before I arrived in Warsaw. Touring the
city with a friend, Dorota, I saw obituarities and tributes posted
outside Warsaw University's Journalism Department. Dorota recommended
this title, about the fall of the last Ethopian emporer.

3. "The Innocence of Loss," by Kirian Desai

Acquired: From my sister, although I gave to her for Christmas. I
bought it Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Current Location:

I heard about this book on a NPR round-up of Booker Mann Prize
Finalists. "The Inheritance of Loss" won the award, and I grabbed in
an excellent New York bookstore. My sister read it quickly, and the
book was free for me to take on the trip.

4. "I Didn't Do It for You,"

Acquired: Barnes and Nobes in Albany.

Current Location: Leo Hostel, Beijing

I got this one because of the subtitle: "How the World Betrayed a
Small African Nation." This account of Eritera from colonialism to
independence suffered from hackeneyed writing and the author's hatred
for Ethiopia. The author finds much to admire in Eritera's rebels, but
fails to mesh that wtih a hatred to current, authoritarian regime.
Probably the lest favorite of the books I read on the trip.

5. "Collected Short Stories, Vol. 3" J. Somerset Magnum

Acquired: From Caleb in Ulaanbaatar.

Current Location: Leo Hostel, Beijing.

Caleb gave this to me as we headed out on our tour of the Mongolian
countryside. I read at night in our gers, before turning off the solar
powered electric light. These are stories about a spy during World War
I, but what's notable is how little "spying" is actually invovled.
Instead these are about characters met and lives described, in full,
well constructed prose. I'd like to read Volume 2 if I can find it,
which features stories set in Malaysia.

6. "The Old Man & The Sea," Ernest Hemmingway

Acquired: English bookshop, Ulaanbaatar.

Current Location: On my shelf. The novella is paired with "The Green
Hills of Africa," which I plan to read later.

Somehow I found the struggle of the Santiago and the massive fish
relavent to the peasants I saw out the sleeper bus window on the way
from the Chinese border to Beijing. Both seemed

7. "Kim," by Rudyard Kipling

Acquired: Borders in Albany.

Current Location: On my shelf. I'm planning to bring it to Leo Hostel
and exchange it for another book soon.

Paul Theroux mentions this book quite a bit in his writing, and
Borders sells a cheap classic edition with helpful footnotes. This is
a wonderful book about a boy drawn to a monastic life and that of a
spy. That the spy ultimately wins out isn't presented as a triumph,
but the result of tough realpolitik decisions.

8. "A Dark-Adapted Eye," by Barbara Vine

Acquired: Leo Hostel in Beijing

Current Location: My desk. I'm reading this when I get bored with
Chinese dialogues.

Leo Hostel had a book swap, the first swap I've seen since New York. I
thought I'd score several sweet books, but this was the only one of
remote interest. The book said it was free with "Country Living"
magazine, and if so, I'd like a subscription. A crime book where the
mystery isn't mentioned until the last 10 pages, and the killer is
known from the first page. Vine reinvents the genre by breaking the
traditional whodunnit rules and focusing exclusively on the
characters.

If Old Things Don't Go Away, New Things Won't Come

2007-07-02T12:41:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – This space has been quiet for a while. It started without
any warning, any sign that I'd be silent for a few weeks. But after a
couple of days of not posting, I decided not to restart without
reason.

Walking down a main pedestrian lane on the Tsinghua Campus near sunset
I heard words echo through my head. "The humid, still air slowly wrapped around me like a sleath boa
constrictor." These weren't just the thoughts of a famished, parched
mind. This was someone who needed to start writing again.

So here I am. The past four weeks there have been dozens of vignettes,
sad and poignant, funny and amusing, that I'll probably never share
here. Everyone experiences these each day. Now I again want to record
some of these – the most notable, the things that stick out late at
night when I return to my laptop – on this space.

But first a few notes on more general topics, overdue housekeeping if you will:

1. Class at Tsinghua is over. Today I took my listening final, and
tomorrow comes speaking and on Wednesday Brown will test my grammar.
Regular undergraduate students have been finished for a couple weeks
now. My roommate successfully defended his biology thesis and is now a
graduate. I'll miss his commencement, which will be in the middle of
the month.

2. I'm missing his graduation because I'll be on the road. I haven't
mentioned my summer vacation plans on this blog, mainly because I'm
afraid they change, and they have, slightly. I've got a plane ticket
for Saturday on a direct Beijing to Delhi flight. It should be two
months before I return to Beijing. I'm not desperate to get out of
Beijing, and the reasons why I most want to leave – the traffic, the
heat, the humidity – won't be solved in India. But India holds a
special attraction to me, something completely different from China.
This is a group I've wanted to take for a long time. Hopefully I'll
come back to this in a future post when I'm there.

3. The Gazelle is gone.

I looked in my shoulder bag after class one Wednesday to see a bottle
of water slowly leaking over the contents. Inside were most of my
valuable possessions: school books, wallet, cell phone, iPod and keys.
I tugged at my shirt and started furiously drying things off in order
of importance: first the iPod, then the phone and finally the books.
Somehow the keys wound up lost. On that key ring were both keys to the
Gazelle. It was immobile.

Then I forgot about it. I never carried it to the Bike Doctor to
remove the lock or got someone to snap it off where it lay. After a
week, I couldn't remember where I left it. I looked around some, but
it was gone.

I've got a plan to capture a new bike, but that my friends, is another post.

Cloned Crow

2007-06-10T11:42:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – An overflowing pint of Tiger Beer in each hand, Crow stopped
for just over five seconds on his way to the patio.

"I'm sorry the service is bad today," he said. "I just had to fire all
my staff."

The perils of opening a business in China are many: the national
government will modify its arcane legal code and make it illegal,
local government or a corrupt official will demand bribes, or people
just won't get what's on offer. Then there's the reason why Crow
didn't have a kitchen staff to manage his popular pizzeria.

Crow gave our table five more seconds on his way back to the kitchen.
"A cook stole all my reicipes," he said, still sounded pissed even
though he must have offered the story several dozen times. "He's
planning to open up his own restaurant near Tsinghua."

Damn. Crow might become a victim of his own sucess. More than a year
ago, Crow opened his little neighborhood pizza joint on a road near
where Beijing and Tsinghua Universities meet. It operates out of a
small hutong, a covered patio and one medium-sized dining hall. Inside
the walls are bright red, with wraught-iron lamps and large screen on
the back wall. Tables have been placed randomly so that the room seats
one-third more than it can comfortably handle. This means walking
strange paths to get from a seat in the back corner to the back room
or the bar, but only enforces the vibe of a neighborhood dive in
Any-College-Town, U.S.A.

The pizza is pretty great, with authentic ingredients that are hard to
find in Beijing, such as pepperoni and black olives. They're also a
fantastic bargain, with a medium pizza that comfortably serves three
costing 50 RMB. Beer starts at a little over a $1 a pint, and there's
also cheap breakfast specials.

Crow's still in his mid-20s, but he's scored a home run on the Beijing
restaurant scene. His restaurant recently was named Best Foreign
Student Hangout by the editors at That's Beijing. The restaurant is
packed nearly every time I go there. That included today's visit, and
the four remaining staff members were running every where to try and
ensure at least a minimum standard of service.

Crow looked frazzled when he came to take our order, and I'm sure
there's a tough couple weeks ahead of him. But I don't think he should
worry about the restaurant's survival. His good food is sure to
outlast any copy.

The Buildings Loom Tall

2007-06-10T11:15:00.001-05:00

TIANJIN, China – How important is a city's architecture?

Based on an afternoon wandering around China's fourth largest, buildings have the ability to transform the way people live.

Tianjin is a city of over 10 million on the Sea River – a delta that leads into the Pacific Ocean. It serves as Beijing's port, its strategic location playing a role in decisive moments in Chinese history. Here a six-nation force began its march toward Beijing in 1901, shooting and killing their way to rescue a few dozen foreigners surrounded by thousands of angry Boxers, eager to drive foreigners
from the Middle Kingdom.

The Boxer Rebellion failed, and western influence continued in Tianjin. The city had a large foreign concession, an area of the town that served as a giant embassy, a place where the laws of China didn't apply. The Japanese, Germans, French and British all lived here.

There were other concessions, in Beijing, Xiamen, and Shanghai, but many of these buildings were destroyed by development in the People's Republic of China. In Tianjin they remain largely intact, thanks to local preservation movements and a city with few other tourist drawcards.

Today the foreign concession is governed by the Chinese, but they here they must bow to West. The streets are still narrow two-lanes with tall trees shading the sidewalks. There are no huge avenues or ring roads that cut through the center of most Chinese cities, a massive concrete strip that can take more than a minute to cross. On a 95-degree day, I prefer the shade.

I visited on a weekend, and the streets were nearly deserted. The types of tenants in these buildings – a mix of banks and foreign-Chinese joint ventures – were so different than the places that occupied them a century ago. Each building had a preservation placard on the outside, which listed the business, former occupation and preservation status. Several times they aligned. An old Japanese bank is now the Bank of China, the British bank the Construction Bank. And people in the concession still keep business hours, not showing up on evenings or the weekend.

The old foreign concession is a just part of Tianjin. Elsewhere, the city sprawls as the rest of China does. On one side of the concession is the Sea River, elsewhere it is bordered by huge roads. But here among the old marble and brick buildings, stately architecture and shady trees have created a quieter, more peaceful alternative.

He Was There

2007-06-07T23:43:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – In a sweltering room on the second floor of Tsinghua's
recently refurbished Communications and Media Studies Department,
nearly 50 future journalists, public relations flacks and censors
watched an hour-and-a-half presentation by one of television's most
recognizable reporters, Peter Arnett.

Arnett is spending the semester teaching at Shantou University, a few
hundred miles southeast of here in Guangdong Province. He never said
why he accepted the position, but the tone of the presentation made it
sound as if he wanted a different, low-key experience after four years
covering the second Gulf War.

His lecture went roughly chronology, taking ground-breaking work
during the early days of the Vietnam War, then onto his experiences in
diplomatic circles in the 1970s, his widely influential coverage of
the Persian Gulf War as a CNN correspondent, and then his role as
mentor and hero of the anti-war movement during the age of Global
Terrorism.

Arnett gave the lecture in English, and seemed only occasionally to
remember that his audience spoke it as a second language (a friend and
I were the only non-Chinese students in the room), delivering
sentences like this one, "I challenged Castro to a boxing match,
because he liked Ali at the time. Thankfully he didn't put up his
dukes. America didn't like Cuba at the time."

He also seemed incredibly hot, dabbing his mostly bald head with a
dripping wet sweat rag every two minutes. But despite looking
uncomfortable, he didn't give these students a cop-out presentation,
lingering over certain stories, pointing out other Pultizer-Prize
winners in old photos from Siagon, laughing while talking about his
firing from NBC in 2003 for giving an interview to the Iraqi press
agency and his subsequent hiring by the Daily Mirror.

The most interesting part of the lecture came when Arnett briefly
discussed China, which he first visited in 1972 right after Nixon's
visit. "Beijing was not a busy city then," he said, but he couldn't
illustrate that point because cameras were not allowed on this trip. A
trip seven years later, soon after the rise of Deng Xiaoping, was much
more relaxed: eight nights of dining in the Great Hall of the People,
a trip to the Great Wall and many, many pictures of a fascinatingly
deserted Beijing.

What does he think of China today? He didn't give much away in the
lecture, perhaps constrained by time or not wanting to wade into
sensitive political waters at China's best university. He did discuss
the issue with the French news agency AFP in a recent interview,
implying that he's been given more freedom than he expected:

"I thought there would be real limitations in what we would be able to
talk about but that is not the case," he said. "In other places I have
been I have encountered a sense of pessimism but I don't get that
sense here. I'm privileged to be giving young people some of my
insights."

This Entry Costs One Dollar

2007-06-05T02:37:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – My first meal at Tsinghua came from the Foreign Students
Eatery, where the dozen or so cafeteria workers are familiar enough
with Chinese nubs and their frantic pointing. I wordlessly selected a
chicken and cucumber dish, a side of rice and a plate of dumplings.
With a soda, the total came to 9.5 RMB, or a little over a dollar. I
took out my one-time 10 RMB dining card and swiped in a counter top
machine. It didn't like the card. Rather than deducting the amount it
started beeping. I tried it three more times to the same effect. The
fuyuan at the cashier knew the meaning of the beep. "Your card doesn't
have enough money," she said, and told me to take another renminbi out
of my wallet.

Weeks later I knew enough Chinese to decipher a sign posted on the
counter near the card reader. "Here we sell 10 RMB dining cards. Each
one is 10 RMB (there is a one renminbi service fee on each card,
making the balance 9 RMB) and can they can be bought here." What I
didn't know when I arrived was that at Tsinghua, everything comes with
a fee.

When I wanted to leave on my Worker's Holiday trip a day early, the
Foreign Students Office said it would be happy to reschedule my
listening midterm – for a 50 RMB fee. The library charges 10 RMB for a
card, then 100 RMB to take out books. The worst offender is Dining
Services, who charge a 20 RMB fee on a reusable dining card, a 10 RMB
fee to recharge it, a 30 RMB deposit and take 10 percent of anything
on the card as a general "service fee."

There are fees to make a photocopy, fees to wash clothes, fees to
organize an activity and fees to register your living location. An
unlucky person – or one disposed to doing things that incur a fee –
might spend more than a month's tuition just on fees while studying
here.

As much as I hate having to dig into my wallet every 10 minutes, these
fees do have a point. High education is China offered à la carte,
which means that every time a student uses a service at the
university, he pays for it. Want to play tennis or use the
university's dilapidated exercise bikes? Fine, but it'll be 3 RMB for
each visit.

American universities, especially private ones, add services as a way
to compensate for ballooning tuition, room and board fees. Parents
send $40,000 to $50,000 to an academic institution each year with the
idea that this is all-inclusive, that this small fortune will cover
their son or daughter's eating, drinking, academic, physical and
mental needs for the next 10 months. Send them the money for four
years, and then show up on a sunny May afternoon to watch your new
graduate march across the stage.

Many students wind up getting a raw deal. Someone who works off-campus
full time, doesn't join university activities and peruses a course of
study with few tangible equipment costs (such as English) winds up
with a poor return on the original investment. Perhaps American
universities should look East for inspiration, and allow students to
choose what they want.

Celvin

2007-06-04T02:02:00.001-05:00

BEIJING — Celvin is 20-year-old college sophomore, an English major with a penchant for cooking. He's just fallen deeply in love, and I can't imagine his desire will ever be requited.

Celvin's been mentioned on this blog, he was Three Thumbs' unnamed apprecentice at last Saturday's barbecue, the one responsible for carrying the huge cartload of supplies around the Tsinghua campus. Now let me mimic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and tell the events of that evening from another angle.

Three Thumbs kept Celvin busy for most of the night, having him prepare wings and pre-spice each roll. Later in the evening, Three Thumbs started chatting with party guests, and left the Celvin in charge of the embers. By 10:00 the party had put away the last of the wings and Celvin was free to join the festivities. Soon he'd found Jessie, a junior from San Diego.

Celvin's English is not good, and Jessie's Chinese is basic, so they had trouble communicating. Some of my more fluent friends served as a meditator and they exchange a few pleasantries about school, their families and the weather.

At this point everyone at the party was full of alcohol and roast chicken, and their conversation was interrupted by requests for pictures. I took a picture with Three Thumbs. Three Thumbs was in a picture with Jessie. I'm in one with Celvin and a tree, and then at some point Jessie and Celvin were in a shot together. After pictures the party guests broke up, the party guests to a bar, Three Thumbs and Celvin to work their grill in front of it.

The next morning Jessie woke up to a text message.

"hello. how you doing?" It was Celvin.

Ten minutes later:

"last night very fun. i really enjoy meeting you."

Celvin sent more messages throughout the day, most referencing when he could get a copy of a picture someone took at the party of Jessie and him. Unfortunately the camera went missing after the party, taking the
picture with it. Celvin didn't take the news well:

"I can pay money," he said in one message. He doubted the camera was really missing. "But I think is this the real reason? I not think so," another message said.

Jessie dropped her phone in toilet Wednesday night, rendering it useless for two days. When it started working again, there were messages waiting.

"i very very very very very very very very very very want to see you."

Celvin had fallen for Jessie, and he wanted a meeting. He suggested dinner, as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, Jessie didn't reciprocate his feelings. She's seeing someone, and isn't about to dump him for a mediocre English student from a small town in Hebei Province. Therein lies her dilemma: She wants to tell Celvin the truth, but in a way that won't drive him to jump from a tall building.

Three Thumbs weighed in one night when Jessie stopped by his grill for a couple late wings and some advice.

"Celvin won't give up," he said to Jessie. "He is in love."

This week Jessie and I are planning to dine with Celvin. I will be there as translator, friend and protector in case Celvin decides he can't contain his love for the duration of the dinner.

I'm not sure if this is the best solution. Celvin wants to go on a date, not dine with a couple foreign acquaintances. Perhaps it would be better to avoid all contact, and figure that Celvin would move onto a new crush in a couple weeks. But this way at least he gets to see Jessie, and there's a chance that their relationship will develop into a healthy, long-lasting friendship, and Jessie's Text Message Box will never be empty again.

My Favorite Animal

2007-06-04T01:55:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – A strange question deserves a strange response.

"What is your favorite kind of animal?" I said to a Beijing taxi driver late one recent evening.

"What?" he said, and shot me a confused look. I repeated myself, stressing the tones to ensure comprehension.

"Well, uh, Chinese people. Chinese people are my favorite animal."

Chinese people? Really? The best animal? I laughed and told him that white people would take offense at being called an animal, no matter the circumstances.

"But we aren't white people," he said. "We have yellow skin."

Point taken.

Juche

2007-06-01T13:25:00.001-05:00

BEIJING – After a scrumptious dinner of dog hot pot Friday afternoon,
I stopped into the campus bowling alley to watch part of the annual
International Students Bowling Competition.

Normally I avoid these Foreign Students Office organized activities,
as they usually consist of awkward conversations, extremely obvious
cultural events (tea ceremonies, Beijing opera videos, trips to the
tourist trap section of the Great Wall, Badaling) and people asking me
questions about the National Basketball League.

None of that happened today. Instead I found out who would be on the
Security Council if hard power was measured by bowling skills.
Indonesia would be a superpower, along with Kazakhstan and South
Korea. The flaky North Koreans would be a significant threat – but
their inconsistency would make unreliable. Americans talk a good game,
and look pretty good while playing, but the result is pretty terrible:
sixth place, behind Vietnam.

The organizers went for maximum comic effect when choosing teams to
share lanes: United States vs. Vietnam, Japan vs. China, Malaysia vs.
Singapore and Kazakhstan vs. North Korea. The last one isn't that
funny, but I choose to watch the match from that side of the room. One
surprise of this semester is the discover that Kazazhstan produces
such beautiful women. If the Tsinghua contingent is an accurate
indicator Astana is crawling with six-foot, fit women with tan faces
and long, dark hair.

I also wanted to get a closer look at the North Koreans. China
sponsors hundreds of students from the Hermit Kingdom to study here,
enabling communication between the two countries who have a
relationship they used to describe as "teeth and mouth." They live in
the foreign student dorms, but no one hears much about them. There are
rumors they are ordered not to speak with white students, and anyone
caught breaking the rule faces immediate deportation and punishment
back home.

The country's contingent was four players, all short men in their late
20s or early 30s. The dullness of their clothes stood out. Each player
wore solid shirt, one a white button-shirt, another a teal T-shirt
tucked into a pair of blue trousers. The clothes didn't look old, just
unfashionable. There were no concession to the maximalist designs in
fashion across East Asia: bright colors, extra buttons, zippers and
clips, shirts with random chunks of English text and fractured
collages. These clothes were utilitarian, a physical manifestation of
the country's Juche philosophy – plain, unadorned outfits that reflect
the conditions of the masses.

There were traces of juche in the way they bowled. A man in a short
sleeve shirt the color of sunflower petals always approached the lane
with the same three steps, releasing the ball at the precisely the
right time, finishing with his right hand pointing toward 10 o'clock,
a pose straight out of a bowling magazine. His technique was
incredibly mechanical, as if he'd learned to bowl by studying a book
and emulated the positions shown in instructional pictures. Perhaps he
had.

The bowlers had no problem getting down eight or nine pins. Their
balls went straight, usually hitting the center pin. But they couldn't
modify their carefully practice strokes enough to get a spare, and
they lacked the experience to consistently get strikes. They lost to a
Kazakh team which the players threw the ball down the lane any way
they thought of: one player consistently used bounces to get the pins
down. Juche wasn't enough.

I didn't get a chance to talk with the North Koreans. As one player
walked to the bathroom, I muttered a "ni hao" and a smile. In response
he nodded his head, not breaking the rules and talking to an American,
but just possibly making a friendly gesture.

Third Generation Women

2007-05-30T23:18:00.001-05:00

BEIJING - We were out of our element, three white guys in Wudaokou's Korean section. But here the people are friendly, so before long we were drinking with an oil magnate and toasting the beauty of Russia's Third Generation Beauties.

With Monday's closing of Zub, one of the area's two bars specializing in local language students and promiscuous Chinese, is gone. Wednesday is All-You-Drink-Night night at the other bar, Propaganda, and with Zub out of the picture, the line to get in reached from the plate glass door to the chau'r sellers on the street.

But if Zub closing means more time at the Korean bars on the other side of the district, it won't be missed. Here the bars are big and spacious with funny Chinglish names like Hump. The clientèle includes businessmen and career professionals, people who have spent decades in China and speak great Chinese. Zub, Lush and Propaganda are Wudaokou's Frat Row, and this is the East Village, where people come to play with a bit of cash and try to look sophisticated wasted.

The linchpin of the evening was Lao Mo, a friendly man with a beet-red round face. We met Lao Mo on the street, and he took us to a fancy bar with red fiber optic lighting and paid for all of our alcohol.

Lao Mo treated us. He said this over and over during the evening. Probably the English word Mo will take away from the evening is "treat," which he pronounced "tree."

He wanted to practice his English, but his oral skills were poor and not helped by his advanced level of inebriation. We tried a conversation, but couldn't make it past "How old are you?" To communicate I first had to speak in Chinese, then repeat what I said in English to keep up the ruse as this being an educational meeting, and not just drinking on a Wednesday.

Ever the reporter, I tried to solicit Mo's story. He worked in Urumqi, the capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region as an engineer looking for oil. Xinjiang is a huge desert area populated by Uighurs, a Turkish Muslim group, and Han Chinese migrants. Mo was the latter, living off China's unquenchable oil thirst.

Why he was in Beijing wasn't clear, he was too drunk to explain in either language. He's got a sick boss in a Beijing hospital, and the company wants him back. Whether Lao Mo is planning to kidnap his ailing superior or push him in a wheelchair the 4,000 kilometers back to Urumqi, I'm not sure. Lao Mo considered his trip "tourism."

As the bottles of Tiger beer emptied, Lao Mo kept returning to his favorite subject: the women of Xinjiang. Lao Mo is married, with a 13-year-old son that he wants to study abroad, but doesn't stop him from admiring the women of his hometown.

"The woman of Urumqi are so beautiful," he said. "We have so many Third Generation Russian Women." He said this over and over, in English and then in Chinese (俄国三代人). I had no idea, so proposed a toast.

"To the Third Generation Russian Women of Urumqi," I said. "They are very beautiful."

The second part of the toast I didn't say aloud: "To the Korean bars of Wudaokou. May I visit often."