I (Not Him) Have Been Expecting You

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

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!

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.

Model Minority

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

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

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

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.

Olga's Caramel Treat

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Straight Outta Ulaanbaatar

DARKHAN, Mongolia – After the old Russian woman in the top bunk went to sleep, Sumar brought out his laptop videos.

As our train slowly passed through the pitch-black Mongolian grasslands, Sumar eagerly showed me what he'd downloaded at university in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. First he went through his collection of basketball clips, where members of various NBA teams made incredible shots during the last seconds of important games. Then came a video shot at art exhibition of a Scandinavian man creating shadow puppets using sand in time to a pre-recorded soundtrack. After that, Sumar clicked on the folder called "Music."

He opened the first file. The name was Cyrillic but I recognized the video from the first few frames. It was Nelly's "Hot in Herre," the most popular rap song of 2002.

"I love Nelly," Sumar said. "He's my favorite." We then watched most of the Nelly catalogue, including "My Place," "Country Grammar," "Flap Your Wings," and that song about chilling with my boo. Sumar then asked if I wanted to hear some Mongolian music, to which I quickly replied, "Yes!"

He queued the video on the computer, waiting for Windows Media Player to load. At this point I had only been in Mongolia a few hours, and had just heard the language for the first time as I snuck across the Russian border in a van full of traders, with hidden human cargo in the back seat. The beat started rumbling, a mix of deep bass rumbles and quick drum hits. A Mongolian flashed across the screen, dressed in urban clothing on top of a building at night. He started to rap in a guttural burst, delievering his lines in a way that seemed half rap-half chant. Accompanying the music were gritty shots of Mongolian urban life: monks fighting, police brutality, strippers, poverty and crumbling Soviet buildings. This was the music of Zaya, a song called "Tears of Ulaanbaatar," his first solo recording away from Mongolia's biggest rap group Tatar.

The beats, the songs, the setting: I loved it all. Perhaps this is the way people felt when they heard Led Zeppelin or the Beatles for the first time, falling completely in love with something so unexpected. I knew that I needed to get this record, immediately. Sumar only had the video, but suggested that I try to buy the record in the capital. He wrote down the name of a couple record stores in Ulaanbaatar and included a couple of Mongolian swear words to boot: Alna shuu! Muu nohoin gölög min! If I remember correctly, this translates to something along the lines of "Fuck you! I fucked your mother last night!"

The next morning I set out to find the Zaya album. At the State Department Store they didn't know anything about it. Hi-Fi Records said it wouldn't be out for another two months. The Hip-Hop Clothing Store no longer sold music. This being Mongolia, the options pretty much ended here.

With no music, I collected stories about the rapper. People in Ulaanbaatar told me about concerts they attended for Zaya's old group Tatar. They talked about the group incited a riot and the police started beating the crowd. A Peace Corps worker in Beijing told me that he'd seen the video six months earlier, but hadn't heard anything about a release. A Mongolian on my floor here in Tsinghua – who, the first time he met me, said, "What up Motherfucker!" – definitely wanted to buy the album, but definitely didn't have it yet. Another student offered to mail me a copy when she went home on spring break.

Then last night I was bumming around on Youtube, when I put in the name "Zaya" and "Ulaanbaatar." One result appeared, and it was the correct one. So now, thanks to the magic of the Internet and a poster named Munko, I can share the video with you. Enjoy:

Falling Into China

ERLIAN, China - I've re-entered China face first.

 

The slow Mongolian train made it through the border at around 9:30 a.m. Chinese immigration, customs and health officers came through the train, distributing forms and then slowly coming back around to pick them up again. Three hours later, I staggered off the train, weary from lack of sleep and desperately needing a toilet.

 

I grabbed a Y5 ($0.65) taxi to the bus station with Jess and Chris, an Aussie and a Brit who met working at the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar. They made good cabinmates, even if Chris didn't participate in our card games. We grabbed three sleeper bus tickets to Beijing with the unnecessary help of Kim, who is increasingly acting like a chaperone on a high school trip to the Mongolian hinterlands.

 

"Be careful!" he said. "Around there are many thieves!"

 

Graham, chafing at all the warnings, decided to join us in search of a hot meal.

 

Erlian is a surprisely developed bordertown. The area around the train station is a criss-cross of wide boulevards and sparkling new buildings. The buildings are painted in bright pastels, and the town avoids the bland white-tile school of architecture found in many Chinese settlements. Buildings had huge Chinese New Year character posters displayed, showing "fu" for good luck and "Happy New Year" written in stylized calligraphy.

 

We walked on the bus station street for two blocks, passing several pharmacies, guesthouses and convenience stores. I asked someone at the second corner where we could find a restaurant, and she pointed to the left. We turned to the left, and down another equally attractive street. I gazed at the colorful advertisements, streakless glass windows and the bright displays behind them. It was really quite nice. Then suddenly, I felt my left foot sliding downward. I swung my right foot to the side to compensate, and then I stopped.

 

I looked down to see my leg all the way down a manhole cover. When I stepped on it, the cover had rotated 90 degrees, exposing a hole of several meters. If I hadn't swung my leg out, I'd be a couple stories underground.

 

That's China for you. Shiny new exteriors masking a more uncertain foundation. I must remember to use caution when traversing the fast-changing landscape.

Stay Safe

SAYNSHAND, Mongolia - As our train sped towards the Chinese border, six of us argued about a robbery.

 

The subject of the conversation wasn't present. I wasn't even sure of his name. He's Finnish, about my age, likes to wear white T-shirts and sports long, brown sideburns.

 

My most memorable encounter with the man occured the night I arrived in Ulaanbaatar. I shared a four-bed bunkroom with two other Finnish people, a couple who met on a travelling forum. We ate dinner, grabbed a drink and were back in the hostel by 10 p.m. Around three hours later, just as we were preparing to turn off the light, this other Finnish man opened our door.

 

"Hey guys," he said, "Let's go out now! It's the biggest party night of the year! I met these Mongolians and we are going to the club."

 

The Finnish couple looked at each other and then looked at me. We weren't in the mood to go out, especially with someone with as much energy as this man.

 

The next morning I headed to the countryside, and all the Finns were gone when I returned.

 

I learned of what happened later in the evening. So the Finn met with with businessmen friends, and they headed to the nearby Face Club. Things were going fine. The Finn bought some drinks for the Mongolians, they reciprocated. He went out on the dance floor, and started to dance with a couple local women. Suddenly the Finn could see some of the Mongolians glaring at him, looking rather angry. Thirty minutes later, the Finn started feeling tired. He walked out of the club, back towards the hostel, and blacked out.

 

He awoke some hours later in an alley. His wallet was missing, and there were bruises on his head, neck, arms and legs. Barely able to walk, he made it back to the UB Guesthouse with much difficulty.

 

"And that's why UB is very dangerous," Kim said, concluding the story in the train cabin. Kim -- really Mr. Kim -- ran the UB Guesthouse with Bobby, his Mongolian wife and my former tour guide.

 

"That's why we say don't go out after midnight," he said, referring to a sign in all capital letters on the guesthouse exit. "You have to be very, very careful."

 

Graham, from southern California and not used to staying quiet for so long during a story, finally spoke. "But that's not the point," he said. "What he did was stupid. You have to go out and meet people. That's why you travel."

 

"No," Kim said. "Local people, they work very hard. They have no time to talk to you. They no speak English. But some local people, they have no job, so they learn English, and then they trick you."

 

"I think that's a very ignorant attitude," Graham said. I admired his gall, an American taking on a Korean fluent in four languages, who arranged his train ticket to Beijing and owned a business in a foreign country.

 

I stayed quiet during the conversation. Both sides had points, but they refused to budge toward the middle. Having spent the last four weeks helped, hosted and fed by local people throughout Europe and Asia, I'm more inclined to agree with Graham. There are nice people in the world, who just want to meet foreigners and share experiences. And while there might be risks involved in travelling, I'm willing to accept them. I hope that attitude doesn't leave me stranded in a gutter someday.

The Mongolian Food Pyramid

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia - A tour of Mongolian cuisine wouldn't take long. There are buuz and then there are khuushur.

Buuz are basically Chinese style dumplings with mutton inside. Some people put a piece of fat inside the buuz, which melts while it cooks. This kind of buuz will spill on any garment

Since buuz are white, they are eaten in abundance around the Mongolian New Year. Every ger I went to on this trip prepared dozens of buuz, and filled us each night until we didn't want to think about ever eating a dumpling again.

Khuushur is more of a summer food. It's made by placing mutton inside dough, just like a buuz. There are a couple key differences. Khuushur is long and nearly flat, and looks like a crushed calzone. The mutton inside khuushur is sometimes spiced, and usually mixed with onions. Khuushur is fried, while buuz are baked.

Both foods are similar to American Chinese in one respect: no matter how much you eat, two hours later you feel hungry again. It's hard to believe after ingesting 1,000 or more calories that the stomach wouldn't be satisifed for a while, but it doesn't seem to work. Some nights in the ger I went to bed feeling stuffed and hungry.

If you come to Mongolia and you leave Ulanbataar, your diet will consist mainly of buuz and khuushur.

Country canteens, or guanz, frequently have lengthy menus, taking up several pages in neatly-written Cyrllic. But ask the waitress what items they have in stock, and the answer will usually be just buuz.

Having sampled enough buuz for one lifetime in the countryside, I wanted some khuushur before leaving Mongolia. Since my traveling companions are essentially all vegetarians, I persuaded Caleb to break away from a salad and stir fry diet yesterday afternoon and take me to a khuushur joint.

We wandered around the center of the city for a while, stopping at tiny Mongolian eateries. They had buuz, and plenty of them, but no khushuur. After nearly half an hour of searching, we finally khushuur at a place called "My Homemade Khushuur."

Khushuur clearly wins a Mongolian taste test. It has flavor and even a hint of spice. It's easily eaten by hand and not as much juice drips out one end.

I wondered why we couldn't find khushuur at most UB Mongolian eateries. I put the question to Jeremy, a Peace Corps volunteer who has spent the last 18 months living in a ger near Tseterleg. He'd obviously spent some time thinking about the subject.

"There seems to be some strange rule that you can't serve both khuushur and buuz in the same place," he said. "As if two choices on the menu would be one too many."

Or perhaps it's because buuz and khuushur are so different. Just as in America you wouldn't expect tacos and hamburgers at the same restaurant, perhaps it's asking too much for Mongolia to serve both of their national dishes in one place. People need some variety in life, and Mongolians are no different.

Here Come the Posts

ULANBATAAR, Mongolia - It appears that the Mongolian Internet has been randomly deciding not to post certain entries I've filed over the past week. After finally finding an Internet cafe with a reliable high speed connection, I've resent these entries to Blogger through Gmail. Right now it all looks terribly messy, with "Fwd:" before entrie subjects and no discernable chronological order.

 

I'll try to find this in Beijing. For now, enjoy the typos.

English Speaking Friends

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia - Here in Mongolia, everyone knows someone who speaks English.

 

I first observed this phenomenon in the Russian border town of Kyakrt, where faithful blog readers will remember I nearly wound up broke and trapped inside Russia. Arriving in Kyakrt by minibus, I waved goodbye to three friendly passengers: a student, his girlfriend, and The Man with Pink Bubble Gum. After helping me lower my giant rolling suitcase to ground level, The Man with Pink Bubble Gum gestured toward my notebook. He took my pen and wrote a name and phone number on a blank page.

 

"Mongolia. Anglski. Mongolia," he said.

 

I understood. In Mongolia this person spoke English.

 

Hearing this the student took the notebook and wrote another name and phone number inside.

 

"Tour guide. Ulan Bator. Speak very good English."

 

Then they left. Leaving me stranded 150 miles from the nearest city with insufficent funds to cross the border. English speaking people in Mongolia are all well and good, but right then an English speaker in Russia would have been better.

 

This morning my mission was slightly more mudane. Jin and Myriam, two Filipino girls teaching English in Hohot, China and I wanted to head to the Black Market, a venue on the outskirts of Ulanbataar famous for Mongolian handicrafts, crappy haircuts and counterfeit everything.

 

We walked 15 minutes from the UB Guesthouse to the Chinese Market. The sky was clear and the air typically frigid. My exposed nose and cheeks felt the now-familiar numbing sensation of walking outdoors.

 

The Chinese Market is a series of four crumbling concrete pillars in the middle of a square. They appeared to be the remains of a highway overpass, but no four lane highway has ever crossed Mongolia. In the summer Chinese merchants sell imported bok choi and pork. Now the place serves as a gathering place for minibuses, the cheapest form of public transport in the city.

 

Myriam knew the Mongolian name for Black Market, and spoke Russian, the country's most popular second language. She approached the first minibus and said our destination. The driver shook his head and pointed toward the end of the line. She tried the second to the same effect. She kept moving toward the

 

"I don't understand," she said, in her German-accented English. "Last week they were all going to the Black Market."

 

We decided to hail a cab.

 

Two minutes later a late-model mint Nissan with no markings pulled over. Taxis aren't regulated in Mongolia, so anyone with a set of wheels and time to kill can be a taxi driver. We agreed on a price of 1,800T a person to the market - about $1.50, and started inching our way through the heavy Ulanbataar traffic.

 

The driver immediately took out a cell phone and starting chatting. Talking and driving are pretty common in this part of the world - Eliot Spitzer isn't in charge - and didn't really pay attention until the driver passed the phone to Myriam.

 

I could hear a man's voice talking loudly in choppy English on the other end of the line. Myriam had to ask her questions repeatedly, but eventually she was able to hang up the phone.

 

"The Black Market is closed for Tsagan Zar," she said, "We need to get out of the taxi."

 

Thank goodness for English-speaking friends.

Chill Out Man

ULANBATAAR, Mongolia - Last night I tried to upload a few of my photos to the Internet. Ulanbataar has an Internet cafe on each block, squeezing a couple dozen ancient Dells into a dark room. At 50 cents an hour, it's cheap and always available, but damn if it isn't painfully slow. After two hours, I'd put up maybe 40 pictures. I decided to head back to the guesthouse.

Since it's run by a Korean, guests are required to remove their shoes at the guesthouse entrance and put on clunky plastic slippers. I chose a too-small blue pair and sat down on the couch. Myriam, Caleb, and Jin were finishing the "Sisterhood of Travelling Pants." I arrived in time to see the titular garment flashed across the screen along with the credits.

On the couch were two new people, Eric and Erica. They are Peace Corps volunteers, just back from one month in Thailand. Both wore Thai style baggy pants and tanned skin not normally seen in the Mongolian winter.

They came from a small town in Missouri, north of the college town of Columbia. Eighteen months into a two year stay in far eastern Mongolian, Eric and Erica had a few stories to tell.

We moved from the couch to the kitchen, where we pulled out the cards and a couple bottles of vodka.

"The other volunteers sometimes come over to play cards, but we always just end up drinking," Eric said.

After a shot, the conversation turned toward drunkeness in Mongolia. Soviets gave the Mongolians a taste for vodka, but genetics gave them little tolerance. In Choybalsan, people are passed out drunk in the street before 9 a.m., male life expectenacy is a decade less than that of women, and there are frequent bar fights.

On their last night in Ulanbataar before Thailand, Eric and Erica went out to a club. As Eric went toward the dancefloor, a Mongolian man pushed him. Thinking him just another harmless drunk, Eric ignored him. Thirty minutes later the same man came over and ripped the right arm off his long-sleeve shirt. He grabbed him so hard that his white undershirt tore as well. He showed us the tear.

Eric said he acted without malice. Why did this man act so aggressively? Perhaps this was an act of xenophobia, an expression of Mongolian desire to keep foreigners out.

"They hate the Chinese," Eric said.

Eighteen months ago, Choybalsan had two Chinese restaurants. Now there are seven. Chinese companies are buying abandonded Soviet mines from American investors.

Cheap Chinese imports flood the town's markets. Locals fear that the Chinese will overwhelm their sparsely populated country.

I've heard this time and time again in the past week. China is the Grean Satan. They stole half the country 100 years ago - the province of Inner Mongolia. Some Chinese maps show all of Mongolia as part of China.

"Some of them dislike us, but they really hate the Chinese," Eric said.

Mongolia is in the same situation as Lithuania, in constant peril of being swallowed whole by a large, powerful neighbor. While Lithuania looks to the European Union for protection, Mongolia has America and its Peace Corps volunteers. Perhaps they shouldn't be so quick to anger when they arrive at a disco.