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.

Standing Up to a Bear

VILNIUS, Lithuania - Sunday is not usually a day for serious journalism in Lithuania.

This week the main paper, Lietuvos Rytas, was filled with stories about an upcoming local election (a pop star known as Pyscho and a forest hermit nicknamed Tarzan are running for seats), and the introduction of the Euro in Slovakia. But even flipping through the Lithuanian-language paper without a translation, one picture stands out. Buried deep inside is a picture of Russian President Vladmir Putin dressed in a suit but holding a handgun, with two masked men standing behind him, dressed like Chechnyan rebels.

The headline referred to Putin's Power Pyramid, a pyramid apparently controlled by thugs. The text of the article expanded on the provocative photograph, detailing spy agency plots and connecting him to the still-unsolved death of a Putin-critic in London several years ago.

Translating the article for me was Jonas, a 22-year-old student of political science at Vilnius University, the best school in the country. As he read, it became clear how serious an issue he thought this to be.

I'm not too strong on Lithuanian history. I vaguely remember some kind of Polish-Lithuania state lurking to the west of Prussia on maps during a Western European history course. I decided to have Jonas fill me in. Was Lithuania independent between the Two World Wars?

Jonas' answer started 998 years ago, at the first mention of Lithuania in a book. In the 13th century Vilnius was founded by the man who became its first and only king after a dream during a hunting trip. After his death the area became a duchy, and at one point ruled from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. (Maps of this large Lithuanian Empire hang inside several Vilnius bars.) The duchy joined with next-door neighbor Poland through marriage, but by the 18th century the combined state was threatened by Russia, Prussia and Austria. In 1795 the Third Partion of Poland wiped Lithuania off the map. Independence came in 1918, but the Russians, then the Germans, then the Russians again occupied the country for 80 years.

What happened in 1990 was not independence, Jonas said, but a reaffirmation of what happened nearly a century earlier.

Here, Russia isn't a new democracy, but a former imperial power ready to snatch power back in the country.

Jonas talked about a trip this summer, when he travelled to Iceland for a conference on political studies in small European states. He thought there would be hysterical talk of the Russian bear, threatening to overtake Europe. Instead he was horrified to find Russia to be a non-issue among the delegates, who came from Nordic, Baltic and even former Warsaw Pact nations.

'This is crazy. They are a real threat.'

He talked about how Russia cut off the gas lines six months ago to Lithuania. The official explanation was 'technical problems' but Jonas and other international observers believe it is punishment for the country's pro-European Union policies.

How is a nation of less than four million supposed to oppose the world's largest country? Consider this. Lithuanian guerrilla fighters held out for nine years against the Soviets after World War II, the longest in Eastern Europe. In a war of words, I'd give them a long time.

The Train Journalist

Trakiszki, POLAND - As the train slowed for the Lithuanian border crossing, a head popped out from the next second-class carriage and into view.

"Is this car going to Vilnius," the face said, referring to the capital of Lithuania and my destination.

"I think so," I said, but I'd almost missed this train earlier in the morning by hopping on the wrong track.

A Polish man, the six-person carriage's sole other occupant, nodded his head. He had been quiet company for the last six hours, saying only, "That is not allowed," rolling the double "l" sounds in a very Eastern European manner, when I attempted to nap with my shoes stretched across three empty seats.

I decided to leave him alone in the cabin and talk with this new gentleman, who cut an unusual figure. He had what might be described as a "Fu Manchu" mustache, a beret and long-hair put back into a ponytail. He was Jack Kerouac meets Pai Mei, the Western beatnik and Eastern mystic.

He introduced himself as a South Korean journalist who was travelling to Vladivostok by train, filing stories for a Korean newspaper each week. It was his fourth Trans-Siberian trip.

We swapped stories about the American heartland, he sharing examples from his time as a theology professor in Kentucky, me with my reporting stint in Kansas. We found a common source of complaint in mega-churches, and my new friend described, at some length, a congregration where parshioners were encouraged after services to visit an adjoining shopping mall.

"They have political power. They have business power. They have everything," he said of these church leaders.

Then he offered some advice on my itinerary.

"You must go to St. Petersburg," he said. "You never know when you'll be able to go there again. There might not be a next time."

"When I studied in Paris, I wanted to go to the Louvre but kept putting it off. I waited and waited, and finally I left, and never saw the museum. It wasn't until four years later that I got back there and saw the place."

Coming from this man, it's enough to make me think about changing my trip's route.

Heart of Palms

WARSAW, Poland - I spent most of yesterday, my first in Warsaw, looking for a palm tree.

The search began 36 hours after I woke up, post-driving to New York, flying across the Atlantic, retrieving my bags, locating a hostel and taking a shower. That's why I asked the friendly travel agent to repeat her directions on where I could find a train ticket.

"Go by the palsmk-- pawms-- palmm." She turned to a co-worker, unsure of the pronunciation, "Palm tree."

Strangely enough, this made some sense. Staring out the window of Bus 175 on the way from Frediric Chopin International Airport to city center, I glanced at what appeared to be a tropical tree in the center of a rotary.

That can't be, I thought. This is Warsaw in winter. That's not a palm tree. It must be some type of mostly-branchless spiky European tree. You've been looking at too many Soviet-style apartment blocks.

But given explicit instructions from a travel agent to seek out the tree, I set off in the general direction of the tree. For bearing I used the Palace of Culture and Science, a Soviet-era monolith that appears to be Stalin's Eighth Sister and is the tallest building in the city.

My search for the tree was frought with distractions. I saw an H&M and went in. Same clothes, higher prices than America. I went in an old bookstore to find a musty smell and a few texts on Polish astromony. I crossed the same street three times.

I reached the palace, but still couldn't find the tree. I took out my map (a small photocopy from the Albany Public Library's Lonely Planet Poland) and tried to find the palm tree. It wasn't listed, but it did say the Warszawa Centralna Rail Station was just two blocks away. I went there, bought a ticket to Lithuiana for $24 and was off to dinner in under half an hour. No palm tree required.

This morning I dodged into the Muzeum Narodowe , or National Art Gallery, to get away from a rain storm. Running into the museum's high gates, I turned to my right and saw 100 meters down the road a familar traffic circle with a palm tree in the middle, branches drooping in the wind.

(The tree, by the way, is technically called Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue, and was installed by Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska in 2001 as part of a temporary art exhibition. The tree proved so popular that it became a permaent exhibition. It's artificial.)