House of Superheroes

DAY 278: Design is a much more important part of society that the average person may think. For example, what would society be without graphic design? Every magazine layout, advertisement poster or web page that is effective to its viewer is like that because of graphic design. Passports, airline tickets and even money looks official because of graphic design. A diploma or certificate of authenticity just looks fake and illegitimate without graphic design. And really, which would you trust more: a company that has an established logo and corporate identity design scheme, or one that uses clip art from Microsoft Word?

Face it, everything that is legitimate and official, slick and stylish is like that because of graphic design. When you are a graphic designer, you are nothing short of a demigod in modern society. Whatever you produce transforms intangible ideas into a believable and accepted commercial reality.

ALL THE CREATIVE THINKING behind all modern and post-modern design as we know it today comes out of the avant-garde thinking of one place: the Bauhaus, a German school of art and design during the early 20th century founded by Walter Gropius, originally located in Weimar. It's surviving artifacts exist in Berlin's Bauhaus-Archiv Für Gestaltung Museum, on the south street of the Victory Column on Klingelhöferstrasse.

In 1907, Walter Gropius, already an established architect, felt that in the 20th century the "building of the future [would require] a new type of artist." This new type of artist would be trained in "art and technology, a new unity." It was then that the very idea of the fusion of form and function -- so evidently seen in today's products, from computers to cars to silverware -- came to be.

Gropius wrote up a manifesto for his new way of creative thinking and started a new, specialized school in Weimar known as the Bauhaus. From there he recruited a league of students, who eventually became the forefathers of contemporary design, each with his/her own specialty.

Since learning about the Bauhaus in design history class in college, I always thought of the avant-garde art school as a sort of house of superheroes, each with his/her own special powers. To name a few, there was: Paul Klee, master of colors and printmaking; Marcel Breuer, master of the chair; Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, master of photography; Herbert Bayer, master of fonts and typography; Marianne Brandt, master of industrial design; Oskar Schlemmer, master of sculpture and dance; Vassily Kadinsky, master of painting; and Joost Schmidt, master of graphic design. These designing superheroes were led by their faithful leader and master architect Walter Gropius, and worked together in the Bauhaus like the Superfriends in the Hall of Justice. If not for this band of designers and artists, we might not have had slick looking iPods, Nokia phones or IKEA furniture -- the lifestyle known as "metrosexuality" would cease to exist.

TO THE NORMAL MILD-MANNERED TOURIST in Berlin, the Bauhaus-Archive Museum might not be an exciting place to visit -- it's not recommended by any guidebook -- but as a designer myself, one of today's many descendants of superheroes, I felt an obligation to pay my respects to the forefathers of the other life I lead. With great power comes great responsibility. Setting foot on the grounds of the museum, I felt like I was coming home to a sacred place where all the magic happens, like Batman to the Batcave and Superman to the Fortress of Solitude. The museum itself was a work of art (picture above), designed by Bauhaus founder Gropius himself.

Inside the museum were original works I had learned about in design school, from Breuer's slick-looking, ahead-of-its-time furniture, to Moholy-Nagy's photos, to Klee's studies of color theory, to Schlemmer's sculptures, to a model of the original Bauhaus in Weimar, also designed by Gropius. Again, not so exciting to the average person, but exhilarating and inspiring to anyone that has studied modern design.

NO LEAGUE OF SUPERHEROES IS COMPLETE without an equally powerful nemesis, a band of bad guys, and in the Bauhaus' case it was the Nazi party. While the new thinking and commercial work coming out of the Bauhaus was a success and beloved by most of the German public, it was the Nazis that wanted to put an end to it all. One day in 1932, Hitler's goons raided the Bauhaus, arresting over thirty students for their non-conformist thinking. Soon after, The Third Reich dismantled the Bauhaus, forcing its team of superheroes to disband and flee the country like refugees. However, this didn't stop the Bauhaus; in 1937, Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago.

While the Nazis may have suppressed modern design in Germany, they had only won a battle but not a war. Nowadays, modern design reigns supreme, particularly in a city like Berlin, a city continually in construction of new, sleek-looking post-modern buildings. None is more evident to this than Berlin's crown jewel of post-modern architecture, the futuristic-looking Sony Center, and ultra-slick superstructure that truly symbolizes Gropius' original idea: "art and technology, a new unity."

The triumph of the avant-garde thinking of the Bauhaus over stuffy old regimes is also evident in the fine art world, as seen in my visit to the 1970s and 80s installation art work of Joseph Beuys in the Hamburger Bahnhof, a former train station-turned-contemporary art museum. More recently than that are the colorful graffiti murals painted in the East Side Gallery, a preserved section of the Berlin Wall about a mile long. But nothing really hits the point home more than what has happened to the Reichstag, the government palace where the Nazis once ruled -- now there is an ultra-modern observation dome on its roof (complete with a solar cone inside that powers the building).

AFTER A LONG DAY OF WALKING THE STREETS and through the Tiergarten, riding on trains to the modern and contemporary sights of "New Berlin," I was really exhausted. I fell asleep pretty early that night when I merely put my head down to rest. What can I say? Superheroes, and the descendants thereof, need their rest too, you know.

Perfect Strangers

DAY 279: There was an American sitcom in the 1980s called Perfect Strangers about the mishaps of an American in Chicago named Larry who took in his estranged Mediterranean sheepherding cousin named Balki who suddenly appeared on his doorstep one day. In 1989, Perfect Strangers went into daytime syndication so that teens on their summer vacation like me had something to watch in between morning game shows and afternoon cartoons.

I still remember the first day it came on WABC Channel 7 New York at noon, when they played the pilot episode where Balki shows up at the doorstep of his Cousin Larry's apartment -- not because it was a rerun of the origin of popular 80s catch phrase "Don't be ridiculous" (said in thick, Greek-like Meeposian accent) -- but because halfway into the episode the doorbell rang. On my doorstep were two guys, one named Hans-Georg who was claiming to be my cousin from Germany.

Ha ha ha. What is this, TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes or something?

Hans-Georg and his friend Rainer said they were traveling cross-country through the States from New York to L.A. and were looking for some trustworthy family assistance since they had missed their tour bus.

Don't be ridiculous.

I called my mother at the office to tell her the strange turn of events of my usually lazy summer days. "Oh, that's Hans-Georg!" she said over the phone. He was the son of my mother's Filipino cousin Tony, who had moved to Germany, got married and started a family with a southwestern German woman named Ursula in the 1960s.

Wow, we have German relatives? I thought. When your ancestry comes from a Third World Catholic country, it's hard to keep track of relatives. I swear I needed five times more room than other students in my class when we had to draw a family tree.

My mother came home and formally introduced the two of us estranged second cousins, and so, it was the first time I met Hans-Georg in my memory -- although my mom had a picture of the two of us together as young children. Three years later after that summer in 1989, I had gone to Germany to visit him and his brother and parents. Seven years later he came to visit in the States, this time with a wife and a two-year-old daughter.

It was "my turn" to visit, not to Germany, but to his new home in Luxembourg, the tiny country about the size of Rhode Island sandwiched in between Germany, Belgium and France. With my iBook and first class Eurail Pass I hopped on the early InterCity Express from Berlin to a stopover in Köln (known in English as Cologne), home of Germany's oldest Gothic cathedral and birthplace of supermodel Heidi Klum, and proceeded by the Mossel River another three hours across the border and into Luxembourg City. I was in the head car in first class and I saw Hans-Georg and family whiz by waiting for me in the middle second-class section of the train.

"He's not going to be in first class," Hans-Georg's wife Tatjana told him. But sure enough, a scruffy looking Filipino-American in desperate need of a shave and a haircut came walking down the platform from the head car.

"Hello!" I said as I approached them. They welcomed me to their home country and asked me about my ride in. "Great," I said. "I think the standard Eurail Pass for people over twenty-six is first class."

"Is that a joke?" Hans-Georg asked. He thought I was being ridiculous.

"That's what they gave me."

Next to Hans-Georg and Tatjana was their now seven-year-old daughter Deborah, who had sprouted like a tree since last I saw her as a toddler. I don't think she remembered meeting me when she was younger, and so, there I was before her, a new face of her father's father's cousins' son. I think that means I am her second cousin once removed, or third cousin, or great second cousin or something like that -- but to make things simple we were "cousins" nonetheless.

LUXEMBOURG CITY, LUXEMBOURG'S CAPITAL, isn't a big city at all. With a population of just 84,000, it's more like Luxembourg Town. In the short ten-minute drive across town, I noticed that most of the signs were in French.

"Some people speak only French, some German," Tatjana told me (in English). "Every day you wonder what language to speak." A country populated with mostly German or French ex-pats, each one usually started conversation in their home tongue and switched if it didn't match the other party -- unless they spoke Luxembourgish, a "low" dialect of German with some French influence.

"Moyen!" Deborah said. Saying "hello" was her way of showing off her Luxembourgish. Apparently it wasn't taking long for her to accept me as family. Soon it was me who was on her doorstep, looking for a place to crash.

The apartment was a nice little place, spacious enough for the family of three, with its roomy living room. In the dining room I had a home cooked meal -- the first I'd had in a long time -- over glasses of fine Luxembourg wine and conversations with Hans-Georg and Tatjana. Deborah, who was too tired to even finish her food, went to bed in her parents' room relatively early.

That night I slept in Deborah's room (picture above). Like Cousin Larry on Perfect Strangers, she had given it up the comforts of her own space for a vagrant cousin that had come to her doorstep -- a real life perfect stranger. Everything had come full circle -- and I didn't even have a catch phrase.

What's A Motto With You?

DAY 280: Luxembourg is not French, not German, not Belgian, but Luxembourgish, a national identity its citizens strived to keep for centuries despite the country's small size. Although Luxembourg may have lost territories to its bordering countries throughout history, its core has been strived in the center of Western Europe since it was founded in 963 A.D. Over a thousand years later, its proud Luxembourgish motto says, "Mir welle bleiwe wat mir sin" which translates to "We want to remain who we are" (or in layman's terms, "We ain't sellin' out to The Man!")

Luxembourg really isn't in the scopes of many travelers in Europe -- most tour companies zip through it from France en route to Germany or vice versa -- but if it really was this distinct nationality, I wanted to see exactly what it was. Actually, that's a lie; I probably wouldn't have thought to go either if I didn't have relatives living there already.

"What do you want to see?" my second cousin Hans-Georg asked in his family apartment.

"I don't really know," I answered. "Let me see what my guidebook says."

"How many pages is it?"

"Four pages."

"Oh, that's too much," he joked.

The first page of my Let's Go guidebook's section on Luxembourg's sights states, "Luxembourg City is compact enough to be explored without a map; by wandering around you'll bump into most of the major sights." Wander around we did, in a logical manner since Tatjana knew the city streets fairly well, bumping into the major sights as predicted: the Parc Ed Klein, the Golden Lady monument on Boulevard Roosevelt, the street with Luxembourg's famous motto painted on the wall, Town Hall and the Royal Palace, where Grand Duke Henri presides but doesn't reside. Luxembourg City was built in and around a section of the Alzette River Valley known as the Grund, which would be a perfect picturesque stretch of valley if it weren't for the towering construction cranes marring the skyline (picture above).

The most significant structure in Luxembourg City is the Bock Casemates, a protective fortress built in the 10th century into a conveniently placed rock formation that overlooked the city. The inside the casemates were used for centuries as soldiers defended the city in a 23 km.-long series of tunnels and caves dug into the rock -- even bakers and butchers dwelled in the rocky barracks to feed the troops. Hans-Georg, Tatjana, Deborah and I walked though the tunnels, with its old cannons still facing out the windows where enemies once were, until we got to a dead end and went back the way we came. The Bock Casemates, which once protected the proud Luxembourgish people, is now protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Walking down into valley of the Grund and across the Petrusse River, we passed through the Abbey of Neumünster, the former abbey-turned-prison-turned-exhibition and performance venue. Sunday jazz was booked with reservations already, so we head back up out of the Grund via elevator, only to find out that Hans-Georg's and Tatjana's favorite hidden cafe was also booked for a private function.

Perhaps Luxembourg's motto should be changed to translate to "Reservations recommended."

DEBORAH, HOLDING HER LITTLE GIRL PURSE and wearing sunglasses like a movie star, led the way, passed the statue of the former Grand Duchess Charlotte in the Place Guillaume II and onto the Cathedral de Notre Dame, before being so tired she had to be carried by both parents (taking turns) back to the apartment. Once back at home she was a little more energetic (although not energetic enough to pop out her loose tooth), while we sat around and ate Tatjiana's home-cooked Indian-style ginger chicken.

SOMEHOW, THE PEOPLE OF LUXEMBOURG managed to fit a city and a countryside in a tiny little nation. Less than an hour away by car was the smaller country town of Larochette, home of the ruins of Larochette Castle built on a hill overlooking the little town. In 1979 the state acquired the property and began a restoration program to preserve its proud Luxembourg heritage. While about half of the grounds is still under renovation (at the time of writing), many items have already been restored, from the wooden shackles that Deborah and I checked out with cranky faces, to the 14th century Créhange Manor. Wandering the manor's insides, we saw the restored, but empty rooms, each with a painted illustration of the way things were centuries ago.

The way things were in town centuries later were a bit of a surprise to us. It was a Sunday in what should have been a sleepy little mountain town, but the downtown area was bustling with carnival rides, balloon animal sculptors in medieval costumes and vendors selling everything from wine to Eminem t-shirts.

"They must have known we were coming," Tatjana said. Later she found out the town was having a paderie, an end-of-season sidewalk-sale which they used as an excuse to have a little fair.

We wandered the town fair at our leisure, checking out the vendors, stopping at a sidewalk cafe for coffee. For Deborah, the trip wouldn't have been complete without a ride on a carnival spaceship ride, where she sat in a UFO that went up and down, around and around while she talked to herself in the ship, perhaps reciting the mottos of alien races like one of her favorites, Stitch from Disney's Lilo and Stitch. After her short stint in outer space, we headed back to Luxembourg City to get ready for the next ride ahead.

WHILE HANS-GEORG AND FAMILY lived in Luxembourg, Hans-Georg commuted to nearby Germany, for his financial job in Stuttgart. During the week, he crashed in his old room at this parents' house in Filderstadt, suburb of Stuttgart; with a three-hour one-way drive it just made sense rather than going back and forth everyday. With my bags packed and my thank yous and aeddis (goodbyes) said to Tatjana and Deborah, Hans-Georg and I hopped in the Audi 80 and cruised down the autobahn. I was expecting there to be some sort of thing denoting the border between Luxembourg and Germany, but there was none, not even a "Willkommen nach Deutschland" sign. If it weren't for Hans-Georg pointing out the Mossel River boundary, I wouldn't have known.

Traffic got pretty bad since we got close to the Stuttgart outer limits, so we took a detour through the countryside and arrived to the little house in Filderstadt by early nightfall. I had spent a month in the house one summer with Blogreader wheat in 1991 and thirteen years later, it looked pretty much the same -- except for the fact that the big open field across the street was now developed with another row of suburban houses. My mother's cousin Tony and his wife Ursula were still the same humble interracial couple I remembered as a sixteen-year-old and they welcomed me with open arms yet again. My cousin Anton, Hans-Georg's brother, still lived there, working odd hours as a security guard for the U.S. military installation 20 km. away. When he came home around ten o'clock, I discovered that he was the same old guy too, just a lot bigger -- although I couldn't believe the teenager I remembered in 1991 who collected Garfield comics and played ping pong now toted a pistol and kept watch over U.S. Navy Seals.

I sat in the same dinner table, in the same seat, and used the same silverware that I had thirteen years prior, and everything become familiar yet again. I even slept on a floor mattress in the same area of Hans-Georg's room that I did in 1991. Thirteen years later, it had seemed that nothing had changed; everyone and everything was pretty much the same from my vantage point. Perhaps they took attention to Luxembourg's proud motto, "We want to remain who we are." Remain they did, and I felt at home again.

Searching For Einstein

DAY 281: In 1879, one of the most influential scientists in history was born. Known for his famous Theory of Relativity and his out-of-control, just-got-out-of-bed hair, Albert Einstein was born in the southwestern German city of Ulm on the Danube River. Although Einstein left Ulm and moved to Munich and then Switzerland and ultimately to the United States where he died in Princeton, New Jersey, his hometown had no qualms in celebrating its claims that the genius was born within their city limits. If not for the birth of Einstein in Ulm, sarcastic people around the world might not have had the expression, "Smooth move, Einstein."

You would think that a city with such bragging rights -- on the famous Danube no less -- would be more of a tourist destination. However, Ulm wasn't even in the index of my Let's Go Western Europe 2004 guidebook, and I've heard that little to no attention is given to it in other guides. Luckily my second cousin Tony (who is more of an uncle-type to me) knew of it, as he frequented the city often being only about an hour away from Filderstadt and Stuttgart. He and wife Ursula (who is a German aunt-type to me), both retired, decided to take me to Einstein's hometown and environs for the day. The night before, they had showed me a coffee table book about Ulm, complete with many pictures, and my goal for the trip to Ulm was to see the subject of one of them: a statue of Einstein's head, based on the famous silly photo of him sticking his tongue out.

After cruising down the autobahn -- slowing down at all the numerous radar/camera devices to regulate speed (Tony knew of all of them) -- we arrived at the not-so-famous city in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. A quiet little city of old southern German architecture and sausages, we walked through the streets, passed the city hall and new library (picture above) and down the park along the Danube -- despite the name of the famous waltz "Blue Danube," by Johann Strauss, it was pretty brown. Across a bridge over the Danube, the boundary line between two states, we quickly stepped in New Ulm in the state of Bavaria before walking back to the "old" one.

THE YEAR 2004 MARKS 125 YEARS since Einstein's birth and Ulm's stadthaus (town house) exhibition hall presented a comprehensive exhibition on the life of their superstar. That was all nice and all (and in German), but I really just wanted to see the statue I'd seen in the coffee table book. In front of the stadthaus was another sculpture that also played on Einstein and his protruding tongue, but it wasn't the one I had seen.

Tony nor Ursula (nor their offspring) hadn't seen the statue, which surprised me because the photo in the book made it seem like it would be fairly famous locally. In fact, Ulm postcards even sported a photo of the statue.

The three of us were on a mission, and Ursula took charge by asking the folks at the Einstein exhibit on where to find it. They gave us vague directions and a direction to walk in, but found nothing but the Einstein Haus, a special school for genius wannabes. The statue wasn't in the Einstein Haus plaza -- the "E = MC Square" as I like to call it -- so we asked for directions again. The latest led us out of the city center and into the residential area -- but the statue we found there wasn't of Einstein at all.

"I don't think that's Einstein," I said.

"I told you no one would know where it is," Tony said. "It's difficult to find. That's typical of Einstein."

Ursula asked for directions in her native German to a resident walking her dog. She didn't know exactly where it was either -- and she lived in Ulm too. Is it really that hard to find? I didn't want it to be such a pain. I thought it would obvious, but I guess not. We asked another guy on the street who gave us another general direction but nothing specific. Finally we arrived at the Zeughaus, a secluded government building, where Tony and Ursula had walked by many times. However, it was my curiosity to look around the statue. Lo and behold, Einstein and his tongue were only visible if you stood at the front door of the building looking outwards -- casual passers-by of the Zeughaus wouldn't see it unless they knew of its existence. I guess, as Einstein put it, it's all relative.

I REALLY QUESTION WHY ULM isn't more popular; not only does it boast being a scenic town on the Danube and the birthplace of Einstein, it also holds the world's tallest cathedral. More noteworthy than that is that it holds the Museum der Brotkulture -- that's right, "Museum of Bread Culture," an entire museum dedicated to the history and culture of bread. At Ursula's suggestion, we went to visit the not-so-famous but impressive museum. I thought it would be like a bakery or something, but it was more or less a museum museum, with paintings and glass displays. As boring as it may sound, the museum was actually pretty interesting; they managed to get their point across to me: bread, in one form or another, has been an important symbolic food source in most civilizations and religions for millennia, from breads of ancient Egypt, to communion hosts in Christianity, to the promise of bread in Nazi propaganda posters. Afterwards, Tony and I went out for doner kebabs in a fairly upscale place (compared to the scummier places I'd seen throughout Germany), which served up sliced meats on really good bread.

WHILE THE "BLUE DANUBE" WASN'T EXACTLY BLUE, a body of water in the old Danube valley was -- so blue it was named Der Blautopf, or "Blue Pot." Der Blautopf, a pond 65 ft. deep, lies in the small town of Blaubernen, the place where Orsel grew up, the town where she met Tony. Perhaps it was Der Blautopf's romantic charm back in the 1960s that did the trick (nowadays it's a locally-popular tourist stop) with its picturesque water wheel and ultra blue water water caused naturally simply by the depth of the water. I suppose we found two things in our excursion that day: Einstein and the blue Danube.

HANS-GEORG WAS HOME FROM WORK by the time we got back to Filderstadt. We made reservations for a court in the local tennis club for an hour of tennis and after our work out, Hans-Georg volunteered to cut my hair. It wasn't exactly as long as Einstein's, but bothering me nonetheless. How Einstein could keep his hair all wild I don't know (although it totally works for him), but perhaps it was intentional when creating all those theories. Now that's genius.

Palace Pictures

DAY 282: There is a saying that goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words." With that adage in mind, I often shoot quick photos of ordinary things with my little digital camera in lieu of jotting down notes when I'm lazy, so my memory is jogged when writing Blog entries -- particularly when I'm a week behind.

"You're taking a picture of the sign?" my cousin Hans-Georg questioned when I took a picture of the sign to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

"Yeah, so I don't have to write the name down," I replied.

Hans-Georg had taken the day off from work to show me the nearby palaces and castles in and around Stuttgart. His retired parents, Tony and Ursula, tagged along. It was a nice sunny day for a stroll anyway.

STUTTGART'S SCHLOSSPLATZ, OR "PALACE PLAZA" lies two palaces, appropriately named "Old Palace" (picture above) and "New Palace." En route to seeing both, we saw the Musichaus, the Staatsgalerie, the Stadthaus and Schillerplatz. I took a picture of the signs of most all of them to remember what they were. Although discreetly, I was the only one doing it. There weren't many tourists around -- one doesn't exactly rave about Stuttgart -- as it barely in my guidebook, which is why I don't have much to say about its past. One interesting fact about Stuttgart's present though, is that it is one of the first European cities to have integrated Fuel Cell buses, powered by water instead of gas, into their public mass transit system.

WHEN THE KING OF THE STUTTGART REGION got bored of life in the palace in the city, he went out to the countryside to the Schloss Solitude, a fortress of solitude much like Superman's. Unlike the Man of Steel, the king used the place as a base for hunting. Instead of shooting animals, Hans-Georg and I shot ourselves and used the palace as a base to shoot a photo of me and the Basilios of Filderstadt (minus Anton who was in training for the day).

"That's three castles so far," Hans-Georg said.

"Three already?" I said, counting with my fingers. I had taken pictures of so many things by that time instead of taking notes, it was hard to keep track.

After trying the regional dish maultaschen -- which (in the way it was prepared) was a fried meat and vegetable egg roll sliced into thin pieces and put into an omelet -- we went to Palace #4, the Schloss Monrepos on the backdrop of a lake and a hill that my cousin Tony referred to as the "highest hill in Germany," which was the site of a prison. "It takes ten minutes to go up but five years to come down," he joked.

As fun as it was to ride one of Schloss Monrepos' guardian lion statues, we moved onto the town of Esslingen, stopping briefly at Palace #5, the Schloss Ludwigsburg, one that I remembered visiting before in 1991 -- we stopped again for a photo anyway.

ESSLINGEN, HOME OF THE UPCOMING ZWEIBELFEST, an "onionfest" where people celebrated the onion with onion cakes and beer, was our final stop of the day of castles and palaces with Palace #6, the Esslinger Berg, built strategically atop a hill overlooking the town. Hans-Georg and I wandered around the compound as workers set up chairs for an upcoming summer performance. Down the hill in the town of Esslingen, I took pictures of more buildings of note -- and their signs thereof -- including the Kesslerhaus, where the regional sparkling wine was made, and the Münster St. Paul. At the town's Rathaus (city hall), there was a fountain in front where water poured from a center structure to the pool below. A cute little German girl, perhaps five or six, ran up to me and spoke a barrage of enthusiastic German words too fast for me to comprehend.

"Um, I don't know what you're saying," I said, shrugging my shoulders.

"She wants to get something in the fountain," Hans-Georg translated.

All of a sudden the little girl, who was with her older sister (by only a couple of years), stripped down to nothing but a pair of panties, jumping up and down to be lifted over the fountain wall and into the water. Hans-Georg did the honors. As questionably sanitary the fountain water was, the little topless girl, shivering and yelping from the cold temperatures, swam around in it, all apparently at the dare of her mean older sister to get the coins on the bottom. It wasn't much of a score -- there were only about ten cents -- but at least it gave me a moment memorable enough that I didn't need to take a photo.

"You're not going to take a pictures?" Hans-Georg asked me.

"No, I think it's illegal for me to put it on the internet."

Hans-Georg lifted the little girl out of the fountain. She shivered in the open air without a towel and sat out in the sun on a bench in the pedestrian mall to dry out -- while her older sister went off somewhere as if the whole dare was a big sister-to-little sister prank.

IT WAS A NICE DAY OUT with my cousins, but it, and my visit to Filderstadt -- and my journey around Germany 2004 for that matter -- had come to a close. That night, Hans-Georg dropped me off at the Stuttgart train station for my overnight train to Prague in the Czech Republic. Hans-Georg's brother, my cousin Anton ran down the platform after work to meet us and wish me farewell -- and for a final photo. Some photos may say a thousand words, but some just say, "Goodbye, keep in touch and see you again soon."

Bohemian Rhapsody

DAY 283: The Czech Republic, one of the newer members of the European Union when it joined in May 2004 (even though it still uses the local currency, the crown [at the time of writing]), has been a popular destination for tourists and backpackers for decades, particularly its Bohemian capital Prague. It was here that poets, writers and musicians convened -- Franz Kafka was inspired to write his Metamorphosis here, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart premiered his opera Don Giovanni. Every backpacker I've met raved about Prague and it's Bohemian vibe and I ventured on to see why.

I lucked out on my overnight train ride from Germany; I had a sleeper compartment that fit four all to myself. However, I didn't get an undisturbed night of sleep; a knock on the door came at about four in the morning.

"Passport control!" Two officers searched my room to see if I was hiding anyone, saw my passport was in order and let me go. It was hard trying to sleep after that and I stumbled into Prague later on all groggy-eyed.

AFTER GETTING LOST WHILE WANDERING OUTSIDE the train station, I managed to find the hostel I had my eye on from my guidebook -- only to find out it was booked. The woman there suggested another (also in my guidebook) where a line was already developing in the reception room -- the hostel wouldn't say any room was available or not until after the official checkout time at 10 a.m.

It was in the waiting room that I met Kyle, a 22-year-old Alaskan backpacker traveling around Europe. We ended up assigned to different rooms at ten but met back in the lobby to explore the town in each other's company. We wandered around Prague's streets, passed the colorful plastic cows of the international art exhibition known as Cow Parade, and into the Old Town Square (other picture above), which was filled to the brim with tourists either following a tour guide holding up a bright flag or umbrella or waiting in front of the Astronomical Clock at the top of every hour to watch statues of the twelve apostles (and one station of Death) pop out and ring in the new time. We marveled at Prague's classic architecture, including the Cathedral of St. James, all of which had survived World War II -- minus a portion of the Old Town Hall damaged by the Nazis.

The crowds of Old Town Square were almost as bad as the ones at the Charles Bridge, "Prague's most recognizable landmark" over the Vltava River, with two watch towers on each side. As impressive as the bridge was, it wasn't the reason why most backpackers came to Prague as I was soon discovering. No, they came for the cheap beer -- you could get half a liter of it for about a buck, including Budweiser Budvar, the original Budweiser before the name was moved to the States with a lesser formula and a funnier Super Bowl ad campaign.

Kyle and I sat in a bar around 11 a.m. for a round; looking around us, it seemed to be the thing to do. Over a couple of local Pilsner Urquell's, Kyle revealed to me that he was a poet of sorts, on a sort of pilgrimage to Bohemia for inspiration. He recited some of his material to me in slam poetry style, which captured his personal memories of the cities he had been in throughout Europe so far. I told him about my less poetic, but regular writing duties of The Blog.

AWAY FROM THE HORDES OF TOURISTS who also probably came for the cheap beer, we stumbled upon a traditional Bohemian restaurant frequented by locals -- if locals eat at a place it must be good. Prague's cheap prices continued to be quoted on the menu; for just about eight dollars I got a lovely roast duck platter with Bohemian dumplings and sauerkraut. The beer was cheaper there too and we toasted for the second time of the day.

"I say, what better way to experience Bohemia than with a poet," I toasted.

"A poet and a writer," he added.

After our lunch and multiple toasts, Kyle went off to take a nap since he had an even more restless night that I did on his overnight train (he slept in the aisle), leaving me to explore the sights of the Bohemian city. On the other side of the Vltava River atop Hradcany Hill was Prazsky Hrad, or Prague Castle, the seat of the Bohemian government for over a thousand years. The exhibitions inside were closed by the time I got there at five in the afternoon, but the outdoor architecture of its towers and its St. Vitus Cathedral was always open. As classically Gothic the Cathedral looked, it was actually less than a hundred years old, only completed in 1929, 600 years after its start. (Now that's what I call procrastination!)

As Czech soldiers marched into the castle's main courtyard, I marched down the stairs of Hradcany Hill and back over the Vltava on the less crowded Manesuv Bridge. It was away from the masses of tourists that perhaps got me in the artistic Bohemian vibe. As the sun set, I parked myself at a cafe table overlooking the river to write, as Kafka might have done in his day, to the sounds of jazz coming from a distant speaker.

IN 1787, WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART PREMIERED his opera Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague. Two hundred seventeen years later in the summer of 2004, Don Giovanni was back in the same theater it began, available for a whole new generation of opera enthusiasts with the cash to spare for it.

Meanwhile in the smaller Divaldo Theater, an ongoing production of Don Giovanni continued to please audiences daily -- for over 2,500 performances (at the time of writing). This longer lasting production lasted so long probably because it was an opera performed with marionettes. Anyone who's seen Being John Malcovich knows that puppeteering can be a serious and respected art form, and in Prague, such is the case.

I'm guessing puppeteering is another one of the Bohemian art forms because Mozart's Don Giovanni wasn't the only marionette performance; other productions in progress at other theaters included La Nozze di Figaro and the Broadway musical Cats.

Killing two birds with one ticket purchase, I opted to see Mozart's famous opera as acted out by Pinocchio's cousins. I felt a bit underdressed in my sweatshirt sweater because some people actually dressed up for the occasion in evening wear. For about two hours, we sat in the small theater and were entertained by puppet masters moving traditional string-on-top marionettes, Muppet-like dolls with wires on the bottom and hand puppets to a pre-recorded playback of the famous opera. To make it a bit more entertaining, characters that weren't "singing" did silly things (similar to characters on Saturday Night Live's animated "Real Audio"), like looking up female puppets' dresses or swatting down puppet birds that randomly came out of nowhere.

"HEY MAN," I CALLED TO KYLE the Poet sitting at the computer in the hostel reception. He had just woken up from his much-needed nap just in time for nightfall. The two of us went up to the hostel's third floor bar, a chilled out place where backpackers convened and, if they chose, to have a sample of another Bohemian tradition, shots of absinthe.

Absinthe, an alcoholic drink made from an extract of wormwood, looks like green Scope mouthwash and tastes a bit like strong licorice or Sambuca. With 140 proof, it's a fairly strong drink, consumed by artists and writers like Van Gogh and Baudelaire since it was known to stimulate creativity -- and lead to hallucinations and addiction after prolonged use. While marijuana may have replaced absinthe as the vice of choice in the modern Bohemian lifestyle, absinthe is still consumed in Prague in its original form -- other countries had outlawed it in the early 20th century.

"Now that's real Czech," an African-American guy holding a beer said at the bar when he saw Kyle and I order a round of the green liquid. The two of us absinth novices consumed it in the traditional manner: taking a spoonful of sugar, soaking it in absinthe, setting it on fire to caramelize it, quickly stirring it into the glass and shooting it straight down. The looks on both of our faces went from constipated to smiles.

Literary artist Oscar Wilde one wrote: "After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."

Having heard that from Kyle, we stopped after a second round. I'm not quite sure how absinthe stimulated creativity in the writers, musicians and puppeteers in Bohemia's past though; all it did for me that night was make me just pass out in my bed.

Classical, Hip Hop and the Ghosts In Between

DAY 284: Music, as Madonna once put it, "makes the people come together." I'm sure this was still true in the caveman days, when a caveman started banging on a rock in a manner as simple as the percussion in a White Stripes' song. Music brought villagers together in South America, tribes together in Africa and Americans together in "we can do it" montages in American 80s teen flicks.

Prague has been one of the premier stages for bringing people together in Eastern Europe, particularly during the 17th and 18th centuries, the hey day of classical music. Classical music still brings people together in modern day Prague; there's quite a calling for it from tourists wanting to hear the classics in a classical setting, to classical instrumentalists looking for work.

I SPENT MOST OF THE DAY WRITING ALONE in my room and running errands in town, stopping for some Czech fast food down the block from sculptures in front of the National Museum. At five in the afternoon I headed over to the Church of St. Martin in the Wall with a flock of others to see one of the many classical concerts in town for a small fee. The Romanesque church had the perfect acoustics for such a performance. The string quartet Musica Praga (picture above) performed classics such as Mozart's "A Little Night Music," Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons (Spring)," and Schubert's "Ave Maria" to a packed house -- so much that some people had to sit on the floor.

Afterwards I went out to find an internet cafe but ended up inquiring about a ghost tour that I had seen a poster for. I figured I spend most of the day writing about a tour in Berlin (I was behind on The Blog), that I might as well see Prague from a quirky angle on my last night. A tour agency sold me a ticket and I went off to Blog.

"HEY MAN," I CALLED TO KYLE sitting at the computer in the hostel reception. He was just getting his day started after a long night out after our rounds of absinthe.

"Feel like hitting that steak place?" he asked me. We had planned to check out the Crazy Cow steakhouse across the street and down the block. Word had it they had great baked potatoes.

"Can it wait 'til ten? I've booked this ghost tour."

"Ghost tour?" I showed him the brochure and he looked it over:

"In the Old Town we stumble through a web of surreptitious passages and infernal alleys extending on all sides infiltrating it completely: small rag doll lanes intersected by entrance halls: circular paths hard to penetrate: narrow underground passages still smelling of the Middle Ages..." [sic]

Kyle seemed a little skeptical until he read the bottom:

"Following our walk complimentary drinks will be served at an Old Town tavern."

"I'm down."

THE SKY DIDN'T GET DARK until about ten on a Prague July day, so an 8:30 ghost tour didn't have much of an atmosphere for a brush with the supernatural. Kyle and I arrived at the meeting point late but eventually found our way to a small alley where a guide holding up a bright yellow umbrella was telling a ghost story to a group of about twenty.

"Is this the ghost tour?" I whispered to a guy in the group.

"Yeah." He was Greg, a 19-year-old American who had also been drawn to the tour by that poster on the street.

"Did we miss much?" I asked him.

"You just missed the first story, but it was kind of lame."

"Okay."

Despite the brochure's backside saying, "You will be entertained," the rest of the tour was pretty lame as well. I don't know if it was the fact that the sun was still out or the guide's delivery was off, but the entire tour was, as we quickly discovered, sort of lame and not funny. The female guide led us around random places in the side streets of Prague, telling us a story in each one. She spun tales about crazy and psychotic priests, doctors and barbers, telling us he killed a woman here, a man there, but it just didn't come off as a frightening ghost tour at all. Maybe it was fact that she spoke through a mic attached to a hip speaker. The only redeemingly entertaining part of the tour was when she said that one of the ghosts manifested in Prague in present day as a dark-skinned happy fellow in Mexican garb -- and when we turned the corner, an African guy was there in a big Mexican sombrero passing out flyers for a local Mexican restaurant.

"Now I will take you to the bar for your free drinks," was our guide's conclusion of the hour-long tour.

"Yes! I knew this was worth something!" Greg exclaimed for joy.

Kyle, Greg and I sat in an old-fashioned wooden bar over a couple more rounds than everyone else that had left after the freebie. We were joined by two British chaps who equally thought the best part of the otherwise lame tour was the beer at the end. The five of us toasted and eventually had dinner at the Crazy Cow steakhouse before splitting up.

CLASSICAL MUSIC ISN'T THE ONLY KIND that brought people together in Prague. All kinds of genres did, and Kyle and I went to confirm in the nightlife scene. We did a shot of absinthe in the hostel bar to start the night off, and then went downstairs to the Roxy nightclub in the same building, where reggae star Luciano had just performed earlier, bringing people together with Jamaican rhythms. The young British couple we met there -- whose female half got picked up by a lone Czech lesbian for really hot girl-on-girl suggestive dancing -- didn't join Kyle and me to Prague's big nightclub, Karlovy Lazne, a five-story venue with a different genre of music on each floor: hip hop, dance, 80s pop, rock and techno. Apparently only certain types of music brought people together -- hip-hop and 80s pop -- because the other floors were empty. Now if there was free beer on those floors, I'm sure people might have flocked like they did for a lame ghost tour.

Capitalist Pigs

DAY 285: Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I always knew Russia as the U.S.S.R., the Soviet Union, a place where citizens living under the system of Communism drank vodka and stood on really long lines at the government store to buy toilet paper. On a national scale, they were America's adversary since the beginning of the Cold War, a formidable competitor in the space race, the arms race and boxing in Rocky IV.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ruskies are now America's new best comrades, perhaps because American and other Western companies can go over to Russia and make money -- and vice versa to American and Western tourists. Capitalism reigns supreme in Russia's capital as I was soon to find out.

I FLEW INTO MOSCOW FROM PRAGUE on Aeroflot Airlines and right away Russians were trying to make a profit off of me. The entry visa I got issued in Paris cleared problem free, but once out into the arrivals hall, I was bombarded by taxi drivers all trying to get me somewhere in their cars. One guy followed me.

"You need taxi? I have official yellow taxi," he said in his yellow shirt and Russian accent.

"No, I'm okay. Thank you."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm meeting a friend. I don't know if I'm meeting him here or at the hotel." I was hoping my bluff of things to do would get ride of him, but it didn't.

"Which hotel?"

"The Hotel Rossiya."

"Ah, central Moscow." He pulled out a laminated slip of paper with prices. "For central Moscow it's eight-six dollars [US]. Are you student?"

"Uh, yes."

"For you, sixty. Okay, let's go."

"I have to wait for my friend."

"Maybe later?"

"Maybe."

I went on line for the official information desk to see if there was a cheaper way, a shuttle bus or train or something. They told me if it was my first time in Russia, the Metro would be too confusing with its signs in the Cyrillic alphabet, and that I'd be better off taking a taxi.

"How much should it be?" I asked.

"About fifty dollars," the woman said.

Wow, fifty bucks? Maybe it's true what Lonely Planet says; Moscow is the second most expensive city in the world after Tokyo.

Yellow Taxi Man was still lurking and offered his services again. I bluffed with having to make a phone call, but he just lent me his cell phone. So I called the hotel and let it ring, told him there was no answer and went with him outside to see his taxi. I checked his ID and everything seemed okay, although how was I supposed to know what an official ID looks like?

"The woman at the information booth said it should be fifty."

"Fifty? Okay," he said with no argument. he called one of the official-looking yellow taxis over and gave the non-English-speaking driver directions. I paid him the 1500 roubles ($50 USD) and went off. Immediately I felt wary of what I had just done, but at the same time was enthralled that I was "back in the game" of uncertainty, after predictable train travel through Western Europe.

How come we're in the countryside? Shouldn't there be a major highway or something into the city? I thought.

I kept an eye on my driver for any questionable behavior, but it turned out that he was just trying to avoid traffic by taking a shortcut. Soon we were on a highway into the city center and eventually to the Hotel Rossiya right outside Red Square and the Kremlin, where my friend Sam (the behind-the-scenes guy who helped set up my entry into Russia) had made us a reservation.

Sam was passed out in the room after a long, tiring two days of connecting flights and lost luggage since departure from San Francisco.

"How much did you pay for a taxi from the airport?" I asked him.

"Don't tell me you paid--"

"The information booth said it should be fifty, so I paid fifty."

"I got here for twenty three."

Yes, capitalism was alive and well in Russia.

I HAD MET SAM IN FEBRUARY 2002, in a much cheaper taxi ride from an airport. Both eager young travelers, we had touched down at the same time in Ushuaia, Argentina on the southern tip of South America and we split a cab for about a dollar each to the docks. From there, we hopped on a ten-day expedition cruise around the Antarctic Peninsula, where we became good friends and future travel buddies. In 2003 we met up in Australia and traveled together for about a week through Sydney, Melbourne and Uluru. A year later we planned on meeting in 2004 at St. Basil's Cathedral near Red Square (our first encounter on the northern hemisphere). Luckily for me I decided to drop my bags off in the room first, only to find him not waiting at the famous Russian cathedral, but passed out in his bed.

Splurging on a former Soviet, but swanky hotel with a prime location, we were staying at the Hotel Rossiya. It was listed in the latest but still outdated Lonely Planet Trans-Siberian Railway guidebook in the budget places to stay section, but at $145 USD a room for two, I hated to see what a high-end place went for. No matter, it was all about location, and our window looked out right to the Kremlin wall at St. Basil's Cathedral itself.

Making the most of the rest of the day before both of us passed out from exhaustion, Sam and I went to get our bearing and see the immediate sights. We walked through Red Square, outside the eastern wall of the Kremlin, the site of Lenin's tomb, the State History Museum and St. Basil's Cathedral (picture above), arguably the iconic building of Russia ever since it appeared as the background image of level one in Tetris, where the blocks still fall really slow.

"This is so cool," Sam said with enthusiasm, walking down Red Square, the former symbol of Communism. "Red Square. We're not supposed to be here and now they want to be like us."

By "us" he was referring to us American capitalists buying and selling goods and services in a free enterprise. Capitalism had really taken its toll since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union -- Moscow had American chain restaurants, a Sephora and an Ikea -- and it was most exemplified in the GUM State Department Store, once the place where Communist citizens stood on lines to get their ordinary goods, but now stood as one of the most extravagant (and most expensive) shopping malls I've seen in the world. Louis Vitton, Hugo Boss and Christian Dior now filled its store spaces, all in an architectural masterpiece that reminded me of a multi-level Venice with no water.

"U vas est Starbucks?" Sam asked a woman working in a store. We figured a place like GUM would have a branch of the capitalist coffee empire -- it didn't hurt to ask -- but the woman just laughed. We settled on a local cafe on a balcony overlooking the mall promenade for cappuccinos and Russian cream puff desserts.

EVERYTHING WRITTEN IN RUSSIAN is in the Cyrillic alphabet, which has some letter from the western Roman alphabet, some of them written backwards or inverted, and some letters, one of which looks like a simple drawing of a squashed bug. Sam had time before arrival into Russia to brush up on his Cyrillic (I was too busy Blogging) and taught me the pronunciation rules. For example, P, O, C, C, backwards N, backwards R is pronounced "Rossiya," the name of our hotel. Any Russian written in Roman characters is not actually Russian, but the phonetic spelling of how the actually written Russian word is spoken. I started to get the hang of the Cyrillic alphabet with the help of Sam and the help of the logos of American chain restaurants like Sbarro and TGI Friday's, which used the same logos in the other alphabet.

And speaking of American chain restaurants, none is more famous than the original location of McDonald's in Russia, one of the first "American embassies" of fast food in Moscow when capitalism began seeping in. Sam figured his way with the Cyrillic signs of Moscow's intricate Metro system and soon we were at the famous original location of the Golden Arches, a fairly big place decorated with statues of world monuments. I was hoping there would be some country-specific item on the menu like I'd seen in other places, but there was none, so I settled on a good ol' American fusion of an upper-case E and lowercase b, backwards N, upside-down inverted L, M, A, K, or "Big Mac."

"Do you realize we're in Russia and the two things we've asked for are Starbucks and McDonald's?" I pointed out to Sam, laughing while munching on one of "America's favorite fries." "I'm going to call this entry 'Capitalist Pigs.'"

Keeping with the newly-realized theme of the day, we walked passed Moscow's Vegas-like strip of capitalist casinos and went to Moscow's branch of the Hard Rock Cafe on Arbat Street -- the pedestrian mall once a haven for artists and writers but had been overridden by trendy cafes, bars and restaurant -- so Sam could buy yet another shot glass in the souvenir store for his collection of them from the many world cities he'd been to.

Tired, we headed back to our hotel that night via the Metro system, with its beautifully designed and constructed underground stations with theme sculptures in each of the main stations that doubled as bomb shelters -- they were about twenty stories below street level. We walked back through Red Square and that building from Tetris to the Hotel P, O, C, C, backwards N, backwards R.

"No more American tomorrow," Sam said, ashamed of our stereotypical American tourist behavior of the day.

We both passed out from our long mornings of travel and long afternoon of sightseeing through the new capitalist country while watching the American Reality TV channel.

Classic Russia

DAY 286: "What does this mean?" I asked my traveling companion Sam, showing him a digital photo of a protest rally I took like an obnoxious American tourist by a statue of Karl Marx in Moscow's Revolution Square. There was a Cyrillic character I couldn't recognize in a word before the English phrase, "Go home!"

Sam analyzed the word. "Oh, do you know what that says? Yankee, go home!"

Funny, the protesters that I took a photo of like a Yankee were protesting me.

NOT EVERYONE IS HAPPY about the state of modern Russia. That morning in Red Square, a parade of people marched in, proudly waving the old Communist Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle (picture above). However, it didn't stop the numerous couples of happy Russians posing for wedding photos.

The current line of Moscow's protesters didn't inhibit us from seeing sights of Moscow's past -- nor did the passport control officers randomly checking people to see if they were officially registered to be in the country or not when I realized that if you get out of their walking path, they'll avoid you. Sam and I started the day off inside St. Basil's Cathedral, the church not built for Tetris' title screen but by order of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century in commemoration of his conquer of the city of Kazan to the southeast. St. Basil's distinct Russian style was seen on the inside was well as out, with bright, eloquently painted walls in a multitude of colors of religious figures in the Russian Orthodox Church.

From the inside of St. Basil's, we went to the inside of the Kremlin, the epicenter of Russia's government from the eras of tsars, Communist dictators and democratic presidents. The Kremlin was not one building but a complex of many surrounded by a fortification wall, most of which existed in present day from a reconstruction effort by order of Ivan the Great in the later 15th century, to replace the 14th century one that was destroyed.

Inside the complex was more than the office and residence of the Russian president (off limits to the public); in fact there were more churches than government buildings behind the walls than anything else, all clustered near each other since the Kremlin used to be the center of the Russian Orthodox Church: the 15th century Assumption Cathedral, the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, the 15th century Annunciation Cathedral and the 16th century Archangel Cathedral, the resting place of many deceased tsars. In addition to the churches were palaces and the 16th century Ivan the Great Bell Tower, where the original bell never rang after it fell to the ground.

The Kremlin was interesting but crowded with tourists. One thing I noticed was that security wasn't as tight as I thought it'd be -- although the security guards really questioned why I was "dancing" when I was trying to swat a bee away from my stomach.

"HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK THE BALLET IS?" I asked Sam as we wandered around with our cameras in the Teatralnaya Square, home of the famous Bolshoi Theater. For the summer, the Bolshoi was under renovation, so The Russia National Ballet Company was performing at the smaller theater nearby in the same Bolshoi complex.

To make a long story short, about an hour later we were sitting in the orchestra section to see Tchaichovsky's "Swan Lake," the famous ballet that bombed in its opening but stood the test of time and prevailed. Men in tights and women in tutus stood on their tippy-toes in graceful fashion, telling the story of Prince Siegfried trying to find his true love, who had been turned into a swan by a bad guy -- who didn't look so evil wearing panty hose.

Moscow's hot summer temperatures took its toll on the non-air-conditioned theater and most of the audience -- including Sam -- couldn't stop nodding off.

ST. BASIL'S WAS LIT UP as we saw from the view from our hotel room when we stopped in to freshen up. Having done the American meal the night before, it was time to go Russian at the Cafe Kartenydvor, a traditional Russian place with rustic decor that was obviously good since the prices weren't inflated and the locals ate there. We had already done the Russian thing by drinking beers in public -- contrary to Western thought, beer is more popular that vodka in Russia -- so I tried a regional Georgian wine with my three course Russian meal: salmon caviar, borscht (beetroot soup with meat, vegetables and sour cream), and a sturgeon fish shishlik.

AS WE LEARNED THAT DAY, there may be debates between supporters of old and new Russia, but as we walked passed the looming shadow of the Marshall Zhukov statue near Red Square, we knew that protest rally or not, Russia's history, culture and customs of the past would never fade away.

Encounters With Lenin

DAY 287: "Is it Communist or Capitalist today?" I asked Sam from my bed.

"It's looking pretty Communist out there," he answered, looking out the window. "Communist" was cloudy and grey and "capitalist" was bright and sunny.

"Alright!" I said. When you're a tourist in a place like Moscow, sometimes you want that old stereotypical classic Communist feel.

WE HAD BEEN DENIED ACCESS to the tomb of Lenin the day before because of what the security guard called in his thick Russian accent, "Camera problem": the simple possession of a camera since none, not even a cell phone camera, was permitted inside the mausoleum. We learned our lesson and went first thing in the morning, joking on the line like we were obnoxious Americans calling home (while eating McDonald's take-out from the one conveniently at the back of the line near the Kremlin):

"Hello? Yeah, it's Erik, I'm in Moscow... Uh huh, yeah... I'm on line to see John Lennon's body... Yeah... I know! Can you believe it, he's in Moscow of all places! Where's Yoko?"

Vladimir Illych Lenin's Mausoleum (picture above) was pretty much a shiny red and black marble underground fortress. Once passed security and into the building, you walk down a dark, black marble corridor where a shadowy figure of a soldier stands before you -- Sam almost jumped when we realized it wasn't a statue, but an actually person pointing for us to go right. After two more corners and two more guards we were in a dark room with the main source of light coming from the inside of the display case of Lenin's actual body. The body of the former Communist leader was actually there in a continual open-casket public wake, embalmed to the point where he looked like a wax figure from Madame Tussaud's. I stood in awe of his deceased presence; a significant world leader I had learned about in history class was right there. I wanted to take a photo with him but remembered I didn't have my camera. A cranky guard motioned me to keep moving on anyway. My time with Lenin was brief, but outside I had more time to see the tombstones of other Russian leaders, including the one of Stalin, buried six feet under.

SAM, AN ARCHITECT FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO AREA, makes it a point to sketch out a famous building in every major city he goes to. Since I've known him, he's sketched an abandoned whaling station on Deception Island off the shore of Antarctica, the Opera House in Sydney and Federation Square in Melbourne. St. Basil's Cathedral was his subject for Moscow and so he spent the rest of the morning in Red Square (where some soldiers came marching through briefly) drawing it. It worked out perfect for me because I wanted to do some catching up on The Blog.

With our "assignments" out of the way, we went off to explore areas away from the Red Square area. Along the way, I was starting to get a hang of the Cyrillic alphabet with Sam's help at a local gelati stand; I managed to order a scoop of T, backwards N, P, A, M, H, C, Y, or "TIRAMISU". A lot of times if you just sound out the written Cyrillic word, you get a word you'll recognize in English or a Romance language. C, T, O, upside-down rectangular U sounded out is what it means in English: "STOP." Still, a lot of times the would pronounced out becomes something totally foreign, making me as confused as a bird in a house of glass. In those cases, I just say "da" ("yes") and smile.

After trying to track down an English bookstore to find me a proper Russian phrasebook down a street with anti-American grafitti -- the bookstore had moved locations since Lonely Planet's publication date -- we strolled passed the Pushkin State Museum of the Arts to the other grand church in town, the Church of Christ the Savior, a Byzantine style cathedral on the Moscow River. We stood in awe of its glorious outdoor facade and went to get a glimpse inside. However, Sam was wearing a sleevelss t-shirt and was denied access into the holy building. The young architect pleaded to the guard but it was no use. A woman who had just come out said she didn't know why; there were women inside wearing worse.

"You have to go in and tell me how it is," Sam told me.

"Okay," I said in my sleeved The Global Trip baseball jersey. "I'll try and sneak in some pictures. Watch my bag."

Inside the church was more of an awesome sight than the outside, a huge high-ceiling nave that glimmered in gold and bright paint. It was a relatively new church, rebuilt in the later 20th century by order of the mayor of Moscow to replace the original that was destroyed by Stalin's mandate of atheism. I couldn't get into any decent corner of the church for a photo that would give it any justice, but the interior was such a sight to see, I bought Sam a booklet with photos. It really was a sight to see, even for a "churched out" guy like me, having seen church after church in Western Europe.

"You have to see the inside," I raved to Sam when I got back outside. During my time in the cathedral, he had tried to enter again, only to be stopped another time by the same security guard.

"Give me your shirt," Sam said.

"Uh... okay."

We went off behind a ventilation column in the corner of the plaza. "Are there any indecent exposure laws here?" I asked.

"I don't know."

We swapped shirts when no one was looking so fast, I didn't realize I put Sam's shirt on backwards and inside out. Sam went off to see the inside of the building, getting a smile and thumbs up from the guard. He came back also raving about the inside with smiles. We posed in each other shirts before switching back to our regular identities for the rest of the day.

AFTER SEEING THE NEW SQUARE OF EUROPE and walking around the Novodevichy Convent, "one of Moscow's most beautiful buildings" (according to Lonely Planet) -- and I mean that literally, "around" since its main gate closed by the time we got there -- we took the escalator down to Metro, which took us to the VDNKh stop, which stands for Vystavka Dostinzheny Narodnogo Khozyaystra CCCP, or USSR Economic Achievments Exhibition. While that sounds impressive, the former Soviet showcase of Soviet progress turned out to be a permanent street carnival with a roller coaster, ferris wheel, carnival rides and games, breakdancers and vendors selling everything from ice cream to bootleg DVDs. Sam and I watched in amazement as in front of an important-looking Soviet palace was an inflatable super fun happy slide with a rambunctious little kid going up and down.

"Who says Russians don't know how to have fun?" Sam said.

The most noticable part of the former Soviet "World's Fair" was the 100-meter-tall titanium moment with a retro-looking space rocket on top, celebrating Soviet cosmonauts in outer space. Underneath it was a pedestal with an iron cast relief of the men and woman that made it happen. It may be interesting to note here that while America may claim having a better space program, the Russians were a bit more resourceful; so I'm told, the Americans spent tons of money developing a space pen that would work in zero-gravity -- while the Russians simply used a pencil.

THE SUN STARTED TO SET when we arrived back in the city center at Sculptures park, a park where all the old Soviet statues (and some artistic ones) were placed when democracy came ringing in. Old CCCP monuments shared the lawns with statues of Russia's former leaders and intellectuals like Stalin and Marx. It was there that I finally got my photo with Lenin.

Right outside Sculptures Park was the momument of Peter the Great, an over-the-top statue of a huge Peter navigating a tiny boat in the Moscow River. I'm not sure what the scroll he was carrying in his hand, but maybe it was a copy of Maxim for those lonely nights on that little boat.

SAM WAS TO LEAVE FOR ST. PETERSBURG in the morning, so for our last night out together we kicked it Rusky style at the traditional Kitezh restaurant, which was just super because the menu came in English. It was a final night of black Russian caviar, blinys (Russian pancakes), beef stroganoff and toasts with shot after shot of Beloi Zoloto Premium vodka.

Needless to say, Sam passed out in his bed that night in his clothes, only to wake up in a frenzy by a wake up call, barely making his early 5 a.m. taxi ride to the airport with all his belongings. And so, there went my friend Sam the architect, who had served as my personal travel agent for arranging my host invitation into Moscow and had eased me into the confusing world of the Cyrillic alphabet -- a good friend, so good I'd give him the shirt off my back.

A Room For The Night

DAY 288: With my traveling buddy Sam gone, so went my room to go halfsies on in a prime location in Moscow, right outside Red Square. In true The Global Trip fashion, I had failed to make a reservation for the night in town, but just kept my bags in the hotel storage and hoped I could find a cheaper opening in a relatively convenient location before spaces filled up as the day went on. More importantly that that, I was to leave on the Trans-Siberian Railway the next day and I didn't exactly have my train tickets yet.

Sokol Tours in Boston, who arranged the train tickets and accommodations for my railway journey through Siberia, Mongolia and China worked in a network of other local agencies in other cities. Sokol's partner in Moscow was SWTS Travel, located in a busy commercial area away from the city center.

Being with Sam for three days did me good because without him I might not have gotten the hang of the Cyrillic alphabet and the Metpo ("Metro" in Cyrillic) signs written in it to get me to the travel agency. There was a line outside the door and about ten Russian guys were waiting their turn to get inside. I waited for about an hour until I realized that they were waiting for the bank services (also in that office) and anyone there for travel services could just walk in. Tatiana, the agent there gave me two tickets for the first and third legs of my journey -- the others I'd get from other agents along the way.

Okay, let's go find a room so you don't wind up on the streets tonight, I thought to myself. I took the Metpo to another new neighborhood which held the only hostel listed in my Lonely Planet guidebook that was on the map of central Moscow, hoping for the best -- but the woman in the building there turned me down.

Okay, where to now? A cheap hotel? Okay. I consulted the guide and lo and behold, one "budget" hotel was right outside the train station I'd depart from the next day. I almost rushed off to it, but realized I was in the neighborhood of the English bookstore I wanted to go to, and went there instead to get a Russian phrasebook; the three phrase pages in the back of my Lonely Planet guidebook were inadequate.

Damn, I'm hungry. I haven't eaten anything yet. What's more important, food or lodging? I rushed off on the Metpo for the Hotel Leningradskaya, which did not look like a "budget hotel" at all. Lonely Planet described it as follows: "Arriving at this looming Stalinist skyscraper in the dead of night is likely to strike fear into your heart, but in the daylight this showpiece Soviet hotel retains much of its grand 1950s style and is worth considering as a base for a couple of nights."

It also said a single room would be $26 USD, but when I registered it was actually $87, but I splurged on it, figuring I'd make back the money in the lack of taxis I would have had to take from a hostel farther away. Plus, the building lobby had a grocery store.

Lonely Planet had it right about the hotel's description though; in the day it really did show off the grandeur of 1950's Soviet style (picture above) -- at night it could have set the stage for a horror movie. Designed by L. Polyakov and constructed in 1954, the hotel had classic bronze lattices in its lobby, some so detailed they appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records (said Channel 1, the hotel information channel). My room was nice with a private bathroom, old retro furnishings and a TV that let you watch ten seconds of porn without paying every time you switched to Channel 13 from one of the free channels. Porn or no porn, it was one of the swankiest places I've ever stayed in (to date).

WITH LODGING OUT OF THE WAY, food was the next priority. I thought about splurging on sushi -- which has become quite the craze in Moscow recently (there are sushi places all over) -- but settled on fried chicken from Rostik's, Russia's fast food fried chicken chain, in the mall food court instead, since I was already splurging on my room for the night. I did some internet and then retrieved my bags back at the Hotel Rossiya baggage storage room, lugged them on the Metpo and settled into my new room in the Hotel Leningradskaya.

The rest of the day and night I just did the responsible thing and sat at my room's desk and worked on my laptop, writing, typing and sorting through photos for The Blog. I didn't get as much done as I wanted though because I was too busy flipping the TV to Channel 13 every ten seconds.

Body Language

DAY 289: In the 19th century, America was on a conquest to expand its territory. Geographically, that meant head out to the old west, back in a time when it was the new west.

Meanwhile in Russia, a similar phenomenon was going on. While most European countries were scrambling for territories in Africa, Russia expanded east, consolidating its far east posts into a greater nation.

Both America and Russia linked their outer territories the same way: by laying down the tracks and constructing grand railways.

IN 1891, TSAR ALEXANDER II DECREED the creation of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which would bring European Russians all the way to the Pacific. Between 1891 and 1916, the tracks were laid, but in 1900, even before completion of the railway, Russia showed off its big trans-continental train route -- the longest train route in the world -- to the world at the Paris Exhibition, promising travelers a way to the Pacific in a fast, luxurious style -- sort of like the Titanic on iron wheels. Like the Titanic, the railway failed to live up to its hype -- there were many delays and even dining car food shortages -- although there were no big incidents of mass deaths or a passenger to later be played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Nowadays the railway still exists, more of as a means for Russian citizens to get from city to city, or for non-Russian travelers holding Lonely Planet's Trans-Siberian Railway guidebook to go on the train ride of a lifetime from Europe to the Far East or vice versa. I expected the train ride to be a sort of international party on wheels filled with lots of chess and vodka, but to my chagrin, I was the only foreigner on the train -- and I knew very little Russian at all.

I'VE HEARD THAT 80% OF COMMUNICATION is visual; you can pretty much tell what someone is trying to say with the context of the situation, hand gestures, facial expressions and other types of body language. For example, if a guy is holding his crotch, jumping up and down or doing a little dance with a look of pain and distress in his face, it's safe to say he's saying, "Goddamn, I have to piss like a race horse!" Then again, he could also be trying to tell you, "Fuck, that old gray-haired woman just kicked me in the nuts!" (in a falsetto voice of course).

Body language came in handy when I climbed aboard the No. 118 train (picture above) at Moscow's Kazansky Station, going from Moscow to Novosibirsk with stops in cities along the way. My first leg on the Trans-Siberian Railway would take me about a quarter of the way to the city of Yekaterinburg on a 30-hour ride across two time zones. The standard accommodation for second-class coast was a four-person compartment with four beds in two bunks on each side. My three compartment mates were a family of three, a mother, father and daughter of about nine or ten years of age -- and none of them spoke English. Whenever they or the conductor would ask me anything, I'd just stammer, say, "Umm..." and smile. I figured that answering in English would be a waste of time, the way it would be for a Russian-only-speaking person to speak Russian on an Amtrak train. I could tell by the look of the Russian mother's face that she was saying, "Oh goodness, another damn tourist that can't speak our language..."

I did my best with body language and context, figuring out the customary train procedures by following example, from renting sheets, rolling out the mattresses to making the bed.

After the Russian father and I helped each other out with the linens, the family kept to themselves most of the time eating or sleeping for the first several hours. I didn't say much because I wanted to catch up on writing. I tended to my notebook as the train cruised by industrial areas and old train yards to the countryside of rivers and little villages.

I REALLY SHOULD HAVE DONE MY HOMEWORK about life on the trains, because I would have known to bring more food -- I was the only one that didn't bring any. Everyone but me was "brown bagging" it -- and I put that in quotes because these "brown bags" had whole rotisserie chickens, vegetables, loaves of bread, tea bangs, drinks and the Trans-Siberian staple, dried lupsha (more commonly known to Americans as ramen noodles) since hot potable water was available in every car.

With only a bottle of drinking water on me, I went over to the relatively fancy dining car, hoping to meet fellow English-speaking travelers in the same predicament as me -- but it was just me one-on-one with the Cyrillic alphabetic menu.

"[Something, something]," the humorless waitress said to me in Russian.

"Umm..." Smile.

"[Something or something]," she said, pointing to two items on the first page of the menu. I replied by pointing to the top one.

"[Something?]" she said in indecipherable Russian.

"Um... da." ("Umm... yes.")

"[Something something something something something,]" she said in fast verbal Russian, so fast I didn't put any commas in there. "[Something?]"

"Um... da." I pointed to the item again.

"[Something, something?]" she asked.

"Um... " Smile. I looked through my Barron's Russian At A Glance pocket phrase book and she had a look to see if it could help her.

"[Something something, something,]" she said with two hand gestures, one like a plate and one like a bowl.

"Oh, no, no... I mean, nyet. Umm... " Smile, while making the plate gesture.

"[Something something?]" she asked. I figured she was asking if I wanted a drink with that, so I turned the page like I knew what she was talking about -- only to stare at another indecipherable page.

"Um... "

"[Something something,]" she said. In there I heard the words "pilva" (beer) and "Kola" (cola). "Kola?"

"No, I mean, nyet. Pilva."

In two minutes I had a beer and a plate of a dried shredded fish snack that I had no idea I ordered. It was okay, but I thought I ordered a substantial plate of food too. The waitress came back with the menu.

"[Something something,]" she said, pointing to the C, Y, upside-down rectangular U part of the menu. Like a beginner on Hooked On Phonics, I sounded out the word. S... oo... p... S... oop... Soop. Oh! SOUP! I am the smartest man alive!

I pointed and sounded out lupsha, chicken noodle soup from my phrasebook.

"Nyet lupsha," she said with a facial expression that said it wasn't available. "[Something] borscht."

"Oh, borscht is fine. I mean, da."

"Da. [Something] minyut," she said with five fingers up. Okay, in five minutes then.

In ten minutes I had a nice bowl of borscht and a plate of about six dinner rolls. I started eating it until the waitress brought over a thing of sour cream from the fridge, reminding me that borscht had sour cream in it. With all the bread the meal was quite filling -- and it better have been at the price of 400 roubles, about $13 USD, the price I paid for a three course meal at a restaurant in Moscow with Sam. It was no wonder everyone else brought their own food -- the only other people dining car but me were train staff and a dolled up Russian blonde sitting with two Russian guys.

THE NO. 118 TRAIN CONTINUED TO CHUG ALONG EASTBOUND, passing through little villages, stopping at their stations along the way. The sun started to set as some passengers stared out the window and I sat on the top bunk by the door and started to write some more. Suddenly there was a figure in the doorway -- and by figure, I mean the curvaceous one of that tall, dolled up Russian blonde I noticed in the dining car. She was wearing high heels (like most Russian woman did), a long, tight black skirt and a translucent but respectable-looking sheer white blouse that showed off her sexy black bra underneath. I couldn't tell if she was going for that hot train staff secretary look or that of a hot, high class Trans-Siberian hooker -- either way I was a sucker for black bras. She approached me, ignoring everyone else in the cabin and said, "[Something something]" in Russian.

"Um... " Smile. I pulled out my Russian phrasebook and she took it to find a phrase that would help her. I thought she would flip to the section on "Train Service" but she read and sounded out phonetically a phrase from the "Socializing" section.

"Are... you... free... this... evening?" she said, unsure of herself with a girlish giggle that made her about ten times hotter.

Am I free this evening? I thought. Really, is she serious? C'mon, I'm not exactly Brad Pitt here. Wait, stop staring down her shirt before she notices!

The conversation at the doorway woke up the half asleep Russian mother laying in the bottom bunk across the way. Russian Mom was diagonally facing from me, out of sight of the Russian blonde with the voluptuous body language, whose back was to her reading the phrasebook at my elevated bedside.

"Are... you... married?" asked the Beautiful Blonde Bombshell with the Body in the Black Bra.

"Uh... nyet."

The Russian mother saw what was going on there and flagged my eyes towards her with her concerned facial expression and index finger waving side to side.

"Would... you... like... a... drink?"

"Um... " Suddenly I saw the Russian mother was shaking her head No, with her finger violently swaying. Through body language, she was trying to tell me it was some sort of a scam or set-up. "...nyet."

"[Something something,]" the Blonde said.

"Umm... nyet."

"Vodka?"

"Umm... nyet."

"Cola? Mineral water?"

"Umm... " -- Damn, black bras are sexy -- "...nyet." Sigh.

She left after that, going onto the next car opposite of the way she came. The Russian mother gave me a smug smile and a thumbs up. I gave her the thumbs up back and she fell back asleep. Later on, I noticed the Beautiful Blonde Bombshell with the Body in the Black Bra going back towards the dining car with those two shady-looking Russian guys I noticed with her before.

WHAT I DID GET OUT OF THE FAUX FLIRTATION with the Russian Blonde was the icebreaker for me and the Russian family in my compartment. They offered me food and conversation, most of which was still with hand gestures and pointing. For example, "Where are you going?" in non-verbal was to point at me and then to a map in my guidebook.

"Yekaterinburg."

To ask me if they could turn off the room light to sleep, the Russian father put his hands together to make a "pillow" and leaned his head into it.

"Da."

The next morning, the Russian father told me what time I'd arrive in my destination by pointing at me and then "8" on his watch. The Russian family of three disembarked the train way before that time, but bid me farewell before stepping off.

"Goodbye," the Russian mother said with one of the few English phrases she knew.

"Da svidaniya," I reciprocated, reading from my phrasebook. It was totally unnecessary though; after all that we had been through, we could have just waved to each other.

Crashing in Yekaterinburg

DAY 290: The No. 118 train continued to cruise eastbound to the outer limits of Europe as the sun came up to start a new Trans-Siberian day. Despite the stereotype that there's nothing in the region but snow, it was starting to get sunny and warm -- after all, it was summer.

For breakfast I did as the locals and avoided the pricey dining car (400 roubles [about $13] for a soup!) and bought food supplies from the babushkas (Russian women with scarves wrapped around their heads) on the train platform during station stops. You could get anything from pre-wrapped chicken to dried fish to a bucket of forest berries, but I just stuck to the staple: dried lupsha, or ramen noodles, since each car provided hot potable drinking water.

The Russian family that had shared the compartment with me was replaced by another family, a mother and two restless girls who kept kicking each other while trying to read Mickey Mouse comics or do word searches. We rode the train all day, cruising passed villages, small lakes and forests (picture above), listening to the conductor's choice of music to put on the speakers: a medley of Russian boy bands, Russian hip-hop (with a horrible Russian version of ODB's "Brooklyn Zoo"), and the ever-popular song from the Romanian boy band O-Zone, which was sweeping all of Europe -- even my cousin Hans-Georg and family had the CD.

I continued to write until my 8:24 p.m. arrival in Yekaterinburg, birthplace of Russia's first democratic president Boris Yeltsin, on the eastern edge of the Ural Mountains, the natural boundary between Europe and Asia. As soon as I exited the car, I was staring at a sign that read "Mr. Trinidad" in beautiful Roman characters. Holding the sign was a tall, young Russian guy that could speak English named Sasha, sent from the Yekaterinburg Guide Center -- partner of my Trans-Siberian tour agency, Sokol Tours, who had set up my train tickets and homestays. Sasha gave me my ticket for my second leg of the train trip.

"You will be staying at our flat," he said as we walked down the platform and out of the station.

"So, are you from here?" I started with the small talk.

"Yes."

"Born here?"

"No, I come from a smaller village called," (he paused for a second) "Asbestos. Because of the mining." I chuckled. "Everybody laughs when I say that," he said. The Asbestosian and I hopped in a taxi and rode crosstown to his apartment building.

YEKATERINBURG, RUSSIA'S THIRD LARGEST CITY, was not a city that looked like it was in the middle of nowhere like I originally had conceived; it was a fairly big modern city with old and modern buildings juxtaposed to each other and a mass transit system of trams, buses and air pollution, and the world's smallest Metro system as registered by the Guinness Book of World Records: one line with just six stops. The taxi took us through the city to a quieter and greener residential area on the east end of town, right near Ural State Technical University, Boris Yeltsin's alma mater. Sasha's apartment building was a humble one, a high-rise building with his apartment on the fourth floor.

When I originally decided to do homestays through Siberia, I had this image of staying with a "traditional" family unit, with a father and mother and a couple of kids in a small house or cabin, all bundled up to go ice fishing or wrestle polar bears. Instead, I was staying in a spare room of a college apartment on a warm summer night -- which was still fine by me because it gave me that nice "Dude, I'm crashing at your house" feeling. Living with Sasha was his girlfriend Tonya, who greeted me at the door. Both of them were English language students at Ural State Educational University, not too far away.

Sasha and Tonya had all the regular things in any American apartment -- kitchen, sofa, TV -- and my only "authentic" experience came from the fact that there was no hot water that particular day. Sasha and Tonya had to boil me water to put in a basin in the tub for me to blend with cold water for a makeshift bath -- something I hadn't done since my last homestay in Quito, Ecuador -- which I didn't mind at all. (I had been warned by Artour at Sokol Tours that this might be the case.)

MY YOUNG HOSTS EXTENDED THEIR HOSPITALITY by offering me slices of watermelon with me in the kitchen.

"So what do you think of [Yekaterinburg]?" Sasha asked me.

"I'm actually surprised that there's a city this big here," I said. "I think most of the people in the States think there's nothing but snow."

"Poor Americans."

We chat over watermelon slices about this and that. He almost fell off his stool laughing when I told him that I had spent a whopping 400 roubles for a bowl of borscht in the train's dining car.

"Well, I got a beer too." More laughter.

SASHA AND TONYA TOOK ME to a pizzeria just off campus so I could grab a couple of slices and a beer -- for a much cheaper price than soup in a train's dining car. We almost didn't make the place before closing time of 11 p.m.; when it doesn't start to get dark until about 10:30, it's hard to adjust to the schedule of daylight, particularly when I had come from two time zones in the past. Afterwards, the three of us were pretty tired and just went home to crash.

After a day of ramen noodles, pizza, beer and crashing at a college students' pad, I closed my eyes, feeling like I was twenty-one again.

Grudka

DAY 291: "Breakfast is ready," Tonya said, wearing an apron from the kitchen.

"Okay."

"It was ready an hour ago."

"Oh, sorry!" I apologized. The night before they asked me what time to have breakfast ready by and I told them "nine" -- only to sleep in until 9:30.

"It's okay," she said with a smile. I ate the oatmeal, smoked salmon and bliny pancakes with sweet condensed milk. It was all perfect energy food for my day of walking around the city with the walking tour route as printed in my Lonely Planet guidebook.

"See you later," Tonya said as I head out the door.

"Paka. Is that right?" I said, which I remembered from my phrasebook.

"Oh yes. Paka," Sasha said. "Goodbye."

Hey, perhaps I'm getting the hang of this verbal Russian language thing after all, I thought to myself as I walked down the flight of stairs.

THE MORNING SUN HEAT UP THE MODERN CITY of Yekaterinburg into a pleasantly warm summer day. I pretty much followed the Lonely Planet walking tour of the town from point to point, stopping at other things along the way that caught my eye.

Starting at the town statue of Lenin standing on a street named after him on the site of a cathedral destroyed during Soviet atheist times, I walked to the Storichesky skver (Historical Square), where the city was founded near the Iset River. Nearby was a time capsule established in Soviet 1973 to by opened in 2023. What the Soviets back then wanted to preserve for their (most likely) democratic Yekaterinburgian descendants fifty years later I didn't know, but I'm betting it didn't include a police patch from Fanwood, New Jersey.

Past City Hall and the Order of Lenin monument, erected in commemoration of soldiers in World War II, I walked by the regional government building and the statue of Yakov Sverdlov (picture above), the Communist party official from which "Sverdlosk," Yekaterinburg's city name from 1924 to 1991 (still used by the railway), came from. It was he who ordered the murder of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and five children during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. Across the street was the Opera and Ballet Theater, and down the block from there was the Guide Center tour office where I booked a tour for the next day.

The hundreds of lives lost in Russia's Afghanistan War from 1979-89 were remembered and honored in the Ploshchad Sovetskoi Armii, with a striking emotional statue of a soldier exhausted from war, amidst the plaques and flowers for fallen comrades. Up the block I walked through a city park where men were fishing in a pond near the "Yekaterinburg Acropolis." The park path led me to the Rastorgoev-Kharitonev Mansion, the rich family estate-turned-after school hangout, and the Ascension Church, which, during Soviet Atheist times, was a natural museum.

Across the street was the shiny new Church of the Blood (finished in 2002), which took away attention from the little wooden Chapel of the Revered Martyr Grand Princess Yelisaveta Fyodorovna and the site of the Romanov's death, where Yakov Sverdlov's goons killed the Tsar Nicholas II and his family. From there it was off to the statue of Russian poet Pushkin -- which was next to some interesting graffiti -- and eventually to the big City Pond and the souvenir markets selling the standard Russian souvenirs: the kitschy but classic Matryoshka dolls and old classic Soviet lapel pins. (If you look closely at the picture, this vendor was also selling a police patch from Fanwood, New Jersey.)

WALKING ALL DAY GOT ME HUNGRY for two things: internet access and food, and according to my Lonely Planet guide I could satisfy the cravings for both in one place, the Pingvin fast food cafeteria that had some computers. My book was written in 2000 and in the four years that had past, "Pingvin" ceased to exist; a fast food cafeteria by another name was there but had no computers. Hungry, I went to the end of the line and tried to decipher the menu, but nothing registered. Forget it, I thought to myself. I'm not that hungry yet, let me find internet.

I went around the area to see if maybe my map had the dot in the wrong place, stopping by the fast food cafeteria each time -- still hungry -- debating whether or not I should try to order something. I should try to order something; what's the big deal? You can do internet afterwards. Come on, it's not rocket science, order some fried chicken! The smell of fried chicken enticed me and that's what I craved for. I looked up "chicken" in my phrasebook and found its section on the menu board. There were items listed in its section -- the third one, "grudka" was what I wanted. A fried chicken breast.

While the two people ahead of me ordered, I rehearsed the lines in my head. Kurista grudka. Kurista grudka. Okay, I can do this. I can be the man. I can order chicken. Finally it was my turn at the cashier and I messed up immediately. "Kurudka grurista."

"Huh?" the woman said.

Suddenly I forgot all words in Russian all together, except for one: grudka, the word for "breast."

"Um... grudka."

"Shto?!" ("What?!")

"Grudka."

"[Something something]," she said in Russian.

"Grudka."

"[Something something something,]" she said in confusion. She was probably wondering why some Asian-looking pervert was raving about breasts in her fast food restaurant.

"Grudka. You know, grood-ka. Grudka! Grudka de..." ("De?" This isn't Spanish or French, idiot.) "Grudka. Um, grudka." I looked for a picture to point to but found nothing. I almost pointed to her own pair on her chest.

"Kurista?" I think she said.

"Da." Whew, I remembered that one.

She went over to the fried chicken bin and came back. "Naga ili grudka?"

"Grudka!"

"Oh, grudka!"

After all that trouble, my crave was satisfied and I licked that breast clean.

"RUSSIA IS ONE OF THE FEW COUNTRIES where no one speaks even a little English," Tonya told me back at the apartment after my day's adventure.

"Well, it's me that should know more Russian, not the other way around." I told the young Russian couple about my little incident at the fast food place and they laughed their asses off.

That night they showed me where an internet place was across town, and after I did as the locals did and ran some errands with them: buying a water filter for the faucet and groceries. Back at the flat, we sat in the enclosed balcony with a view of the neighborhood and hung out doing "homework:" I wrote in my journal and they read up on Yekaterinburg history since they had to sharpen up for their jobs as city tour guides. Afterwards we sat in the living room to veg out in front of the tube. Atop the set were four videos, including "forward and reflected combined-in-one P, o, p, p e, c, m, upside-down L, a, M, n" or "Forrest Gump."

"Is this in Russian?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Oh, we have to watch this then."

"Sasha's never seen it."

"Don't worry, it's funny," I told him.

As soon as it started rolling, I started laughing as soon as the emotionless Russian narrator started reading the opening credits. "See, told you it was funny."

And so we watched the modern American classic movie dubbed in Russian (with just two male voices, a woman and a boy for all the parts). I was hoping I would have learned more Russian vocabulary words by watching it since I knew most of the lines in English by heart already, but at the end of the day, I still only remembered that one I learned in the fast food cafeteria.

The Things Between Europeans and Asians

DAY 292: The continents Europe and Asia are separated naturally by the Ural Mountain Range, which extends from the northwest of Kazakhstan to the Kara Sea in the Arctic Circle. The mountain range is fairly wide as most mountain ranges are, and without any legal boundary between two different nations (it's mostly all in Russia), it's hard to pinpoint exactly where Europe ends and Asia begins. As far as I'm concerned, the mountains are the wide border between the two continents, just as Central America is a big border between North and South America.

I had signed up for a mountain expedition day tour through the Urals to see the things between Europeans and Asians. The day started as I was picked up at the Guide Center office -- where Sasha had escorted me to that morning with my bags to be left there -- by Russians Pavel and Tom (who was also from Sasha's hometown of Asbestos). In the car with me were Matt, Jeanette and Pavel's Siberian Huskie Jean (pronounced the French way).

"Don't worry, I may look old, but I'm fit," Jeanette said, an elderly woman old (only in terms of years) enough to have white hair.

We rode westbound down a modern mountain highway, stopping briefly at the Memorial for Repressed People under Stalin's Atheist mandate. Those who had been persecuted, simply for having religion were remembered with names on rows and rows of plaques.

We continued down the highway, passed a construction area on both sides of divider. "They're building a dividing line between Europe and Asia," guide Tom said. "But the real border is farther down." We drove about twenty minutes more off the main highway and onto a small road, to the site of an obelisk with a green line coming from it. Pavel drove right over the line and stopped the car.

"Welcome to Europe!" he said. The obelisk and the line were yet another group's definition of the boundary between Europe and Asia, declared sixty odd years before.

"I'm going to have to ask you to take my photo," I said to British traveler Matt.

"What, one food on one side and one on the other?"

"The standard tourist pose."

He shot me and some pictures of his own before we hopped back in the car. Pavel drove another ninety minutes to the entrance of our destination, Wild-Deer Streams Nature Park, yet another thing between Europeans and Asians (although according to both borders we had seen so far, we were on the European side). Pavel let Jean out of the back hatch so that he could run alongside the car for the one kilometer to the parking lot. Tom told me that Pavel and his many dogs were pretty famous, appearing in the Guinness Book of World Records for the mountain expedition at the highest elevation for dogs.

THE SIX OF US (DOG INCLUDED) GEARED UP for our rafting, hiking and caving experience at the car. Pavel handed me to carry the two end pieces of a portable paddle, which looked like two big metal fly swatters. "Anti mosquito!" Pavel joked.

We hiked through the long grass to the Siberian taiga-forest, where luckily for us, tick season had just ended three weeks before. Tom pointed out the different kinds of trees to us, the beehives in one of them too. "You see the moss on this tree? That means the air is very clean."

While Pavel and Tom got the rafts ready, Matt, Jeanette and I hiked around the river valley area (picture above). "The guy at the tour agency said that an American bloke who's an experienced rafter would be joining us," Matt said.

"Experienced? I don't know about that," I said with modesty.

"I was afraid it was going to be twenty young fit guys and me," Jeannette said.

We eventually got into our two little inflatable dinghies floating in the small but pleasant Serga River, Matt and Jeannette in one, and me alone in the other -- the guides would take a hike on a shortcut to meet us downstream at the take out point. I think the adjective "experienced" fit me like a size 7 1/2 shoe because I got the hang of paddling solo pretty fast. Having practiced the paddle technique on my final day in the Amazon rainforest did me good after all.

The Serga took us downstream, about six kilometers over an hour, passed serene green scenery, through a rock tunnel formation and down sections of rapids (nothing too major).

"Zdrastvuytye! ("Hello!") I called out to a happy camper near his tent at the bank of the river.

"Hello there!" he replied in English, waving.

The river run only lasted so long when I spotted Tom and Pavel on shore setting up a lunch campfire. I stepped onto shore with matt and Jeannette not far behind. Pavel had stripped down to his briefs and invited us to join him for a dip in the cold Serga water.

"I'll go," I volunteered. "I'm already wearing my swimming trunks [underneath]." Pavel said something Russian.

"He says don't mind the nuclear waste factory down the river," Matt joked. Keeping the moss on the trees in mind, I stripped down to my trunks and followed Pavel's lead. Jean the Siberian Huskie jumped in too and doggy paddles to the other side.

"Whoa, that's cold," I said, yelping -- but I got over it and did the plunge. I was only in the river for about a minute before I went to the campfire to thaw out.

"All that just to say I went swimming in Siberia," I told Matt. Needless to say, if there was another thing to add to the list of things between Europeans and Asians, it was my pair of shriveled, shrunken genitals.

TOM LED US ON A HIKE through the forest of the Middle Urals, a generally flat region with not many hills since the mountains are very old, geologically speaking, and have lost most of its peaks already. The six-kilometer hike took us to the Friendship Cave, an underground tunnel where, as soon as you set foot into it, the temperature dropped to 39°F (4°C). Jeannette skipped out on it while us boys went inside to climb over slippery wet rocks and see the vapors of our breath illuminated by flashlights and headlamps.

After seeing another big cave, we head back to camp for the lunch Pavel prepared for us. A drizzle started to fall from the sky, signaling the end of our day trip. We hiked back to the car, over rickety suspension bridges and up some small hills. We were all pretty much exhausted on the way back to Yekaterinburg and took naps on the two-hour drive back (minus driver Pavel of course). On the way there, I was awake to see the "Welcome to Asia!" sign on the different highway we were on, with yet another definition of the imaginary line between the two continents. I thought the sign was funny saying "Welcome to Asia!" as casual as the "Welcome to Maryland!" does on US I-95.

BACK AT THE GUIDE CENTER OFFICE, I picked up my bags and another American traveler there, a spaced-out young Californian named Blake who had just gotten into town. We had a quick round of outdoor beers before he walked me to the bus that took me to the train station for my overnight train to Novosibirsk. I shared a compartment with three Russian mafia-looking guys with gold teeth -- one big as Tony Soprano -- who didn't bother me other than when they annoyed the hell out of me, playing every musical ring tone on their cell phones to each other.

And so, the train head eastbound through the night into the "official" region of Asian Russia east of the Ural Mountains, a.k.a. Siberia. I made sure I didn't leave town without having tipped my guides Tom and Pavel -- I really like tipping to deserving guides, especially when they don't ask for it. If there was something else to add to that list of things between Europeans and Asians, it was Pavel's and Tom's smiling faces.

(By the way, for the record, you can go ahead and cross out "my pair of shriveled, shrunken genitals;" they had returned to normal.)

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

DAY 293: The day before in the Yekaterinburg Guide Center office, I had met a South African guy doing the Trans-Siberian trip like me. He too was somewhat upset that so far it hadn't been the international party on wheels of vodka and chess that people made it out to be, but was happy enough that he had lucked out in his compartments with nice people. "I haven't been stuck with three drunk Russian guys," he said. "But I suppose with all my good luck, the bad luck is sure to come."

THE NO. 56 TRAIN WAS STILL IN EASTBOUND MOTION when I woke up in one of the top bunks that morning. I had a cup of ramen noodles for breakfast and sat in my bed to continue writing in my notebook quietly as the train continued to stop and leave from stations on the way. Underneath me, the three Russian mafia types I was sharing the compartment with were stuffing their faces with their big picnic they had brought with them. They offered me some food -- and some of their vodka -- but I politely declined with body language; my rule is to never drink alone or with people I don't trust. Most of my communication with them was through body language or my occasional "Da" or "Nyet," although I managed to figure out when they were asking if I was Chinese or Mongolian (they didn't buy my answer of American) of which I just said, "Filipino."

The Russian mafia types were like a trip of thirty- and forty-something delinquents, closing and locking the door to smoke illegally in the compartment or to through their garbage out the window -- all while drinking shots of their vodka. They pretty much left me alone with my notebook in one of the top bunks -- that is, until the big fat guy with three gold teeth stood up to try and tell me something with body language. He held up some ten rouble notes and rubbed his middle finger to his thumb to signify "money." I didn't know if he wanted to give me some or was asking for it.

"Um... " Smile. I just played dumb tourist.

The big fat guy with the three gold teeth -- let's call him "Tiny" -- tried asking again, but I didn't understand him. The guy below me stood up to talk to me in Russian in the top bunk, completely shit-faced -- let's call him "Mr. Shit-Faced."

"Um... " Smile.

Mr. Shit-Faced continued to badger me in Russian and I recognized the phrase "Sto roubles." ("One hundred roubles.")

"Um... " Smile. I tried to continue the dumb tourist bit, but it was started to run thin.

Mr. Shit-Faced started getting angry, almost shouting to me in Russian -- at one point he grabbed my bottle of Coke and tried to pour it down my shirt. Over and over, he tried to tell me something in Russian. "[Something something] sto roubles [something something]." He started with the hand gestures and I deduced he was trying to tell me, "Give me a hundred roubles or I'll throw you and/or your bag out the window."

"Um... " Smile. "I don't know what you're saying." The more I played dumb, the angrier he got in his slurred speech. He gave up on talking and just did hand and arm gestures. He pat my big bag on the top shelf (which I had no regrets locking up to a bar with my steel cable lock) and made the "throw out the window" motion before rubbing his middle finger to his thumb to signify "money."

"Umm... " Really, what do I do here? I thought to myself. "Tiny" was busy making a cell phone call and the third guy was out in the hallway, behind the closed compartment door, probably on guard.

"Sto roubles!" Mr. Shit-Faced demanded. Jesus, won't this asshole just pass out already? He was really pissed off at the point of reaching for the insides of my pants pockets. I moved and slapped his hand away.

"Nyet!"

"Sto roubles!" He went to reach for my pockets again.

Slap. "No! Nyet!"

Fuck, how do I get out of this one? I was very aware that there was a knife in plain sight that they used to cut their food with.

AND THEN, THERE WAS A KNOCK ON THE DOOR. "Passport control!" Two officers came around to check passports. I never thought I'd be happy to see Russian police. The officer check the passports of the three mafia types and eventually mine. "Oh, you are American," said Officer #1. "You speak English?"

"Yes."

"Filippine!" Mr. Shit-faced exclaimed in his slurred, drunken speech.

The officer had my passport and the one of "Tiny." "Please come with us," Officer #1 asked me.

"What's the problem?"

"No problem. Just come with us."

Sure, anything to escape that room and Mr. Shit-Faced. Perhaps the police are going to ask me to work undercover for them, spy on the Russian mafia and report my findings. How cool would that be?

The two officers escorted me down the train car aisles (picture above), car after car after car. The sound of sliding the big heavy metal door to the entry/exit vestibule was followed by the sound of the sliding the big heavy metal door to the area between two cars, followed by the slam of the first door and then the second. All of this was repeated shortly thereafter as two doors opened and slammed to get into the next car.

Footsteps, footsteps. Open open, slam slam. Open open, slam slam. "Where are we going?" I asked, marching down the aisle with one officer ahead of me and one behind.

"Just follow us." Open open, slam slam. Open open, slam slam. Footsteps.

"Is there any problem?"

"No, no problem." Open open, slam slam. Open open, slam slam.

Shit, is this all some elaborate scam?

We arrived at the last car before the dining car and they escorted me to just a regular second-class passenger compartment that did not look official at all for police work, and closed the door. Fuck. The fairly young guys started chuckling to each other, which also tipped me off that a scam was in progress.

"Officer" #2 looked through my passport and my supporting documents inside. He read my identification section and perused all my other stamps. Holding my tourist card, he made a rolling motion with it. "Do you..." followed by two sniff sounds, signifying "...snort cocaine?"

"No no no."

"Okay." He looked at the passport again. "Oh, America! Winchester, bang bang. You have Winchester?"

"No."

"Me, I have Winchester right here," he said. He made it evident that he had a gun in his holster. I didn't know if it was fake or not, but that's not the sort of thing you know until it's too late.

"Do you have any identification?" I demanded of the "officers."

"Don't worry, no problem, no problem," said "Officer" #1.

"Let's get the conductor in here."

"No."

"Please, let's get the conductor." I stood up and opened the door.

"No. Sit," "Officer" #1 said. "No problem. Sit."

"No, let's get the conductor."

"No, there is no problem here."

"If there's no problem, then we can get the conductor in here."

"No. Sit."

I sat only for the sake of getting my passport back, keeping my leg in the doorway to keep the door open.

"Move your leg," "Officer" #1 demanded.

"No, let me see some identification."

"You want identification?! Here," "Officer" #2 interrupted. He showed me his badge in a flash before I could see if it was an EPSON print out or not. "Officer" #1 let me read his -- but how was I supposed to know what a real police ID should look like?

"No, there should be some sort of metal badge or something," I said.

"You want to call the consule?!" "Officer" #2 said. "Here." He gave me his cell phone. "Go ahead, call the American consule in Moscow."

Fuck, these guys were good; they knew what tourists are supposed to say to threaten them.

"Okay," I said. "I have to get the number. It's back in my room." I stood up.

"No, you sit."

"No." I stood in the doorway, trying to call down a train staff member at the end of the hall, but she wouldn't respond.

"Sit down. No problem."

"No." I kept on looking for help. On a train, you can't really go running off to the nearest real police or threaten to handle everything back at the station. A passenger walked by. "Vy gavarite-pa angliski? ("Do you speak English?")

"[Something something]," in Russian. He moved on.

"Please sit down. There's no problem," said "Officer" #1.

"No, let's get the conductor first if there's no problem." A man and his little boy walked by and I seized the opportunity to follow the boy down the corridor to get the conductor -- but "Officer" #1 physically grabbed me like a wrestler and shoved me into the seat in the room.

"Sit!"

I quickly put my leg in the doorway to keep it open. "Officer" #2 dangled his handcuffs in front of me with one hand while still holding my precious kidnapped American passport in the other. He pretended to call in information on his cell phone. The rhythmic sounds of the train -- tha thump tha thump, tha thump tha thump -- continued as the green scenery whizzed passed the window.

Suddenly, the big, gold-toothed Tiny showed up casually at the doorway. Shit, now what? He smiled and said something in Russian to "Officer" #2 and gave him some roubles. He got his passport back in a clear example to show me what I needed to do to persuade the fake police from getting my passport back.

Fuck, they were all in it together, probably communicating over cell phones right in front of me when Mr. Shit-Faced was harassing me.

"Officer" #1 told me to empty my pockets and lay the contents out on the bed. I initially refused, but I was going nowhere fast, and did as instructed, only showing off my non-valuable things. It didn't really work because he frisked me several times, after of which I had to reveal the real goods: my camera, my secret pocket with about $200 worth in cash, a credit card, travelers checks and my ATM card. (I really don't get the purpose of money belts and secret pockets; muggers and robbers know about them, and rob you accordingly.)

"Officer" #1 pretended to analyze it all, thankfully confiscating nothing. "Officer" #2 was more interested in a visa sticker in my passport for South Africa. Yeah, Russian passport official, my ass.

The only thing I could think to do was just play along. "How did that other guy get his passport back?" I asked.

"Money," said "Officer" #2 with an evil smile.

"Sto bucks," said "Officer" #1. They wrote a figure on a scrap piece of paper: $100.

"No no no no," I gasped. "That's too much."

"Okay." They wrote down another figure. What was this, a mortgage negotiation? 1000 pyb. (1000 roubles, about $34 USD)

"Fine," I sighed. I gave them one of the 1000 rouble notes they knew I had, and they released my precious American paper hostage.

"See, no problem," said "Officer" #1. I was already halfway out the door.

OPEN OPEN, SLAM SLAM. Open open, slam slam. Again, five more times. I opened the door to my compartment just as the three Russian mafia types were raising their shot glasses for another toast, possibly celebrating their victory over scamming me -- Mr. Shit-faced had 200 roubles in the 1000 5-way split instead of the original 100 he asked me for. Tiny motioned me to join them. Yeah right, motherfuckers.

"No, I'm going to the dining car." I grabbed my bag on my bed, which I had secretly packed up and locked with quick thinking while the "officers" were "inspecting" their passports. The fact that I shoved all my loose valuables in the bag at that time kept me sane during my "interrogation."

Open open, slam slam. Open open, slam slam. Again, six more times. I ordered a bowl of soup, some chicken and a beer, but I still felt queasy from what hat just happened. I survived with my passport and lived to tell the tale, which was the most important thing I guess. I made small talk with the young friendly waiter there that was happy to meet me; he told me he had a friend also from the New York/New Jersey area.

I sat and wrote, dreading going back to the compartment. I figured I'd just stay in the empty dining car and kill time until arrival. My big bag was locked by cable anyway.

"Gdye tualet?" ("Where is the toilet?") I asked the waiter after two hours or writing, with two hours to go.

"They are closed," he informed me. "We are near the city." Toilets on the train were closed in big cities so as not to flush shit on the tracks where people might live near.

"What city is this?" I asked.

"Novosibirsk. In five minutes."

"Novosibirsk!?" It was my stop and the train was slowing to a snail's pace into the station. "But we're not supposed to come until nineteen." He showed me his cell phone. "18:53."

"Fuck!" I had forgotten about the time zone change. Everything was confusing with the zone changes (all train tickets use Moscow time), and the fact that my printed itinerary said Novosibirsk was +4 of Moscow, when it was actually +3.

Open open, slam slam. Open open, slam slam. Again, six more times, in a hurried, frantic pace. The conductor gave me a scolding look in the corridor. "Novosibirsk?"

"Da." I rushed over to the compartment; the mafia-types were already with their bags in the hallway, telling me I needed to hurry. I unlocked my chain, grabbed my bag, and scanned the room. The only redeeming value of the mafia types was that they had returned my bed sheets for me already.

"MR. TRINIDAD" WAS PRINTED on a sign held by a big Russian guy at the arrival platform. He motioned me to follow him through the crowd. "Gavarite pa angliski?" ("Do you speak English?") I asked him. He grunted No.

We rode through the city of Novosibirsk, a fairly big modern Siberian city with a population of almost two million. We rode on without conversation across town to the homestay he was instructed to bring me to. He got lost twice though, in residential and industrial areas, having to use a map and radio for directions. As he pulled near an abandoned area where some guys were burning garbage, a thought entered my mind: Did "Officer" #2 phone my name in to someone to print out a "Mr. Trinidad" sign?

Finally the taxi driver found his way, to a nicer high-rise apartment building complex, where a member of my host family greeted me at the door.

YOU'VE NO DOUBTEDLY FIGURED OUT "The Bad" and "The Ugly" in this story so far (take your pick) and to balance it all out, I really needed some "Good" in the day, before it ended. I totally lucked out with my homestay as soon as the first door to the apartment swung open, revealing an ultra clean Westernized-looking household with shiny like-new wooden flooring, bright lights, lots of space and a TV in the corner of the living room playing MTV.

My gracious hosts were Julia and her mother Lugmina, both generations born on Russian soil on Sakhalin Island, off the east coast of mainland Russia, north of Japan. Their Asian faces were contributed to their Korean ancestry, although it was hard to tell just where English-fluent Julia was from exactly because she was so Americanized in terms of style, behavior and musical interests.

"My mother raised us with a Western upbringing instead of a Russian or Asian one because she thought it would be more beneficial," she told me.

"Wow, I feel like I'm at my friend's house in New Jersey," I told my hosts.

My room for the night was Julia's brother's room, who was away for two weeks in the city of Tomsk, visiting friends. His room was just like one I might have seen in American suburbia, with his karate awards on the wall, a comfy bed and a nice big computer desk with a rolling office chair by a window overlooking the outside -- a perfect place to work on my laptop and catch up on Blog duties.

"We're going to have dinner in fifteen minutes," Julia told me. "Care to join us?"

"Sure!" Only breakfast was required by the host according to contract. I really lucked out; there really was a balance of Good in the day.

Over tasty mashed potatoes and meat balls, we sat around the dinner table as music videos of Pink and No Doubt played in the corner. "Do they play Russia artists on MTV here?" I asked.

"Yes, but I think it ruins MTV." I told her about the Russian version of "Brooklyn Zoo" I had heard on the train.

"'Brooklyn Zoo?' ODB?"

"Yeah."

Wait a minute, am I really in the middle of Siberia?

Julia was a 20-year-old student of the University of Tomsk-Novosibirsk campus, studying international relations and world history. Not only could she impress me with her wealth of knowledge of American pop culture, but she knew many things about Russian, American and world history too. She was just like any American 20-year-old I might speak to in the States, with subjects ranging from the latest prank on MTV's Punk'd to the woes of a dial-up connection for instant messenger programs and downloading movies and MP3s off KaZaa. She had also talked about the American movies Road Trip and Half Baked. I suppose I could relate to all of it being what Sebasitian (Morocco) called, "the youngest 29-year-old [he's] ever met."

I was in her brother's room writing on my iBook at the desk and she came in to hang out that night. I showed her the in's and out's of an Apple computer -- she had only heard of them but had never seen one before in person -- and my photos from Africa. She had photos of the time she met and held hands briefly with Mariah Carey, backstage at a concert in Moscow, which she showed me the next morning.

Being in the home of Julia and her mother, even just for the first couple of hours, I really found the "home" in "homestay." Julia had been in a family homestay in Minnesota before and knew what I might be going through, easing my transition into Novosibirsk -- which was a great thing after the bad and ugly events earlier that day. Where the Russian mafia types or the "officers" ended up that night with my 1000 roubles I didn't know, but I was too comfortable to care.

Bowling For Siberia

DAY 294: "So is Novosibirsk what you thought it to be?" my 20-year-old host Julia asked me at dinner that night.

"I didn't think there'd be a city this big here. I thought I'd be staying in some small house with an old couple. I had that image of the babushka," I said. By that time in the evening, the entire image of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk had changed for me.

THE DAY STARTED NOT AT DINNER, but at breakfast. "Breakfast is ready," Julia announced to me at ten in the morning. Her mother, off to work even on a Sunday, had prepared a spread of yogurt, eggs, bread, sliced cheese, toast, coffee and tea for us. Julia and I sat at the table, where she taught me some history, even some American that I didn't know of. She told me about her theory on the origin of the Cold War: it was Great Britain that started tensions between America and Russia; if not for them, America and Russia would have probably continued to maintain their relationship as allies. Behind a regular 20-year-old Americanized by pop culture, Julia was still a bright, intelligent young woman.

While waiting out the storm outside, we got ready to see the sights of Novosibirsk -- although not required by contract, Julia was going to show me around, being on summer vacation and all. I typed up another entry and prepared my files for upload, while Julia did some things in her own room listening to Black Eyed Peas. I flipped through the Russian TV channels to see a Russian version of the game show Pyramid and a Russian-dubbed showing of American teen flick, 10 Things I Hate About You.

THE RAIN HADN'T STOPPED but we went out anyway and took the public trolleybus to the city center. Playing city tour guide with umbrella in hand and Jansport bag on back (complete with a lapel pin of the US flag on it), Julia told me how Novosibirsk only became as big as it was because of the railway; originally the railway was supposed to go to the pre-establish city of Tomsk, but they reused it, eventually giving Novosibirsk bigger industry and business growth.

The tour started off in the geographical center of all of Russia, the small Chapel of St. Nicholas, rebuilt in 1993 for Novosibirsk's centennial, on the site of the original that had been destroyed in the 1930s. We walked into a Russian Orthodox mass in progress. It was a full house -- there were about ten people in the room smaller than a American supermarket's produce section. After lighting some candles, Julia told me how amazed she was when she finally saw a big American and European church. "It's like a concert [in there,]" she said.

Julia took me through underground mini-malls to different sights on street level, passed the Local Studies Museum and the famous Opera and Ballet Theater, unfortunately closed for renovations. In front of it was Lenin Plaza, featuring a statue of the former Communist leader, soldiers, workers and common folk.

To escape the rain Julia and I browsed some stores in an expensive mall with glassware by Fabergé and Versace, until the sun started to break through the clouds. The street was still wet though, inhibiting the drag races scheduled for that afternoon, where "tricked out" cars raced each other like they did in America in The Fast and The Furious fashion.

We walked through the business district, passed a school showing off its traditional Russian hand-carved window treatments, a children's theater where puppet shows were performed, and a drama theater. "My [high] school is behind this theater," Julia told me. "I know this area because I used to skip class and play American pool."

Novosibirsk, a city in the middle of Siberia, was really like American suburbia I was discovering.

"There's the Levi's store," Julia pointed out to me. "We have Levi's too. See, Siberia isn't all bears and snow. We have everything."

"Oh, I knew you had everything when I walked in and saw the MTV in the corner."

Julia led me to a local internet cafe so I could upload my latest stories cheaper and faster than her dial-up. This internet cafe was on the mezzanine level of a bowling alley, yet another example of Novosibirsk's similarity to Anytown, U.S.A., complete with a computerized and animated Brunswick scoring system and Sega arcade games on the side. "Do you like to go bowling?" she asked.

"Yeah!"

We made a reservation for a lane and while waiting I worked on the internet. In about an hour, I was wearing rented bowling shoes and holding a twelve-pounder with "Cosmic Bowling" etched on the side. We played 3 1/2 games in our one hour lane (picture above) rental ($13 USD) all for the sake of me to say that in the middle of Siberia, I went bowling. Not only that, but in the middle of Siberia, I scored the highest I've ever bowled (to date), a 168.

After bowling, we went out for a cafeteria-style American dinner at Kuzinas (Cousins), owned by an American ex-pat who also started the multi-located New York Pizza chain all over town -- both establishments were frequented by Julia. After lasagna and chicken rolls, we took a trolleybus back to the residential neighborhood, where we went to the supermarket to get me food supplies for the overnight train to Irkutsk that night.

I had tea with Julia and her mother while waiting for my taxi. Julia asked me about Cafepress.com (host of The Global Trip 2004 Pledge Drive and WhatExit.net) and the services of PayPal. "But will it work here in Russia?" she asked me.

Russia? Oh right, Russia. For a second there, I thought I was in New Jersey.

It was sad to leave my Americanized Korean-Russian homestay, but I had to move on to other parts of Siberia. Perhaps I'd run into another bowling alley anyway; it wouldn't have surprised me.

Lucky Lazy Day

DAY 295: When I boarded the No. 8 train the night before, I was anxious. Would I be assigned to a second-class compartment with three drunken Russian mafia-types again, or encounter a sexy, but questionable blonde bombshell in a black bra? I got to my compartment assignment, #25 in Wagon #006. Inside was a young guy in a uniform.

Fuck, is this guy another imposter?

But I lucked out; I felt like I won the lottery or something. He was a legitimate officer with a wife and cute little daughter who shared a bed with her mother -- I've found you can always sort of trust a family man, traveling with his kids. The little girl's giggles were music to my ears. The other person in the room was a lone woman who made kissy faces to her lover on the other side of the window as the train took off.

NOTHING REALLY EXCITING HAPPENED the entire day on the 30-hour train ride -- except for the fact that in that time, I managed to catch all the way up to the present in my handwritten journal for The Blog. I hadn't been caught up for over a month since slacking off in Spain, but had finally made my mark. In my spare time, I finally got back to reading instead of writing, something I hadn't done in a long time.

The train cruised eastbound to Irkutsk in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia, passed little houses and fields with haystacks in them for the horses (picture above). We stopped periodically at station stops where vendors sold food goods, but I was already well stocked with juice, water and ramen noodles. Plus, the nice young family offered me some cheese and bread, cucumber and tomato.

All in all, it was a fairly lazy but productive day (and two nights) on the train, the kind of rest and relaxation period where you don't leave the house and veg out all day. Man, I hadn't had one of those in a very long time.

The Real Siberia

DAY 296: The sun rose around six to burn off the morning mist of the Siberian countryside. I was awake before my alarm clock set for seven -- my internal body clock was all out of wack with the constant adjust of time zones every other day.

Seven thirty-three a.m., right on schedule. My train arrived in Irkutsk on a cold morning, cold enough that it finally felt like my stereotypical conception of Siberia, just without snow. I saw my breath in the air as a sign handwritten in bright orange magic marker stared me in the face: "ERIK TRINIDAD." Holding it was Martina, a Russian woman sent from the agency that didn't speak any English. She was friendly anyway, and escorted me to the taxi that took us over the frigid Angara River into town to my homestay for the next three nights. We arrived at an apartment complex on the quieter end of the main strip of town. On the third floor of one of the buildings I met Nina, an old woman living with her cat in a nice humble place with a lot of houseplants.

It's always a hit-or-miss with a homestay, and so far I was two for two on hits. Despite Julia's (Novosibirsk) notion that it was a requirement for a homestay to have at least one English-speaking person, Nina only spoke Russian -- and her cat didn't say much at all, not even a "meow."

No matter, we got by with body language, and my limited reading from my phrasebook. In a way, it was almost exactly the way I imagined a homestay: a cold day with an old woman and a language barrier in a humble little home. I had finally found "The Real Siberia," just without snow.

I took a nap for the rest of the morning and awoke at eleven for a shower and breakfast. Nina had prepared a spread of meat, cheese, bread, tomatoes and cucumbers for me, but wasn't much of a conversationalist. It seemed to me that she was doing the homestay service only as a means of additional income, and only performed her obligations as required by contract: provide a private room and make breakfast. The friendships I had made in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk were just a part of life's little bonuses.

THAT WAS THE END OF "THE REAL SIBERIA" for the meantime. The sun came out and warmed Irkutsk to a hot summer day, shorts weather almost. Although not a big modern city like Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, Irkutsk still had a modern edge. With a population of about 600,000, it was more like a modern suburban town. Walking down its main strip Karl Marx Street, it felt like I was walking down Main Street, U.S.A. with all the familiar shops and stores selling shoes and clothes -- there was even a bowling alley. Once known as the "Paris of Siberia," Irkutsk had many stores selling gold and imported goods during an 1880s gold rush, which as far as I could see, were long gone.

I left my fleece jacket back at the house and went exploring the sights, starting with the Volkonsky House, one of the houses built by the Decembrists, a group of intellectual rebels who had staged a coup against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825, only to fail and to be banished to Siberia. It was a prime example of Irkutsk's distinct wooden houses (picture above) -- some with intricate decorative wooden carvings known as "wooden lace" -- found in all neighborhoods of town where modern construction hadn't found its way to yet.

I walked the entire strip of Karl Marx strip, passed a group of leftover war tanks on display in a parking lot, the Academic Drama Theater and to the obligatory statue of Lenin found in a main plaza. Another statue, one of Alexanary was found at the end, near the Angara River. In the center of the river was Youth Island, a sort of relaxation park accessible via a footbridge, which was a nice place to sit out for a while and watch the Angara River go by.

In the Irkutsk Regional Museum (just $2 with my "student" discount), displays and exhibitions showed off artifacts of all the cultural aspects of the region throughout history, from the Ice Age to the nomadic tribes, to the southern Asian influence, the colonial influence and the Soviet one. Across the street was the White House, the former home of the governors general of Eastern Siberia, now a university library.

IRKUTSK DIDN'T LOOK LIKE it had more to offer for more than a day of sightseeing, so I went over to the only tour agency that was both mentioned in the Lonely Planet guidebook and on the map. Why Lonely Planet didn't mention the others on the map (even if off the map) I didn't know, and I hated them for it. No matter, I figured there would be a group of tourists like me at the one in town since it was on the map, only to find myself the only one there talking to the woman who spoke basic English. I tried to get a tour to nearby Lake Baikal, and she offered me one where I'd have to go on a train for 12-hours. I knew there was another way -- it's only an hour by bus -- so I politely left and went to go look for another tour agency in the book.

After an internet session, I asked for directions to the Green Express agency, which was on the other side of the river somewhere. I walked, and searched and searched, only to find out that Lonely Planet's map had the streets mislabeled, costing me time. (Damn you Lonely Planet!) I finally found the building, only to find it had closed for the day at five. (The next day, I found out it didn't matter because the agency had moved entirely since Lonely Planet's publication date.)

I WALKED BACK OVER THE BRIDGE into town to see the other sights -- there was still a good six hours of daylight left. I wandered the Plaza Kirova, near the Church of the Savior, the Polish Catholic Church, and a new church bigger than both that wasn't even mentioned in my Lonely Planet guidebook. (I swear, Lonely Planet; I bought your latest edition too! I understand that maybe you couldn't put in every detailed in an abridged "Shoestring" book, but I was using your guidebook specifically for the Trans-Siberian Railway and the cities and sights on the way.)

Hungry, I went looking for a place to eat in town, but in this small time suburban place, all the cafes and cheap eateries seemed to shut down by seven, even with four more hours of daylight left. I guess Irkutsk wasn't the big city or town after all; perhaps I really was in a place as remote as Siberia.

I went walking to try and find an open place, but was soon followed by a beggar woman who wouldn't leave me alone, and just went back home. I settled for one of my spare ramen noodle bowls -- Nina boiled some water for me, although it seemed to me like she felt like was perhaps doing too much. Her cat, who reminded me of Mr. Jinx in 2000's Meet the Parents, visited me in my room often, even opening the door with his paws. I thought in the daytime he might try and scratch up my stuff in my bags, but then I remembered he didn't have any opposable thumbs.

THAT NIGHT I JUST WROTE on my laptop until I was all caught up on The Blog. The weather outside got cold, and I was in The Real Siberia once again.

No Aunt May

DAY 297: Living in a homestay with Nina was sort of being like Spiderman's alter ego Peter Parker. I lived in my own room with an old woman with white hair who, without me might be pretty lonely, just like Peter Parker and his Aunt May after his Uncle Ben's death. Meanwhile, she, nor did many people I've met, knew of my secret identity as this big world traveler -- a superhero to those stuck in office cubicles -- with The Global Trip insignia emblazoned on my chest. (I don't really reveal my 16-month travel plan to locals, thinking that they might think I'm some sort of millionaire. RTWs make you poor!)

Anyway, the similarities end there; while Aunt May in the Spiderman comic is an extremely sweet and friendly old woman who would bend over backwards for her dear nerdy photographer nephew Peter, Nina wasn't the type that would. Don't get me wrong; she was okay and sort of nice, plus she made a mean breakfast every morning -- this morning included fried eggs and blinys -- but that was about it. Her obligations as a homestay host were to provide me a private room and breakfast and nothing more. Anything above that would be a bonus, and the one bonus she did not possess was the ability to speak English. To be fair, it was understandable; it was me that should have known more Russian. But as a volunteer host, I figured the least she should possess was the patience to understand the Russian coming out of my mouth -- as bad as it was -- as I read it from my phrasebook. My "Umm..."-Smile combos were only greeted by deadpan stares and often a stern-looking face.

Nina went about her business in the living room (picture above) after setting my breakfast for me on the table, and afterwards when I sat in my room with the door open and tried to figure out what I'd do with the day, she shut the door on me. Eventually she left the house, leaving me home alone with her cat, the one I called "Mr. Jinx." I had seen most of Irkutsk's sights and so just decided to sit at my desk with my laptop until I was all caught up with Blog duties. I went to the internet cafe and uploaded it all and then looked up the Green Express travel agency mentioned in my Lonely Planet book. Since publication, the agency had moved way out from the city center. I called them and they gave me hard-to-follow instructions to get there by public transportation, but suggested I should probably just take a taxi.

A FIVE-DOLLAR TAXI RIDE TOOK ME out of the city center, way off the my Lonely Planet map to an area looking even more like New Jersey -- residential houses, followed by some factories and industrial parks. Green Express was located in a ten-story office building in a business district. On the seventh floor, I was directed to Eugene, who knew more than average English.

"I'm in town for two more days," I said. "What sort of excursions or tours are there at the lake?" I asked.

"With only two days, you can go to Listvyanka," he answered, which was my assessment as well; it was the closest village on Lake Baikal from Irkutsk. I asked about the homestays and hotel situation, plus about horses and mountain bikes, and Eugene was a rather helpful guy -- well, he was just doing his job. After a bunch of phone calls, he told me that all homestays and hotels that worked with Green Express were booked solid, but that horses and bikes would be available for me at the Outdoor Center of his affiliated hotel, Hotel Terema. With no where to stay, I wanted to make the most of the one day and wanted to get to Listvyanka as early as possible -- spend from dusk 'til dawn there -- which counted out public transportation.

"Is there a way you can call me a private taxi to take me?" I asked. He said he could if I gave him Nina's address and phone number -- I only had the former.

"Ask your host if she can call you a taxi. If I do it, it will be more expensive because of commissions," Eugene told me. "Does your host speak English?"

"No." Great, the entire fate of me seeing Lake Baikal -- the reason I came to Irkutsk in the first place -- rests in the hands of an old woman who shut the door on me that morning.

Eugene gave me his card and told me to call him if I had any problems with Nina trying to arrange a taxi. I thanked him and hopped back in the taxi back to Nina's apartment at 30 Karl Marx Street.

"[SOMETHING SOMETHING BAIKAL SOMETHING,]" Nina asked me when I came in.

"Umm... " Smile. I whipped out my phrasebook while she looked for a map with a stern impatience with me.

"[Something something Baikal something,]" she asked, pointing to a map of Lake Baikal.

"Oh! Baikal! Da."

"[Something something something.]"

"Um... " Smile. "...I need taxi."

"Um!" she sarcastically mimicked, throwing the map to the table. "[Something something something!]" she scolded. Like I said, she was no Aunt May. I tried to look for a sentence in my phrasebook, but she just swing her arm in disgust and walked away.

I went to my room, a pathetic, non-Russian-speaking Peter Parker.

What do I do now? What would Spiderman do? He'd jump out that window in costume and swing around to blow off steam and think. Okay. Damn, no skyscrapers outside. And oh yeah, I don't exactly have the powers of a radioactive spider now do I? The only sticky white substance that comes out of me doesn't exactly come out of my wrists.

Rather than unzipping my trousers and aiming out the window (ew!), I did the next best thing (in this scenario at least) and decided to call Eugene at the Green Express office.

"Mozhna at vas pazvanit?" ("Can I use the phone?") I asked Nina, reading from my phrasebook. She gave me a look and said [something] in Russian. I showed her the number to prove it was local and she watched me dial the number.

Ring... Ring... Ring... No answer. I hung up and dialed again. Ring... Ring... Ring... Ring... Still nothing. Nina gave me this look that said, "Yeah right you have someone to call in Irkutsk. Who is it, you're imaginary English-speaking friend?" She went back to the kitchen and I dialed again.

Ring... Ring... Come on you bastard, I was just there at the office. Pick up! You couldn't have gone far. Finally he picked up. "Eugene, it's Erik Trinidad. I don't think my host understands me. Could you explain it to her?"

"Okay." I passed the phone to Nina and the two spoke in their native Russian. I couldn't hear what Eugene was saying on the other end -- I assumed he was giving her directions to call me a cab at 8 a.m. the next morning. I heard Nina's replies of "Da"s and "Uh huh"s. The conversation ended and I though Nina would call a taxi right after, but she just went back to the kitchen.

I DID MORE WRITING and went for another internet session, this time getting food before the town cafes' weekday closing time of seven. With all my Blog duties done, I celebrated with a couple of bootleg DVD purchases so that I could cuddle up to a good book that night -- my iBook.

Back at the apartment, the phone rang and Nina knocked on my door for me to take it. She hadn't called me a taxi -- knowing it'd be relatively expensive, she called her tour agent friend named Elena who spoke English. The friendly voice of Elena told me how significantly cheaper the buses were and that I should take one instead. In terms of time on the lake, I didn't have to worry about finding a place to stay; according to her I could wander the village and find a B&B or homestay with a sign in the front in English -- the residents would be more than happy to take me in for my money. "The mistress will help you with the buses," Elena told me. "I'll tell her."

I passed the phone back to Nina and heard more "Da"s and "Uh huh"s and afterwards, I kept the door open so that Nina could come in with the so-called help with the buses. But she just closed the door on me when she had a visitor stop by and didn't speak to me the rest of the night.

I sat in the comfy armchair in my room with my laptop on the side table to veg in front off the screen with a big of chips, soda and ice cream that I bought from the supermarket. In the middle of Kill Bill Vol. 2 (in English), which I hadn't seen yet, I was interrupted by a guest who rang the doorbell. It was Martina, my Russian-speaking contact with my train tickets for my fourth and fifth legs of my journey. She was smart and brought a somewhat English-speaking friend to translate, but it was hardly necessary since the tickets were pretty straightforward.

Although the cover of the Spiderman 2 bootleg DVD I bought said it was in English, it wasn't -- only in Russian. I tried switching the audio track and played around with the subtitle options, but nothing. I watched it anyway, hoping to pick up some Russian here and there. As I watched the scenes with Peter Parker and his sweet aunt in their house in Queens, I finally found a similarity between Nina and Aunt May: as much as I pushed the buttons, both only spoke in Russian.

Deadpan Looks By The Deep Blue Lake

DAY 298: From what I had heard, many travelers on the Trans-Siberian Railway only stop once on the way from Moscow to the Far East in Irkutsk in order to see nearby Lake Baikal (rhymes with "bagel"). The shimmering deep blue lake -- the world's deepest body of freshwater -- was formed after a collision of tectonic plates. It is believed that as the plates separate over time, the lake will get deeper and wider, forming the earth's fifth ocean. Until then, it still remains the one "must see" place in Siberia.

MY BAGS WERE PACKED BY EIGHT and Nina served me my obligatory breakfast at nine. She wasn't as much help about the buses like her travel agent friend Elena had told me she would; all she did was motion me that I'd better hurry or I'd miss the bus. I had packed everything thinking I wasn't planning to come back to Nina's apartment -- I was going to spend my final night at this stop not at her place but in Listvyanka on the shore of Lake Baikal -- so I tried to give her back the key for the front door. In another episode of miscommunication, she refused it -- perhaps she didn't think I'd spend the night there.

I got to the bus station at ten hoping that the next bus would leave within the hour. A taxi driver approached me with body language to take his cab. He showed me the bus schedule on the wall for Listvyanka: 9:00, 14:30, 17:00. I had missed the 9 a.m. and the next wouldn't be for another four and a half hours. He quoted me 1000 rubles for the 65 km. ride (about $34), which was about what Eugene at Green Express said it would be anyway. I hopped in the cabbie's ride.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER I was standing at the Hotel Terema on the top of a small hill overlooking the tiny village of Listvyanka with the blue waters of Lake Baikal just behind. Around me were trees, mountains and little hours on dirt roads with gardens and farm animals. Cows walked around as they pleased while roosters crowed in the distance. Finally, I was in a Siberian countryside that looked not like New Jersey, but more like, well, Siberia, just without the snow.

I went to the hotel reception as instructed by Eugene at the Green Express travel agency. As predicted the young woman there spoke English -- but wasn't much help. She didn't even crack a smile or even a half-smile.

"Where is the outdoor center?" I asked.

"It's here. What do you want?"

"Eugene said that there'd be horses or bicycles that I might rent."

"There are no bicycles," she said deadpan. Not even a smirk.

"Oh, Eugene told me there would be," I said. "And horses?"

"We have none, but maybe you will find [someone else's] horses in the back."

"Okay," I said, remaining positive. "I know you have no rooms, but another agent told me that I might be able to find a homestay around here. Which way would I go?"

"I don't know. I've never rented a house before," she said, again emotionless or even with a bit of disdain.

"Is it okay if I leave my bags here while I look for a place? Eugene said that if I came here to reception, they'd sort things out for me."

"You can't leave your bags here unless you are staying at the hotel," she told me after consulting with the other deadpan woman at the desk.

I LUGGED MY BAGS for about forty-five minutes through the village, a tiny settlement relatively speaking, with a population of just 2,500. There were only a handful of people walking around, plus a couple of cows. I looked all over for those houses with signs on them for available rooms, until I finally found a sign on the main road for a B&B through the valley. Walking another kilometer with my bag, I found the place with a sign in front with the English word "ROOMS" on a sign.

"U vas yest... uh, a room?" I asked the guy at the gate.

"Yes." The guy was Nicolai, a 23-year-old who learned English from being a foreign exchange student in Iowa, USA for four years. "We only have rooms with two beds," he told me with his Russian accent. The accommodation was about $40 USD, reasonable for what it was. "Oh yeah, you can also stay in a Mongolian yurt," he informed me. In the backyard were three traditional Mongolian yurts, big circular fabric tents constructed with a central pole and rope. At only about $12 a bed, it was perfect -- no one was staying there anyway; I had the entire deck of three yurts to myself.

Nicolai's parents ran the B&B, which was a fairly nice establishment compared to the little shacks down the road, and still not as Westernized as the bigger hotels like the deadpan Hotel Terema. Nicolai told me about bikes and boats and that if I wanted to do a boat excursion on the lake that afternoon, I'd better get to the nearby port and check it out soon.

ALONG THE SHORE OF LAKE BAIKAL in Listvyanka -- aside from the rocky beachgoers and villagers fetching pails of water (picture above) -- were informational signs with facts about the lake broken down into bullet points. Reading them, I learned a great deal about the body of water before me:

• Lake Baikal is the world's deepest lake, with a maximum depth of 1637 meters (over a mile)
  
• it is the world's oldest lake, aged 25 million years
  
• it holds 20% of the world's freshwater and 70% of the world's drinkable water without purification
  
• in 1996 it was declared a World Natural Heritage Site by UNESCO
  
• the main industry in the area is paper and pulp production
  
• the region holds the world's highest concentration of signs with bullet points about Lake Baikal
  

The local tourist information office (the only one in town) sold me a ticket for a 2 p.m. one-hour boat tour on the lake to Port Baikal and back. The group consisted of a Russian family, some guys from Greenland, a pair of women traveling together -- one New Zealander, one Brit -- and me. Our guide was a young Russian woman who spoke basic English -- she definitely knew the adjective "beautiful" because she used it to describe everything -- and read us more bullet points about the lake like a grammar school student presenting a book report nervously in front of the entire class. She acknowledged when she told us a pretty well known fact: "Lake Baikal is the world's deepest lake. You know this... Lake Baikal is the world's oldest lake. You know this." I didn't mind the mediocre presentation; the scenery that surrounded me sufficed for it -- especially after seeing nothing but modernized cities of Siberia thus far. The waters were near crystal clear; even the foam coming from the back of the ship was more clear than white.

Irene, the older, retired New Zealander didn't seem too impressed with the tour and was pretty critical of everything -- particular the claim that the local pollution of the lake is entirely the tourists' fault, when industrial waste wasn't exactly hidden behind the trees. After the tour, Irene and her younger friend Gilley invited me to join them for coffee at one of the three cafes by the pier.

"Sure."

Gilly and I had beers instead, and we didn't just have one round. We sat out under the warmth of the sun, just being lazy over conversation. We took notice that just like the staff at the Hotel Terema, the majority of the cafe staff didn't crack a smile. "Everyone here is miserable and cold," Irene said. "I fit right in here." She was a seasoned traveler, having done most of that traveling in the sixties when going around the world meant "just going to India and doing drugs for six months." In her older age, perhaps she was still stuck in the sixties, ending every other sentence with "man."

Her sardonic bitterness -- which often transcended into humor -- came with age she said. She was the type of person who probably invented the slogan "Life's a bitch and so am I." She had been critical for the entire ride through Russia, even telling off one of the guards at the entrance to Lenin's tomb in Moscow who had been rude to her: "Your punishment is that you have to stay in this country for the rest of your life!" she told the guard who didn't understand. Gilly was often humored by all of her travel companion's snide comments, given that the recipient didn't hear or understand -- which wasn't always the case.

THE PIER AT LISTVYANKA WAS THE CENTRAL MEETING PLACE of the village, where the boats, buses, taxis and tourists all convened. A souvenir market was there too, next to a strip of food vendors selling the Lake Baikal specialty: smoked or salted Baikal omul fish. Smoke filled the air was hundreds of fish were freshly smoked by dozens of vendors, selling them right out of the smoker. The enticing scent of the smoke was inescapable, which attracted the three of us to have dinner and more drinks instead of heading off to the Ecological Museum like we had planned. It was about one US dollar per fish, and about $1.60 for some fried rice from a big happy guy that reminded me of Navid (Ecuador), who gave us free freshly-roasted tomatoes as a gift. The three of us sat at a picnic table on the shore over dinner, swapping more travel tales. The two of them were fairly well-traveled, especially Irene, who in her "twilight" years, had no intention of stopping her travels or plans to climb mountains.

I accepted their invitation for a lake shore stroll and we walked along Lake Baikal, passed more little houses, cows taking over the road, a small wooden pier for smaller boats (HiRes) and a sad little zoo were Siberian black bears were poorly caged up. We eventually made it to their "homestay," which was actually an overpriced apartment their agency set them up with. There we had tea as the sun began to set outside the window. We went outside to another pier with our teas to watch nature's tranformation of hues, which turned the sky -- and the lake's reflections below -- a shade of pink.

NIGHT FELL AFTERWARDS, asking for a night out -- my last night outside of a train compartment in Russia -- and we ended up at the only bar visible on the main route, a rustic wooden place with a pool table and a fairly international crowd of about a dozen people.

We sat at a table over rounds of Russian vodka and orange juice (served in separate glasses in Russia), served by another emotionless deadpan staff that wouldn't crack a smile. There we met a rambunctious trio of American guys from Vermont and New York that tried to taunt the staff with falsetto calls. Still, nothing. One of them told us he was of Russian/Polish ancestry and that his European relatives were notorious for keeping deadpan faces in any situation.

The temperature had dropped as the stars came out. With no city lights, it was quite a display, all of them in the northern hemisphere present and accounted for -- even the clouds of the Milky Way. I didn't have anything but a t-shirt on so my time stargazing was brief. I bid farewell with my new friends of the day and bid them farewell when we split up. They went back to their apartment to wake early to go to Irkutsk while I walked the one mile to Nicolai's family-run B&B through the darkness with the sight of my breath in front of me at every exhalation. I suppose it was fitting; for my last night in Russia outside of a train, I had finally found the really real Siberia: a lake, trees, mountains, deadpan faces and all.

Gangs of Siberia

DAY 299: As a tourist, you don't really have to worry about the Russian mafia, so my Lonely Planet guidebook says; they are only involved in high-scale crimes involving big business or bribing police or politicians, like the Italian mafia in The Godfather. Whether or not it was the actual Russian mafia that harassed me on the second leg of my train journey when three drunk Russians sicked fake or corrupt cops on me I don't know, but that's not to say the actual Russian mafia is alive and well, not only in Russia, but around the world. I learned all of this at my family-run B&B's son Nicolai, a fine 23-year-old Russian guy with very good English.

I didn't run into Nicolai right away as I was up at eight in my Mongolian yurt in the B&B's backyard. I walked along the shore of Lake Baikal to get to the Ecological Museum after its opening, before the crowds. There I saw not only more bullet points about Lake Baikal but taxidermy stuffed animals of the indigenous creatures of the region included wolverine, lynx, ducks, wolf and chipmunks. Also on display were dried up or formaldehyde-preserved indigenous fish, like perch, sturgeon and Baikal's endemic Golomyanka, a small clear fish with no scales. But the main reason to go to the museum was for its new aquarium where indigenous fish and indigenous nerba seals swimming in a big tank of the lake's freshwater.

After the aquarium I went to the fancy Hotel Baikal with its fancy hilltop view (picture above) and rented a bike for an hour to cruise by the lake with the cold lake winds, and to run some errands (i.e. fulfill my postcard duties). I stopped by the B&B to get my address book where Nicolai was outside hanging out. "I wanted to ask you if you know anyone that will marry me so I can go to U.S.," he asked. "Married and handle the papers."

"Uh, I don't know really," I said, walking up the path to the yurts.

"I think maybe I'll have to spend ten thousand or fifteen thousand to get a wife."

I was sort of in a rush -- my rental was only an hour -- so I was off to talk to him later.

After mailing out postcards, returning my bike and grabbing a lunch of smoked omul fish, fried rice and pine nuts (right off the pine cone), I went back to my Mongolian yurt for a one-to-one with the young Russian. He and his mother ran the B&B in the summer, a fairly well-off one compared to the shabby ones down the block, with a new house on the property being built for higher guest capacity. Nicolai's father was quite the real estate entrepreneur, going into the business almost immediately when it was permitted after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, after the times that were a bit more, well for lack of a better term, Communist.

"I still remember in the eighties when our family had to get a ticket for meat and you got five kilograms for the family [for one month]," he told me. But his industrious hard-working father used the tools of capitalism to his advantage, building a local real estate empire where he'd just collected rent from tenants and use that money to build more housing or office space in Irkutsk. His business partner became quite prosperous too, leaving Russia with his family to live the good life in an affluent neighborhood in northern New Jersey outside New York City -- only to be pursued by the Russian mafia sect in the metro New York area.

"They said give them half of all his property or they will kill his wife and children," he told me. The guy, still bright industrious thinker found the loophole in this, renting a Jaguar instead of buying one (technically it's not his property), but the Russian mafia saw through that.

Nicolai was not without problems with gangs of his own. A former foreign exchange student in Iowa for three years of high school and six months of college, he had been surrounded by other foreign exchange students in the same program, particularly Hispanics in the division of the street gang, the Latin Kings. They had come to like Nicolai and wanted him to join up as their Russian muscle, but he refused. With their pressure and his homesickness, he returned to Siberia to be with family -- only to regret leaving the States five years later. He was now desperate to return, even if it meant buying a wife for the paperwork, so he could make money in the States as a truck driver.

The day was going by fast so I bid my Siberian friend goodbye. He told me that I'd have to come back to see the better areas of Lake Baikal -- Listvyanka didn't do it any justice -- and I agreed. Before I knew it I was on a bus back for Irkutsk. The one-hour 4:45 bus didn't leave until 5:00 and took 90 minutes, which would have put a cramp in my time schedule if I hadn't gave myself some padding before my train departure.

My last order of business in Irkutsk was to return the key to Nina's apartment -- which I wanted to give to her before I left for Listvyanka -- but when I arrived back there she was no where to be found, and there was no way to leave a key in the foyer and lock the door from the outside. I couldn't even slip the key under the door because a wooden flap fit over a small ledge in the floor like a Tetris piece.

Great, this is Nina's revenge.

In a frenzy I called all the local contacts I had as "Mr. Jinx" watched me from the floor. None one was around, but luckily I managed to stick the key on the side of the door, in between the door and the frame, and dashed off to the train station. There, Nina was waiting for me to get her key back, and with body language I told her where it was. She bid me goodbye in Russian and body language, although I don't know if she was saying "Good luck" or "Later, asshole."

IT'S FUNNY HOW I COMPLAINED that the Trans-Siberian Railway wasn't the international party I thought it would be because for my fourth and last leg of the journey -- my "official" last leg since technically I'd continue southbound into Asia on the Trans-Mongolian line -- was every bit the way I imagined. In my car I heard the languages of German, French, Spanish, English and of course, Russian. Unlike the Russians on my previous legs, these Russians spoke some English, so a language and culture exchange was inevitable. I shared a compartment with three Russians, Valentina, (another) Nicolai and Alexander, an Asian-faced Russian who was a cop in Irkutsk on his way to visit family in his hometown of Ulan-Ude, our destination. We pretty much played Twenty Questions with each other over beers to see how life was like on the other side of the world. Funny, whenever Alexander stumbled on his English, he'd say, "Umm... " and then smile. I knew exactly how he felt.

As I rode the train through the night with my friendly compartment mates and the friendly young British couple down the hall, it was good to know that with a whole new gang of Siberia to be with, it didn't have to be all violence and money.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Asia

DAY 300: It's somewhat fitting that I stumbled upon a interracial wedding party taking a big new family portrait in Soviet Square in Ulan Ude (picture below, which I took by posing as one of the many wedding photographers). The bride and her side of the family had Russian Caucasian faces while her new hubby had an East Asian one, just like the ones on his side of the family.

Ulan Ude, Russia, a former trading post for the tea caravans between Irkutsk and China in the 18th century, is one of the main crossroads between East Asian peoples and stereotypical Russian ones -- I say stereotypical meaning Caucasian because let's face it, two-thirds of Russia is in Asia; concurrently I say "East Asian" because Indian faces are Asian faces too. It lies in the region of the Buryat people, the largest indigenous group of Mongols in Russia. The Buryats have had a strong cultural identity that they wanted to preserve, from the days of Russian colonization to the days Soviet Communism was spreading like wildfire. While they might not have stopped the onslaught of either, they did preserve their identity and it is evident in the people and the culture of the city today.

My stay in Ulan Ude was brief -- only a total of about six hours -- but it wasn't too big and I had just enough time to see the major sights. My train pulled in early in the morning before 6:30 and I bid my compartment mates goodbye, including Asian-faced, Ulan Ude-born Alexander, the cop from Irkutsk who gave me "'Um...'-Smile" combos when he stumbled on his English. After catching a bit more sleep in the station waiting room, leaving my bags in storage and wasting an hour wandering the wrong side of the train tracks by accident, I found myself in downtown Ulan Ude, most of which was still in earshot of the train station's loud and obnoxious pre-announcement musical tone: a crude electronic beep rendition of the first eight notes of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas."

East Asian faces surrounded me -- I would have fit in perfectly if my skin tone was a bit lighter -- in a pleasant little town in the mountains where East Asian faces were even seen on local statues, like the ballet dancers in front of the Buryat Theatre of Opera & Ballet. In fact, the only remnant of Soviet sculpture (and the most obvious) was the big massive head of Lenin in the center of Soviet Square. (He looks like Captain Picard with a moustache, no?)

I walked the main street through town, passed the classical architecture and the ordinary type too. Like in Moscow and most of the cities along the Trans-Siberian Route, construction of new buildings was well under way. I thought seeing the Hodigitria Cathedral would be something to write about, but it too was closed off for renovations.

THE PIERCING ELECTRONIC TONES of Ulan Ude Station's pre-announcement "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" filled the air multiple times as I boarded a train around 1 p.m., which had come in all the way from Moscow, with service to Ulan Baatar, Mongolia and all the way to Beijing, China (still labeled as "Peking"). The train was a Chinese one, with courteous Chinese conductors that gave us bed sheets for free. (The Russian lines charged about $1.50 for sheets.) In my car was another international group with faces of young travelers from Poland, Japan, China, Russia, Mongolia and Spain.

The train head southbound through the countryside on the tracks of the Trans-Mongolian Railway, built section at a time between 1936 to 1956, each construction dependent on political climates between China, Mongolia and the Soviets. In the 1960s, the borders -- and therefore the line -- were shut down during the China/Soviet split, but it had only been reopened in the 1980s, providing access for locals and foreigners to go straight from Moscow to Beijing or vice versa if they so pleased.

A young couple from Barcelona I met were two of these people, having been in the same compartment in the same car of the same train for the past five days. When we stopped in Naushki, the Russian border station before entry in Mongolia, it was the longest time they had been off the train in the past week. It was probably the longest time anyone had been off the train though; the Russian exit formalities took four and a half hours for the entire train. Teams of stern-faced Russian immigration officials in uniform went to each person for his/her forms and passport in a formal military manner, so formal that you just had to hum the Darth Vader theme when they walked by. Another team of officials searched the train for contraband, even using screwdrivers to open access panels in the ceilings and walls to see if anything was hidden. The Russian officials marched around the train, and even saluted a higher-ranking officer like a platoon, before going back to the station office.

"Russian red tape," my young Polish compartment mate Mark said. He was no stranger to the formalities of Soviet culture, but knew that in Poland things were way more relaxed nowadays. "Everybody thinks Poland is like Russia, but it's a different country."

My two other compartment mates, two Mongolia women, had been subject to the strict Russian formalities; they had not registered their Russian entry form and had to pay a fine.

WAITING AROUND WASN'T SO BAD; the pre-announcement musical tone was the pleasant sound from Microsoft Word after you "Save As..." Plus, it was at Naushki station that I met the people on the train, sitting outside on the platform outside the station building. Vendors on the other side of a fence sold beer, fruits and snacks to keep up happy. Smiles were also brought about by a group of little dogs that walked around, jumping through the bars of the fence back and forth.

It was about nine thirty by the time we all had our passports returned, again, individually by the stern Russian officers. The train continued southbound through the night to the Mongolian border. After a brief 30-minute stop for a train inspection, we continued to Sükhbaatar, the town for Mongolian entry formalities. The process didn't take as long as the Russian one -- only about two hours -- but that wasn't to say it wasn't just as strict, or even stricter. A humorless Mongolian man in a uniform like a military general came to each compartment of our car and briefly interviewed up individually with our passports. It's funny how the East Asian-faced Mongolian official really scrutinized passport photos against the actual faces of the Asian passengers (me included); even he believed in the politically incorrect adage, "All you Asians look the same." For me and my American passport, he gave me a simple test -- to say my name -- which I did in a perfect American accent.

AND SO, after over six hours in border crossing formalities, the train finally continued on its way southbound to Ulan Baatar, Mongolia under the nighttime sky. I slept fairly well in my compartment top bunk as the fourth part of my trip began: The Global Trip 2004: Asia.

Surrogate Parents

DAY 301: Ulan Baatar (pronounced Ulan BAAT'r), which means "Red Hero," has been the capital of Mongolia since its "independence" from the Manchu Dynasty by help of the Russian Bolsheviks ("Independence" is in quotes because Mongolia eventually fell under the strong political and cultural influence of the Soviets.) The man responsible for the defeat of the Manchus and the eventual formation of the People's Government of Mongolia was Sükhbaatar (literally "Axe Hero") who had formed the army that teamed up with the Bolsheviks. A statue of this national hero stands in the middle of Ulan Baatar's Sükhbaatar Square, where a mausoleum that once held his remains stands at the northern side, flanked by the Parliament House.

This was just one of the sights I saw my first day in Ulan Baatar. I had arrived on a rainy morning via train and was picked up by Tatiana of Legend Tours, who had faith that I would arrive on the 7:33 a.m. train (which I did) even though she had been informed I would arrive at 6 a.m., when she originally showed up at the train platform. I hopped in her big SUV and she drove me through the city on a sort of mini city tour, showing me the central State Department Store, Sükhbaatar Square and the Chinese embassy, where I'd attempt to get my Chinese visa the following day.

The friendliness found in Tatiana continued when she introduced me to my host family, an elderly Mongolian couple, Vera and Gotov. Despite the fact that the neighborhood they lived in looked like a heavy-littered housing project in New York City, their humble apartment was very welcoming, with a big living room with satellite TV, a kitchen and a master bedroom.

After a nap, Vera served me breakfast and afterwards Gotov helped me find a laundromat in town. The two of them didn't speak any English -- I had to communicate with basic Russian (da, nyet, spasiba) but mostly body language. The two were patient with my inability to speak their language, and I was grateful for it after my homestay in Irkutsk with Nina.

My Mongolian surrogate parents took me to the city center in their SUV and brought me to a money exchange bureau to exchange my remaining rubles and some US dollars to local tögrögs and then dropped me off at the mall like I was their teenage American son. Before my surrogate parents left me, they told me which bus to take to get back home and even volunteered to pick up my laundry for me.

Actually the "mall" they dropped me off at wasn't a big one in the Western sense; it was the State Department Store, the big store no longer run by the state, but by private entrepreneurs that sold everything from groceries to DVD players and HiDef TVs. There I bought an English-Mongolian phrasebook which wasn't as helpful as I thought since the Mongolian half was in cyrillic letters, not in phonetic syllables in Roman characters.

I walked around Ulan Baatar -- known by ex-pats as "UB" -- pretty much hassle free with my Asian-looking face. Just like in South American (where my face was South-American-looking), most touts assumed I was a local, only giving flyers for tours and guesthouses to Caucasian folk. The only time my cover was blown was when I took a photo of the State Department Store like an obvious tourist, which prompted begging children to come out of nowhere to hound me for the ice cream bar I was eating.

DOWNTOWN U.B. WAS FAIRLY MODERN, although not as crazy as a bigger city. Buses, cars and trams polluted the air, but it was bearable to walk around in moment at a time -- phone call vendors on the streets wore dust masks. I didn't have enough time to see the museums by that time in the day, so I just wandered around, passed Sükhbaatar Square, the State Opera and Ballet Theater, the Tumen Ekh Ensemble Palace (closed) and the city circus building (also closed). I wandered outside the central business area to discover an old train museum and finally to something unlike the list mentioned above -- if you hadn't noticed, all those things mentioned were similar to those found in Russian cities due to the Soviet influence.

The Gandategchinlen Khiid monastery is the "largest and most important in Mongolia" (says Lonely Planet), both superlatives probably due to the fact that it actually survived the religious purges of the Soviets in the 1930s when they wiped out all establishments of religion in their territories in accordance with their atheist mandate. Gandategchilen Khiid, which means "great place of complete joy," was built in the mid 19th century for monks of the Lamaist faith, when Lamaism (Tibetan Buddhism, the one Richard Gere practices) became widespread throughout Mongolia. Today, over 150 monks pray there with prayer wheels and a huge 25-meter tall golden statue of the Buddha inside the Migjid Janraisig S&uulm;m temple, which was reconstructed in the 1990s to replace the damaged original.

I BOUGHT SOME PROVISIONS at the grocery for dinner and walked back home instead of taking the bus (it was only 20-minutes walking), only to find out that Vera had made dinner for me: spaghetti with meat sauce, Mongolian milk tea and baitsaan zuush, a sort of Mongolian cole slaw. I showed her the dictionary/phrasebook I bought that afternoon and the rest of the night my Mongolian surrogate parents and I (picture above) communicated simply by pointing to phrases in our respective language so the other could see the translation.

Later that night I realized that I was actually sleeping in the master bedroom -- the only bedroom in the house. Vera and Gorat had given it up for me. If there was a phrase for "mi casa es su casa" in my phrasebook, they might have pointed to it, but translating Mongolian to Spanish may have been too far a stretch, even for nice surrogate parents like them.

The Return of Ghenghis Khan

DAY 302: "Between the National History Museum and the Natural History Museum, which one is better?" I asked Tatiana at her Legend Tours' office after arranging an excursion to the nearby Mongolian countryside the next day.

"I think the Natural History Museum," she answered. "But I think you have time for both."

The Natural History Museum was "just okay" (for me) with its taxidermy stuffed animals of a polar hare, an indigenous two-humped camel, lynxes and wolves -- plus a really cool painting of primitive man slaying a saber-toothed tiger. The main attraction was its paleontology wing's big skeleton of a tarbosaurus, one of the several types of dinosaurs that roamed the nearby Gobi Desert to the south. While learning about the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I was more impressed with learning about the time when Ghenghis Khan pretty much ruled it on my visit to the National History Museum.

The National History Museum's exhibition was a chronological history of Mongolia, starting from the Stone Age and onto the Ancient States period -- when the Huns ruled from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st AD -- but the most interesting part of Mongolia's history (for me) came in 1162 when Ghengis Khan (picture above) ruled the Mongol empire, the largest empire in the world at the time, which stretched as far west as Eastern Europe and the Middle East and as far south as where Vietnam is today. The Mongol empire lasted for about two hundred years under Ghenghis Khan's democratic philosophies of government:

• government is participatory
  
• rule by law prevails
  
• all are equal before the law
  
• personal freedoms are honored
  
• chocolate milkshakes for everybody!
  

Actually I made that last one up, but seriously, how great would an empire be if everyone got frosty chocolate milkshakes? Anyway, milkshakes or not, Ghenghis Khan was the Mongols' greatest (and possibly lactose intolerant) ruler, never to be forgotten.

However, in 1308, the great democratic Mongol Empire fell to the hands of the agressively expanding Manchu Dynasty from China. Mongol battle gear was no match for Manchu battle gear. By 1691, the Manchu Dynasty took over the land of the Mongolia. Chinese people were even encouraged to intermarry the Mongols (in their traditional Mongol clothes) to wipe out their pure lineage entirely.

Enter Sükhbaatar, the "Axe Hero," who formed an army to combat the Chinese before it was too late. In 1919, with no acceptance in a cry for help to Russian, Japanese, American, French and British govermments, Sükhbaatar turned to the Bolsheviks who were leading the revolution in Russia -- which led to the rise of the Communist Soviets -- who helped defeat the Manchus. After victory in 1921, Sükhbaatar formed the Mongolian People's Party of "independent Mongolia," which soon fell into the hands of the Soviets who had purged their Lamaist religion and introduced the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, still in Mongolian written language today.

The Mongolians never forgot about their glorious past, the days when their Ghenghis Khan ruled most of the eastern hemisphere. However, along with religion, praise of Ghenghis Khan was also frowned upon by the Soviets, perhaps because of its ahead-of-its-time democratic thinking. It wasn't until the Mongolians saw the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that they -- along with most of the other Soviet-influenced countries -- protested until a free democracy was enstated in the country. In 1992, Mongolia finally became independent, in the spirit that Ghenghis Khan had 700 years prior. Ghenghis Khan (also spelled "Chinggis Kaan"), and the public remembrance of him, became in fashion again. Ghenghis Khan's face appeared on local currency and Chinggis Kaan Beer and Chinggis Kaan Vodka started to appear on the shelves.

MONGOLIA'S RELATIONS WITH ITS NEIGHBORING COUNTRIES are fairly stable nowadays, particularly with China from my experience when I went to get a visa first thing in the morning. I had tried to get a Chinese entry visa at the Chinese consulate in Paris after waiting on line for about four hours, only to be told that I wouldn't be able to obtain one unless I was in my home country -- but there were rumors I could get one in Ulan Baatar.

The Chinese embassy in UB was far less crazy than the one in Paris, with a courteous staff and a line of only about five people and one-day service for $80 USD ($60 if I wasn't American). It's funny how I had come to Ulan Baatar to get my Chinese visa at the Chinese embassy when France's wouldn't because the two friends I made on line, Antoine and Elodie, were French citizens that couldn't stand the craziness at the embassy in Paris either -- and they did live in the home country.

LONELY PLANET HAD LED US IN THE WRONG DIRECTION three times in a row for three different things that morning when the three of us wandered around, running errands and looking for some sort of tour together at the Legend Tours office:

"Thank you Lonely Planet," Antoine said after the first dead end.

"That map is Lonely Planet," Elodie said when we were lost, looking for Legend Tours. "Lonely Planet is not so sure."

"That book is old. That place has moved many many times since then," Tatiana told us, when giving us directions to a popular cafe.

The young French couple had more time in Mongolia than I did and so we split up. They went off to find a bigger tour group while I booked a solo three-day excursion to the countryside outside of Ulan Baatar, before heading out to the museums and learning about Mongolia's glorious past of Ghenghis Khan.

THE NEW DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT of Ghenghis Khan prevails in modern Ulan Baatar and it has opened the doors for foreign business -- there's even an IKEA. One such place was the Modern Nomads Cafe, which served Westernized food to locals, ex-pats and tourists like me. For me, nothing celebrated the return of Ghenghis Khan more than the good ol' fashioned chocolate milkshake I had there. I'm telling you, if only Ghenghis had that chocolate milkshake policy, perhaps the Mongol Empire might have taken over the entire world.

Little Yurt On The Prairie

DAY 303: I've titled this one "Little Yurt On The Prairie," playing off of the title of the book and 70s television show Little House On The Prairie. I never read the book, nor do I remember the TV show that well, just that in the introduction, young Laura Ingalls (played by young Melissa Gilbert) trips and falls as she runs down a hill. I remember being it really funny.

Anyway, if you've followed The Blog through my voyage through Siberia, it probably didn't come to any surprise that once I got to Ulan Baatar, Mongolia, it too was not a deserted city in the middle of nowhere. To me, unless a city has a good vibe -- like New York, Paris, Berlin -- it is pretty generic. As pleasant as Ulan Baatar was -- particularly my host family --it was just another modern industrial city after seeing its cultural sights and museums, and so for my last three full days in Mongolia, I decided to spend it in Mongolia's countryside.

While three days didn't allot me enough time for a full comprehensive look at the different ecosystems of Mongolia -- including the vast Gobi Desert with its indigenous two-humped camels -- it was enough time to see the steppe to the northeast of Ulan Baatar. Most of the steppe is preserved in the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, an open valley nestled between huge boulder mountains, perfect for rock climbing enthusiasts (although rock climbing culture hasn't really hit Mongolia).

Tatiana of her local Legend Tours picked me up at Vera and Gotov's apartment. From there we drove the hour out, on a road in desperate need of a truckload of pothole filler. Once through the entry gate we crossed the Tuul River and drove down the valley road to the Tarim Wellness Center, which sounds like a fancy spa, but was just a tourist camp in a small valley between big boulder mountains with about a dozen yurts (known locally as gers, picture above), a big house for toilets and showers and a big mess yurt for food, drinks and karaoke -- for those rare occasions you might want to bust out and sing Men at Work's "Land Down Under."

Before dropping me off, Tatiana took me out of the way and father down the road to the site most tour vans and buses go, Turtle Rock, a naturally formed massive rock that looks like a big turtle climbing over the hill.

"I'M HIGHER!" I heard a voice call out from above from one of the big mountainous boulders flanking the camp. It was an American from Chicago calling out to two Australian girls who were on another boulder -- a slightly lower one. I climbed up to meet them -- down below on the other side was a Mongolian camp blasting Dr. Dre and Eminem -- and learned that they were three of a party of ten travelers doing a backpacker package tour from Australian-based Sundowners Tours, this one a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway from St. Petersburg to Beijing. Since the party of ten (which included Americans, Aussies and Irish) was a pre-established group, they sat a table for ten set up for them by the camp staff. I was the only one in a party of one and sat at a table set just for me.

The Party of Ten went off with their tour leader to Turtle Rock, leaving me to my own devices. I decided to go for a hike, passed the main gate, a random basketball hoop and some dogs herding cattle, and through the valley to the Tuul River that we drove by on the way in -- perhaps 10 km. away. Before I was even a quarter of the way there, I noticed a storm brewing ahead. I could see rain falling from a dark cloud just over the nearest mountain on the other side of the valley. Thunder rumbled and bolts of lightning cut through the gray sky.

I stood there for a while, playing boy scout trying to figure out which direction the storm was headed and assessed it'd move away from my path -- but as soon as I continued my hike, a foreshadowing thunderous boom rumbled from the sky and into my ears. Up ahead a bolt of lighting came from above -- a much thicker one than the ones before I might add -- advising me to go back. They say you have something like a million in one chance of getting struck by lightning, but whoever said that was probably some big shot scientist in a lab coat in the safety of an indoor laboratory, not out in a big open valley in the middle of Mongolia.

Taking the big bolt of lightning's advice, I played it safe and headed back to camp. The winds shifted or something because the storm was chasing me like they do to cartoon characters with bad luck. I took a short cut on a hill. The storm caught up just as I was at the camp entrance gate -- fortunately with a roof structure to shield me from the rain and hail downpour that lasted all afternoon. I ran to my yurt -- I had one all to myself -- and took shelter until the storm passed and took a nap.

The rain stopped in early evening, giving me just about two hours of daylight left to hike up one of the mountains surrounding the camp. I went alone to be one with nature -- I pissed off the cliff -- and was rewarded with a view.

A table for one was set up for me at dinner in the mess yurt, but Parker, one of the Party of Ten invited me over seeing I was all alone. Parker and his wife, two young Americans, were also on a RTW trip, having hit most of the spots I had at different times. They too had a travel blog set up, one Parker crudely set up himself since he told me he opted not to do one with BootsnAll (the host of this blog), thinking that most commenters would probably just scorn them for their traveling habits (i.e. playing Tetris on their Game Boys in Red Square, spending hours each week to download the latest episode of The Sopranos on bit torrent and the like).

"I think this is the first time on this trip that the Americans have outnumbered everyone else," one young guy from Tennessee said.

"Is that why you called me over?"

"Exactly," he joked.

Dinner was a lot more sociable than my lonely lunch. The guy from Chicago and the guy from Tennessee (I never got their names) challenged the Aussie girls to sing "Land Down Under" on the karaoke machine -- hence, the karaoke machine's purpose of being there -- and they were inadvertently challenged to sing "Summer Days" from the Grease soundtrack. The singing never happened though, leaving the karaoke machine to do nothing -- until the Korean tour group came the following day.

I'm not sure how any of this relates to Little House On The Prairie, although I'm sure if the Ingalls relocated to Mongolia, little Laura would probably fall and bust her ass there too.

Wild Wild East

DAY 304: I've never been a cowboy in the traditional old American Wild Wild West sort of way, but I've seen a lot of classic Westerns. Actually, that's not true, I've only see a couple -- or three if you include Mel Brooks' western parody Blazing Saddles. In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that the landscape of the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park was reminiscent of being in the old American west -- especially when you are on the back of a horse all day wearing a sort of cowboy hat.

With Tatiana's help the day before, I had managed to book a horse for seven hours at the price of three. The unofficial timer started five hours after sunrise at around 11:15 in the morning when Davaabat (picture above), a 28-year-old Mongolia guy from a nearby Mongolian yurt camp came over to our camp with two horses, one for each of us.

Wearing my full-brimmed cowboy-esque sun hat, I rode my horse named Har, who was attached to a long rope held by Davaabat who was riding his horse named Hehr. Trailing behind Davaabat for most of the day wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the sounds of farts every two minutes.

* Urrrrrnnnt! *

Wait, was that my guide or his horse? I thought it was best not to ask.

We continued on through the vast landscape, passed herds of cattle, a stream and some French tourists from a package tour bus that took pictures of the two of us, probably thinking that I was one of the locals with my East Asian-looking face and all. At times, riding the beautiful northern Mongolian steppe landscape, I could imaging myself riding alongside the great Ghenghis Khan in the 12th century -- it was his home territory -- but then I'd hear the * Arrrruummmmmmppppf! * from the backside of my guide and his horse and be immediately reminded of the famous fart scene in Blazing Saddles, and then be transported back to the old American west.

My goal of the day was to reach the remote Guunjin Sün temple, a former religious temple created in Manchu style during the Manchu occupation. We trotted long passed Turtle Rock, the farthest most of the tourists go, and continued about another hour through the grassy valley and towards the mountains.

"Sün!" Davaabat pointed out in the distance. A red building was about halfway up a steep hill -- I noticed its Chinese architecture with its Chinese roof. Davaabat had his traditional Mongolian hat on and again I was transported back to a time of feudal Mongolia and China, when Mongols and Manchus duked it out with bows and arrows atop their horses. The Eastern mood was broken again though, when I heard the ringing of a cell phone coming from Davaabat's boots. He grabbed the mobile out of his leg and took the call.

We tied the horses to a tree at the base of the Guunjin Sün temple and proceeded on foot over a rickety suspension bridge over a small gorge. Soon we were at the foot of the stairs that ascended as steep as the hill's incline and walked up to the temple itself. It had recently been converted to the Aryabat Initiation and Meditation Center for Tibetan Buddhists -- the main religion of the country. Inside the building was prayer and meditation space and a golden Buddha statue with money in its hands.

After admiring the view from the temple
and trying on each other’s hats, I realized that we had completed the one goal I had of the day relatively early. There was still a good five hours of riding time that was agreed upon and so I used my Mongolian-English dictionary to point to "river," which translated to "upside-down L, O, Pi, M, theta, P, theta, H" since I hadn't reached the river the day before as planned. Davaabat slapped his horse on the ass to get a move on and it farted almost immediately after contact like a four-legged whopping cushion. Then again, maybe he timed it that way to hide his own flatulence?

AS COOL AS IT WAS TO RIDE ON THE TOP OF A TRAIN IN ECUADOR, the novelty of it wore off after a couple of hours, and I thought to myself, What the hell am I doing on the top of a moving train? Riding on the top of a horse is different though; the novelty lasts a long time, at least for me as I rode through the magnificent landscape of Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, passed other Mongolian horsemen and scurrying chipmunks below, still pretending that I was some sort of cowboy in the Wild Wild West. Davaabat was even jokingly twirling his rope like a lasso when we approached some cattle. For a while he gave me all the rope of my horse -- full control -- and I managed to steer my horse with my fellow Far Eastern Mongolian cowboy.

Conversations with Davaabat was not so much a chore; most of the time we just pointed to single words in my dictionary. We sat out by the Tuul River and had a sort of finger-point conversation. He knew I came from New York and wanted to know more about me. He pointed to "backwards N, p, r, 3, H." Translation: "citizen."

"Yes," I said, nodding my head.

He pointed to another: "backwards R, a, X with a vertical line down the center." "How, which way, in what manner."

I pointed to "born."

He pointed to rectangular U with a tail on the right side, a, Pi, backwards N, H. "Wages, pay, salary, scholarship."

I wrote down "$30,000" in my notepad to give him an average starting salary from my estimation. I figured it was too complicated to tell him I was actually unemployed.

He pointed to "Cap." "Month, moon."

I wrote down "$2200."

He flipped through the pages and pointed to the words for "send, deliver" and "life," and spoke the word, "money." But I didn't get it. "Send money life?" "Deliver life?"

"Deliver life, like a baby?" I said.

He looked for another way to express himself, but just got frustrated with the book and told me to forget it.

FOR KICKS, we switched horses for our final leg of the day, westbound into the setting sun, through more incredible grasslands and forests, just like in some of the classic westerns. The two horses, animals I've admired for years for their incredible strength and endurance, hiked up steep mountains on rocky territory, all while we were on their backs. My new horse however, turned out to be the culprit of the day, continuing to fart its through the landscape.

The day ended when Davaabat dropped me off back at camp. Immediately, Shirka the camp cook that I met that morning, signaled me to eat the late lunch he had prepared for me -- only to serve me dinner just two and half hours later. In between meals, he and two of the Mongolian girls on staff invited me to join them in a karaoke session in the mess yurt, so I could sing them American songs that they punched in: The Beatles' "Let It Be," George Michael's "Last Christmas," Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach," and Laura Branigan's "Self Control." My little concert with them didn't last too long because that night the machine was overtaken by a Korean tour group that had come for the night.

Alone in my yurt I could hear them wailing their vocal chords out to Korean love songs and I knew that I was no longer in the Wild Wild West but the Wild Wild (and sometimes off-key) East. However, I don't know what Shirka the cook put in my Mongolian beef dish because it was me that was farting now -- just like in that Mel Brooks movie back in the West.

Will The Real Mongolian Please Stand Up?

DAY 305: Being of Filipino descent, my physical appearance blended in pretty well in South America, making me able to walk amongst the locals "undetected" -- until I tried to say something and my cover was blown. I bring this up because I sort of blended in as a Mongolian as well (as long as I kept my mouth shut), and I contrasted my guide/driver Tatiana, a blonde, pale-skinned European Russian-born mother who was fluent in Mongolia, having lived in Ulan Baatar for quite a while with her baby son.

Traveling with Tatiana was an interesting experience because from what I gathered, people assumed it was me that was the local showing her, the foreigner, around.

AFTER A POST-BREAKFAST HIKE up one of the big boulders near camp for a final view of the Mongolian steppe landscape, Tatiana picked me up in her SUV to take me from the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park to the site of the former Manzshirkhiid Monastery to the south of Ulan Baatar.

There was no direct route between the two and so we had to go back to UB and then out again, on a road behind the Ulan Bataar airport. Along the way, Tatiana explained the little difference between her and her Mongolian neighbors: 1) that she rode in a car with a seatbelt on, and 2) she didn't drive like a guy who had too many beers and was rushing home to the bathroom. On the way through UB we saw two car accidents in a row, just two blocks away from each other. The first was so bad, Tatiana thought the driver might have been killed.

Back in the countryside I marveled at the big countryside and the big big sky with its big fluffy clouds -- as much as I've seen them, they never get old. Paying a toll to get into Ulan Baatar was so surprise but the surprise came when, in the middle of a deserted road, there was a tollbooth for what we didn't know. It couldn't have been for road repair fees because the road was so full of potholes.

The gatekeeper approached us from my side of the car first, probably on the assumption that I spoke his language. I didn't say anything because Tatiana spoke to him in Mongolian. She had been accustomed to possible Mongolian scams against foreigners and was very reluctant to pay the 500 tögrög "toll" on principle. She argued and argued over what the fee was far -- the road was in desperate need of repair -- and asked for identification. They furnished it, all the while another van full of Mongolian faces whizzed on by without paying anything.

"[You just let them go past!]" she argued in Mongolian as she started to inch forward. But the guard wouldn’t let go of the car without a fee. She just paid it in the end, got a receipt, and was frustrated for a while on the continuation of the drive.

A similar situation occurred at the entrance gate of the Manzshirkhiid Monastery. The entrance guard approached to my window, only to have foreigner-looking Tatiana do all the talking from the driver's side. After the fact, she told me the conversation went something like this:

GUARD: The entry fee is 10,000 tögrögs, so 20,000 for the two of you.

TATIANA (after recovering from the shock that the price suddenly jumped five times from what she paid before): I'm a guide. I've seen your museum fifty times.

GUARD: Okay, no fee for you, but 10,000 from him.

TATIANA: That's outrageous. It was only 2,000 last time.

GUARD: But now you get to see this. (He pulled out a cheesy brochure of the cheesy nature museum on the monastery grounds, which wasn't new anyway.)

TATIANA: Ten thousand is still too much.

GUARD: Okay, five dollars (about 6000 tögrögs).

TATIANA: It was 2,000 last time.

GUARD: Okay, five thousand tögrögs. (He continued to use the nature museum as his excuse to jack up the price.)

I paid the 5,000 and we drove up to the gate to be opened -- but then stopped when Tatiana read the Mongolian sign on the fence that stated that the entry fee for foreigners was 3,000.

She got out of the car and walked to the booth and argued for me in Mongolian. In the end, she didn't get my money back; just a name to report to the Ministry of Tourism.

"I think he just put the two thousand in his pocket," a furious Tatiana told me.

THE REST OF THE VISIT wasn't as annoying; Tatiana was not only my local travel agent and driver, but she was also my tour guide on the former monastery grounds. She led me around Manzshirkhiid, which used to be a big city-like Buddhist monastery in what is now the Uul Strictly Protected Area of evergreens, cedars and birch trees. Build in 1733, it once held two temples and 350 monks -- but all of that was decimated to the ground during the Soviet anti-religion purges of the 1930s. All that remained now were the ruins of the main temple and a lone surviving building, now a religious museum, complete with a model of the way things used to be. Perhaps my Asian-faced façade came in handy in the museum; I snapped away taking photos with no problem, while a white tourist had to pay the photographic rights fee. (That or people didn't realize I was taking photos with a little spy camera.)

Behind the temple were two prayer houses on the hill dedicated to the Gods of the Rocks, which I climbed to see while Tatiana waited below. On the other side of the museum, the only other main artifacts that survived were a big cauldron, chipped but still in fact after the Soviet attack, and a couple of statues (picture above).

The Nature Museum, as the brochure implied, was well cheesy with more taxidermy stuffed animals and glue and glitter drawings of local plants.

"I'M NOT GOING TO PAY AGAIN," Tatiana told me as we drove back to Ulan Baatar. She drove passed the supposed tollbooth without slowing down and then continued the hour back to the city. I dropped off my bags at Vera and Gotov's and then hitched a ride from Tatiana back to the city center.

We said our goodbyes in the car when she dropped me off at a cafe. "I'll see you the next time I come to Mongolia," I told her. I didn't know when that would be, but I knew whenever it was, it'd be good to have a Mongolian resident -- as foreign-looking as she may be -- on my side.

Chopsticks and Train Tracks

DAY 306: I woke up early that morning in Ulan Baatar to catch my 8:05 a.m. train to Beijing, China. Everything was packed and read to go by seven -- except for one thing: my watch.

It's funny how certain things suddenly become sentimental on a trip like this. For example, I almost flipped out when I thought I had left my New York Yankees hat in Namibia; it had become a symbol of where I came from -- where The Trip would begin and end -- plus it cushioned the blow when a heavy sign came crashing down on my skull in Brazil and sent me to the emergency room.

My watch also served as a sort of symbol; it was the first "major" thing I bought with money earned from my first job working grills in summer street fairs in and around the metro New York City area. Every time I look at the time, I am reminded that with a little hard work and a little savings, you can acquire the things you want -- much like how I set up this trip around the world. Although the wristband has changed for years, the center timepiece has been on my wrist practically everyday for the past thirteen years. I didn't by it for its brand (America by Perry Ellis, which I guess now serves as a symbol of where I'm from), but for the features that I required in an analog watch when I bought it at the age of sixteen: tick marks (but not numbers) where they should be, a date indicator and a day indicator. (The day indicator is really important on a trip like this because when you don't work a 9 to 5, there is no "Monday feel" or "Friday feel" and it's hard to say what day of the week it is unless you are told.)

Anyway, this watch has come to have great sentimental value to me -- like the gold watch in 1994's Pulp Fiction -- and leaving Mongolia without it would be a major downer. I pretty much ransacked my bags even though they had been neatly packed. I turned over the mattress, looked behind dressers, and nothing. I think my mania transcended into Vera because she was frantically looking for it too. She even called (and woke up) Tatiana to explain the situation -- not that there was anything she could do.

There was less than a half an hour left to get to the train station across town, and thankfully Gotov was to drive me. We stopped by the internet cafe that I might have left my watch at the day before (why I don't know), but it wasn't there. The minute hand was fast approaching 8:05 on my watch, wherever it was, and we just called off the search and head to the train station -- the next train to Beijing wouldn't be for another six days, and that train was booked full already. In fact, in the summer tourist season, it is near impossible to get a train to Beijing from Mongolia; the next opening wasn't until late September.

My surrogate parents Vera and Gotov seemed very concerned when we zipped towards the train station. Vera had a worried look on her face and Gotov even took the silver watch off his wrist and gave it to me to have -- I politely declined. Vera walked me and my bags to my train car -- with only minutes to spare -- and saw me off. Sooner than I thought, the train pulled out of Ulan Baatar, taking me southbound towards China. Towards China without my watch, I thought.

There was no use crying over spilled milk so I just sat in my compartment bed to chill out and relax from a hectic morning. I opened my Dave Barry book to read a bit and realized that I had used my watch as a bookmark the night before.

THE CHINESE TRAIN CRUISED OUT of the steppe region of northern Mongolia towards the Mongolian/Chinese border, stopping at smaller stations along the way. I had lucked out again on compartment mates: Henry, a Vancouver-born-but-raised-in-China Chinese guy on his way to Hong Kong to start a hair styling business; Toni, a Croatian-born-but-raised-in-Germany guy on his way to Shanghai to finish university; and another Mongolian guy who didn't say much in the few times he was awake in the room. Sharing the apples and cookies that Vera had packed for me broke the ice. Soon after, we were served airline-type food in our compartments from our food vouchers that came with our tickets. It was evident we were heading to China; our food was served with chopsticks.

I spent a good portion of the first six hours of the thirty-one-hour journey in my bed to catch up on writing and to read Dan Brown's Angels & Demons. Two little children spent their time sitting on the retractable chairs in the aisle playing with their Game Boys. When I finally looked out the window I saw that the scenery had changed; we had made into the great sandy expanse of southern Mongolian known as the Gobi Desert. Although I had enough apples, ramen noodles, chips and water to last me the entire trip, I head out to the dining car to be a little social. I hung out with Henry for a bit, talking about this and that when there was a tap on my shoulder -- Pilar, the Colombian girl from Barcelona that I met on the train from Ulan Ude to Ulan Baatar was there. Soon we were joined by Croatian Toni and the other Barcelonan Jave and sat around swapping traveler tales over beers. We looked out the window to see if we could get a glimpse of the indigenous two-humped camel, but there nothing but sand, small patches of grass and a few scattered cattle.

THE TRAIN CONTINUED THROUGH THE GOBI DESERT (picture above) all day until our arrival at dusk in Zamyn-Üüd, the border town on the Mongolian side. We were there for a few hours as really friendly Mongolian exit official proceeded with exit formalities -- no drama, just long. While waiting to get into China, we were handed a variety of entry forms, one medical form asking:

Have you had close contact with any probable or suspected SARS case in the past fourteen days? __ YES __ NO

"Not yet," I joked to Toni.

One form asked for your intended address in China. I just picked any old one in the guidebook.

"You will go to jail [if you don't stay there]," Toni joked.

"Well, it's my intended address. Maybe when I get there, I'll change my mind, but right now it's my intention to stay there," I said. "Actually, I intend to stay at the Forbidden City."

"Forbidden City, one," he joked.

The train pulled into the station at Erlian, on the Chinese side of the border for the long two-hour entry proceedings -- one hour if you account for the fact that we turned the clock back one hour in accordance with Daylight Savings. (I had my watch to do this now). Immediately we saw the different in the two cultures. As friendly was the officer was on the Mongolian side, the Chinese side was really sedated, in a serene, almost science fiction waiting room sort of way. The train platform (which we were not yet allowed to go on) had speakers that pumped Muzak renditions of elevator songs to keep us calm during the entire immigrations process, from "Our Love Goes Up To Where We Belong" and the theme to The Godfather. A pleasant female voice came on the loudspeaker and calmly announced, "Please... do not take inflammables or explosives on the train. Thank you for your cooperation."

"What's your name?" the immigration officer asked me. A simple test that he gave everyone.

"Erik Raphael Trinidad."

He flipped through my beat-up U.S. passport, full of stamps on almost every page (even with the page extensions in it) to look for the Chinese visa that I got in Ulan Baatar. He scrutinized my identification on the inside cover. "What's wrong with your passport?"

"I don't know." The ID page was all beat up and the lamination was cracking as if it might have been a forgery. This wasn't the first time an official suspected my passport was a forgery.

The officer didn't give it much thought after that -- I got an entry stamp. "Welcome to China."

IN ATTEMPTS TO PREVENT AN ATTACK by railroad in the past, the rails of the Mongolian and Chinese lines are at different widths; one cannot simply go from one country into the next. After the two-hour customs proceedings, the train was decoupled into sections and brought into a huge hangar where each car was lifted (with us inside) so that the bogies of every car could be swapped out for the Chinese-sized one. A huge mechanical arm like thing swung above us, to do what, I don't know. "It's like a big Transformer," Toni said. "More than meets the eye."

The entire process, as much of a picture taking event it was for everyone the first half hour, turned out to be fairly boring and it just put most of us to sleep. I passed out in my bed before it was over, but by morning I knew that we had "transformed and rolled out" into China -- my watch included.

Money, Lodging and Beer

DAY 307: "Did you see The Wall?" Colombian Pilar from Barcelona asked me in the early afternoon as I entered the dining car -- a new Chinese dining car that had been swapped for the Mongolian one during our overnight transformation to conform to the width of the Chinese rail system.

"Huh?" I said in confusion.

"The Great Wall," she said before saying some exclamation in Spanish. "The conductor told me we stopped here for five minutes to see The Wall because a lot of passengers are foreigners." Four minutes had already passed since we had stopped. The whole time I was just in my compartment reading; I thought the stop was just one of the many other stops of the day, in a small village for quick pick-ups and drop-offs.

Pilar and I were about to jump off the train onto the platform to catch the glimpse of The Wall I had missed; it was around the other side of the train. The conductor told us to stop because the train would leave any second, so Pilar led me from car to car at a frantic pace. Open open, slam slam. Open open, slam slam, went the doors as we tried to find one of the cars that had its aisle windows on the left side facing The Wall. The train started moving and we had not found one yet.

Just before it was too late, the next car had its aisle on the left side and we rushed to an open window where a small group was already gathered with their cameras pointing out. I did as they did and snapped a photo, but a mountain got in the way before the shutter released. At least I had seen it with my naked eyes, I thought. The Great Wall. Wow. I'm officially in China.

THE MAD DASH TO SEE THE WALL for a photo wasn't so necessary because The Wall is so long -- so long one might call it "great" -- the train tracks went parallel with it for a considerable amount of time and there was no missing it -- much to Toni's happiness because he too had thought The Great Wall stop was just another stop.

The train continued southeast-bound through the green hills Inner Mongolia (the name of a province in China) and then into the Shanxi province towards Beijing, capital of China, once named Peking by colonists who pronounced "Beijing" wrong. Xavi, Pilar, Toni, Henry, a Japanese girl whose name I never got and I killed most of the remaining travel time hanging out in the dining car, trying to learn Mandarin from Henry over beers and decent Chinese dishes prepared in the dining car kitchen. With the Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook I got at a used bookstore in Ulan Baatar, Henry explained that the hardest part of speaking Chinese is the different inflections, because each one is actually a different word. For example, "ma" can be said in different ways: with a high tone, "mâ," meaning mother; with no tone, "ma," which denotes the sentence just spoken was a question; with a rising tone, "má," meaning numb; with a falling tone, "mà," meaning scold; and with a rising and falling tone (the way Scooby Doo says "Huh?"), "mã," meaning horse.

"Mâ ma má mà mã," Henry told us, very fast. It was hard to keep up, and that was just one syllable five times. I didn't dare try speaking a whole sentence yet.

Written Mandarin is a completely different beast all together, with many Chinese pictograms that people will tell you is logical when its broken down because they resemble trees and mountains and things like that -- which I think is sort of a crock, because how am I supposed to intuitively know that a simple "X" represents a baby in some situations? I mean, X's usually mean ten or mark the spot or are drawn onto a simply face for eyes to show the guy is dead. Also, like the inflections in voice, one simple difference in line stroke may alter the word entirely. And don't even get me started on how impossible it is to look at a Chinese letter and try and pronounce it -- try it yourself the next time you see one. Thankfully, the Chinese adopted Pinyin in 1958, a way to write Chinese words using the Roman alphabet, so that foreigners like us could get around a city.

Pilar, who was writing notes in her notepad translating Mandarin into Spanish, was only concerned with remembering two symbols: the ones for man and woman, so she'd know which bathroom to go to. She had been having a case of the runs from something she ate in Mongolia and had no time to be deciphering symbols in the case of an emergency.

AROUND THREE O'CLOCK the train pulled into Beijing's main railway station. The doors open and we walked into the main hallway. We bid farewell to Henry and thanked him for his help -- he was off to get a ticket to Hong Kong -- while the Barcelonans, Toni and I went a long way up a ramp and out the main door. Suddenly, after over thirty hours on a fairly peaceful train ride, we were thrown into the madness that was Beijing (picture above). Touts came with signs for guesthouses. Beggars singled out the Western looking folk for spare change. And hundreds and hundreds of other Chinese people were just going about their business, picking up friends and relatives or dropping them off.

"Aren't you glad it's not rush hour," Toni said, smirking. It was Saturday.

"Okay, money, lodging and beer," I said. We were all travelers and knew the drill when entering a new city.

"That is practice for Life," Toni said. "First you need money, then you need a place to live, and then beer." Ah beer, the universal symbol at the end of a day for a job well done.

Money was no problem; I went to an ATM machine while Toni, the Colombian and the Barcelonan exchanged travelers checks at a nearby four-star hotel -- one that used to be affiliated with backpacker organization Hostelling International. Cheap accommodations were no longer available there, so we tried to find another place. The whole ordeal was confusing since we didn't know exactly where to go, how far things were -- plus it seemed the approaches by rickshaw and taxi drivers wouldn't end. Luckily every guy on every level of Beijing society seemed to have a cell phone, and each prospective driver would call a hostel up for us to get directions or to find out availability -- only to find out all the hostels in the immediate area were full. Toni said we should probably move out to the Dongcheng District where all the clubs and bars were; rumor had it there were a bunch of hostels there.

Two taxis piggybacked on the fifteen-minute drive through central Beijing, a city that we were soon discovering was an ultra clean city with no litter on its modern thoroughfares. We arrived near Workers Stadium, a sports stadium inside a park where many locals came to do Tai Chi exercises, jog or rollerblade. About five blocks away was a Hostelling International hostel listed in the guidebook. When we got to the lobby, four familiar faces from the train were there, also trying to get a room. After they all checked in, there were no more rooms for us, but the receptionist told us about a new HI hostel affiliated with the fancy Sports Inn built inside the Workers Stadium's ring -- it wasn't yet mentioned in the guidebooks, so it was worth a shot.

The Beijing Gongti Hostel at Workers Stadium was better than we could have imagined. The rooms were actually rooms that were designed for the fancier part of the hotel -- they even had keycard locks -- just at about $8 (USD) a night for a four-way share. Each room had its own air-conditioner and television, plus a view of the lake in the surrounding park. Down the hall were the shower and bathroom facilities and even a washing machine that was free of charge to use. Downstairs was another television that seemed to be perpetually showing Olympic ping-pong, and a decent internet connection with two extra Ethernet ports for laptops.

"I think this is the best place!" Toni raved, sharing my enthusiasm. Toni and Xavi were assigned to the same room, Pilar to another (all girls) and me to another were two Americans, Paul and Sam, had arrived just the day before, but had already pretty much spread out their things all over their side of the room.

MONEY, CHECK. Lodging, check. Beer was next on the list, but in a place like Beijing, you can't just have a beer on your first night, you have to have the local specialty known all around the world: Peking Duck, known locally (and more politically correctly) as Beijing Duck, crisp fried slices of duck breast rolled into thin pancakes with green onions and eaten with a sweet plum sauce.

Toni, Pilar, Xavi and I exited the Workers Stadium grounds and wandered for a place to eat, a real locals place that didn't have pictures on the menu to point to or English translations. We found a little divey place nearby and were handed a menu completely written in Chinese characters. It might as well have been a US Treasury tax form pamphlet because no one was about to figure out what it all meant. Using our phrasebooks, we tried to ask for duck, but they had none. No chicken either. We looked around the restaurant and simply pointed to things the people were having around us (in a borderline rude sort of way) and ended up sharing a bowl of noodles and a big platter of pork bones with some meat on them -- nothing that really said "Welcome to Beijing." At least there was beer.

Still hungry, we wandered down another street and found a more upscale looking place with brighter lights. Still a place frequented by locals, we asked if they had Beijing Duck and the man at the doors said they did. It was a ploy in the end because after we were comfortably seated -- conveniently by the front window to attract other foreigners into the restaurant -- they said they didn't have Beijing Duck. We ended up ordering a couple of dishes -- the menu was had English translations and pictures -- which filled us up some more, but not completely. Again, at least there was beer.

Pilar was just getting over a stomach virus that she got in Mongolia (most likely from trying the local drink of horse's milk); by default Xavi went with her, leaving me and Toni to check out the scene for the rest of our first night in Beijing. We asked the hostess at the restaurant for another with Beijing Duck and she put us in a cab and told the driver where to go.

About ten minutes later we were on the other side of the city center near Tiananmen Square, in another little divey place where a lone guy was sitting in the empty restaurant waiting for either a customer or closing time until we arrived.

"Beijing Duck?" Toni asked -- it never hurt to try and ask in English first. The guy understood and went to the kitchen to get it prepared. Meanwhile, there was beer.

After finally having the quintessential "Welcome to Beijing" meal, we asked the only other guy in the restaurant for a cool bar. With hand signals and limited verbal communication, he told us to go to a place called Mix, "the best disco in Beijing" he said, which was actually back near the Workers Stadium.

A taxi took us back to our home neighborhood, but we couldn't find Mix. We ended up finding one of the crowded side streets where a lot of trendy bars served foreigners and locals alike for a round of beer. After asking person after person for directions to the Mix place, we started walking down the main street back towards the stadium.

"Do you know the club Mix?" Toni asked some random Chinese girl on the street.

"Maggie's?" she replied. She knew some English after all.

"No, Mix. M, I, X," he said, writing the three letters in the air with his finger.

"Yes. We go and take a taxi. Only ten yuan. Let's go," she said eagerly. She had a friend with her that would also go. Toni seemed to excited at the prospect of hooking up with the girls that night at the Mix club, and rushed into an acceptance.

"Are we going to Mix?" I asked.

"Maggie's," the girl replied.

"Maybe Maggie's is the way Chinese say Mix," Toni said. He and the girl were already flagging down a taxi. Skeptically I went in the vehicle with my own female escort. I had a feeling they were being a bit overfriendly for a reason.

"Where are you from?" one girl asked me on the taxi ride.

"USA," I said sort of fast, mumbling. She heard another country for some reason, "India," and right after that (as fucked up as it sounds), she simply ignored me; all eyes went on the guy pretty fly for a white guy, who probably had a bit of local cash on him.

The bar we arrived at was definitely not "Mix," but "Maggie's," as written in big neon letters above the bar. Inside were the sounds of American dance and hip-hop -- and a bunch of old middle-aged men dancing with young Chinese women. Long story short, the girls had scammed us out of cab fare to get to the bar they both "worked" at. When Toni didn't have any small bills of the local yuan currency, he wanted to change money at the bar -- but they gave him a bad rate and so he remained at Maggie's without usable cash.

When the girls found out that Toni wasn't exactly a big spender -- particularly on them and their preference for pricey cognacs -- they excused themselves, even admitting, "Excuse me, I am working here." Around us, other working girls were looking for possible clients for the night, mostly desperate middle-aged men with time and money. We hung out on the dance floor and the sofa in the back for a while, exhausted but still happy that we had arrived in Beijing, the final destination for both of us after long days on Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian trains since Moscow -- despite having been led on by a couple of working girls on our very first night. We had money, we had lodging and so, for one more time that night, we cracked open another round of beers in celebration.

Forbidden No More

DAY 308: At the heart of Beijing lies the Gugong, the Imperial Palace, more commonly known as The Forbidden City. Why it was still known as The Forbidden City I don't know -- they just let me (and hundreds of others) right in through the front gate.

Actually, the name spawned from the fact that when the palace was occupied by Ming and Qing dynasty emperors and their parties of family, soldiers, eunuchs and concubines, anyone else was forbidden to enter within its walls -- or to even approach the walls for that matter. Times have now changed of course, and now anyone with 60 yuan (about $7.50 USD) can enter through its gates and be one of the estimated two million visitors per year who come to see the center of many a dynasty.

BEIJING HAS A LONG HISTORY of being the governmental seat of the lands that eventually evolved into modern day China. It was here that Ghenghis Khan and later his grandson Kublai Khan ruled the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, the largest empire in world history, until it fell and eventually became the center of the Ming Dynasty. Ming Emperor Yongle reconstructed the city and built many of Beijing's famous historical buildings known today, including The Forbidden City. The Mings were succeeded by the Qings who ruled until the early 20th century when Beijing was run by overlords, and then foreign troops. Enter the Communists in 1949, and the city was reconstructed under the Cultural Proletariat Revolution of Communist ruler Mao Zedong. Nowadays, Beijing continues to be modern China's capital with a unique multi-party rule where the official ruling Communist party works together with socialist parties to bring Beijing and China up-to-date with the rest of the world.

MY JOURNEY TO THE "CITY" once forbidden to someone like me started at my hostel in the northeast corner of the city center. Using the Roman alphabetic Pinyin signs -- and many that just used plain old English -- I managed to figure out the Beijing subway to get to the Qianmen Gate, to the south of The Forbidden City. After a quick Chinese fast food breakfast of dumplings at Yonghe (who looks like he could be Colonel Sanders' Chinese cousin), I made my way passed the Qianmen south and north gates, through Tian'anmen Square -- with its disciplined soldier guards and vendors selling little flags of China for people to pose in pictures with -- and up to Tian'anmen Gate (picture above), where I came face to the painted face of Mao Zedong. Once through the gate, I had entered within the walls of the once forbidden palace, paid my 60 yuan at the ticket booth and was on my way inside.

Most times when you go to a place like this, the buildings don't really mean anything unless you know a little historical background information. I had not yet purchased a guidebook specifically for China to tell me what might be what, so I did what many others around me had done: rented a headset and electronic device for the audio tour. I suspected a lot of people simply rented the audio guide for the reason I did -- for its narrator with a British accent:

"Ni hao. Welcome. I'm Roger Moore and I am delighted that the Palace Museum has asked me to be your guide on this tour of the magnificent imperial palace known as The Forbidden City..."

With the former James Bond talking to me in my ear above background Chinese music and sound effects to simulate times past, I followed the relatively linear path from the south of the city to the north. The eight main buildings were designed and constructed in accordance with the balanced principle of yin and yang, with big courtyards balancing out the space occupied by bigger buildings to provide an overall harmonious peace of the palace grounds. Some buildings were under renovation, but even their construction signs gave forth an expression of peace to the visitor.

Over the small Golden Water Bridge, the voice of Mr. Bond led me passed the bronze guardian lions -- one male with his right paw on the globe, symbolizing worldwide imperial power; and one female with a baby cub under her left paw, symbolizing a prosperous family. Through the Gate of Supreme Harmony, I walked through the Outer Court, up a three-tier terrace and up to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest hall of The Forbidden City. In addition to the bronze statues of a heron and a turtle on its main terrace, there were examples of Chinese ingenuity, such as the sun dial. Inside the building was the Imperial Throne, conveniently placed in the center underneath a heavy sphere on the ceiling. Legend had it that if anyone overthrew the emperor and siege the throne wrongfully, the sphere would fall and kill him dead. What a way to go, huh?

Most of the buildings in the Outer Court half of the imperial palace (the governmental half) were pretty much the same, just in varied sizes positioned in accordance of yin and yang. Each one was painted mostly using four main colors: green and blue, representing rebirth; yellow, representing the earth and wealth; and the predominant red, the color of fire, representing good luck and happiness. It was ironic that the buildings -- wooden buildings I may add -- were predominantly the color of fire; the Hall of Supreme Harmony had been burned down four times, each time rebuilt to its original state. The threat of fire became so common that bronze vats filled with water were placed around the great halls in the event of another ignition.

The former Agent 007 continued to guide me through the imperial grounds, passed the Hall of Central Harmony, used for imperial briefings, and the Hall of Preserving Harmony, used as a testing hall for the civil service exam. According to Mr. Bond, passing the civil service exam could elevate a poor person into the imperial circle, which is why kids started to study at the age of five and continued for thirty years.

Down the Great Carved Marble Ramp, carved out of a single block of marble, I passed through the Gate of Heavenly Purity, the boundary between the Outer Court and the Inner Court, the private, more intimate residential half of The Forbidden City where the emperor got busy with his concubines -- one so "busy," and full of testosterone that a harem ganged up on one and killed him for being too rough.

Meanwhile, the Inner Court area was also inhabited by eunuchs (castrated men) who lived in smaller buildings on the rim of the courtyard to serve the emperor. Eunuchs were able to work up the ladder of imperial authority, and sometimes it was in a man's best interest to become a eunuch by means of a really big knife and a lot of falsetto screaming. Although I can't help but wonder if having no testicles really led to a better life.

Passed the Palace of Heavenly Purity, used for entertaining foreign dignitaries, and the Hall of Union and Peace, where the empress celebrated her birthdays, I continued to the last building of the linear northbound route, the Palace of Earthly Tranquility, the residence of the empress. It was supposedly unique because of its differently designed walls, but it was just another stop on the tour where hundreds of tourists stopped for a photo.

A GREAT CHINESE MAN once said that if a ruler is to govern well, he must take time out for a stroll to relax his heart. Since the emperors almost never went beyond the palace walls, Yongle put a whole park inside the "city," the Imperial Garden, an 1170 sq. m heavily-landscaped park with a Taoist temple, rocks to climb on for the view and trees to please the soul.

Roger Moore never said goodbye as I left The Forbidden City via the north gate and went off looking for a China guidebook at the foreign bookstore. Talk about the duality of yin and yang; while The Forbidden City was a preserved tribute to China's past, the ultra-modern Wangfujing Dajie was its opposite, a glitzy modern commercial pedestrian mall of bright lights, big billboards and shopping malls. The big Foreign Languages Bookstore had many English guidebooks for countries around the world -- except for China. Later on, someone told me that the Chinese government banned the sale of Chinese country information from foreign publishers. I guess they didn't mind as long as it was coming out of the mouth of James Bond.

TONI AND I DECIDED TO GET SOME DINNER. He had managed to buy a really old used Beijing guide and we used it to try and find a placed called Food Street, which had many local delicacies, including deep-fried scorpions. We walked passed the nightly summer ballroom dancing session outside the Workers' Stadium and took the subway to the closest station and thought we'd be able to find it, but we ended up just getting lost in some random neighborhood with a really bad map. We tried to ask for directions but no one was of any help, until we ran into the American embassy -- McDonald's -- with a Chinese staff that spoke English. The manager knew where we wanted to go, not even minding that we were asking directions for a restaurant in her restaurant, and wrote down our destination in Chinese for us to give a taxi driver.

Food Street was closed by the time we got there (around ten) and I ended up eating some noodles at a little dive restaurant before going to a glitzier club nearby, Club Nu, which had relatively pricey drinks and a techno DJ was simply faded from one song to the next in one slide of the mixer. Toni, a DJ himself, said, "Club Nu? They should call it 'Club No.'"

I was exhausted and just wanted to sit down and write but Toni egged me on to continue the night with him -- I conceded. The club he wanted to check out was back near the Workers' Stadium anyway. We searched wide and low for it, asking people for directions. It was advised to ask younger looking women because they would most likely no English. Whenever Toni would approach one, pointing to club Vogue in his guidebook, they'd just nod their head no.

"Maybe they think you're asking them for sex," I pointed out.

"Yeah, I am pointing to a guidebook and asking for sex," he said sarcastically.

"Maybe they think it's the Kama Sutra, and you're pointing to a position."

We wandered some more until we found two Caucasian guys who seemed to know what was going on. They were American ex-pats who told us that Vogue had shut down two years before, but tipped us on a place called Cloud Nine, the best bar in the area, so they said. They pointed us into a direction and told us to "just ask anyone, 'Cloud Nine.'" However, whenever we asked someone on the bar and cafe-lined street, we were only retorted with offers for "lady bars."

"You wan' lady bar, lady bar? Massage, one hundred yuan. Lady bar, lady bar." One woman even whispered, "Two hundred, sex!"

It seemed everyone on the street was a pimp or madame of some sort trying to push her "beautiful Chinese girls" on us -- for a fee of course -- instead of giving us directions. As appealing as a ladybar was, we had become so obsessed with finding Cloud Nine -- it seemed to be a forbidden place to us and we just wanted to find it. "Yesterday, our goal was to find Beijing Duck, tonight, Cloud Nine," Toni said with determination.

We walked beyond the strip of bars to a quieter section of the street. A man there that we asked didn't know what we were talking about, but led us to a friend who might. That friend just touted us for more lady bars.

Dark alleys, wrong streets, we couldn't find it. We met a trio of other travelers looking for a cool bar and they tagged along with us for a while for the search, but we lost them too. Long story short, we found Cloud Nine with the help of a Russian gay couple who knew exactly where it was. Upon entering we discovered that Cloud Nine was a chilled out electro-lounge -- a complete metrosexual lair -- with candles, sofas and pillow lounges. It reminded me a lot like Dahab, just without the ocean breeze. Toni and I chilled out in a booth with a round of drinks and just soaked in the modern Chinese vibe of downtempo jazzy beats.

The voice of James Bond may have not been there, but at least I think our Cuba Libres might have been shaken, not stirred.

The Fantastic Wall

DAY 309: I remember watching a television special as a kid in the 1980s when hotshot magician David Copperfield performed a "magic" illusion in which he walked through The Great Wall of China. Actually, from what I recall, you never really saw him pass through The Wall; on both sides of The Wall he put up a backlit translucent screen so that you only saw a silouhuette of David Copperfield go in one end and out the other. The end result, as mysteriously executed as it was, was pretty lame.

Nowadays, David Copperfield's lame television magic specials have been replaced by David Blaine's lame tests of endurance, but The Great Wall remains. If you live in America, no doubt you are within close vicinity of a Chinese food take-out place bearing the same name. But I'm not talking about that Great Wall -- as greasily good the chicken with broccoli may be -- I'm talking about The Great Wall, the 4,464 mile-long wall constructed in northern China in sections over time from 3rd century B.C.E. to 17th A.D. by the various emperors -- most constructed in the later years by the Ming Dynasty. It's been said this wall, long enough to link New York to L.A., is so tremendous that it is the only man made object viewable from outer space -- although I'm told that when China's first astronaut went up, he was an embarrasment to his country when he said that he couldn't seem to find it.

"Beijing, we have a problem."

THERE ARE SEVERAL SITES TO VISIT THE GREAT WALL from Beijing, the closest (and therefore most crowded with tourists) being Badaling, not to be confused with Badabing (the strip club on The Sopranos). For a more intimate experience with The Wall, one mustn't need to resort to heavy petting at Badaling, but simply journey farther out from the city to the "Wild Wall" as Lonely Planet calls it, sections where The Wall is lonely and unrestored from the times it had been breached by incoming warriors. The Hostelling International hostels in Beijing couldn't make it any easier (and cost effective) to go to the Wild Wall beyond Badaling, three hours north of Beijing by car to Jinshanling. From Jinshanling, we'd hike 10 km. east on top of The Wall to the town of Simatai for a ride home.

Sitting in the transport mini-van at 7:00 a.m. were a drowsy group of people -- I was happy to see I wasn't the only one who had only slept four hours after going out the night before. Actually, a trio from France was the only energetic ones, but they got nixed from the transport because no one had jotted down their transportation reservation from the day before, and our car was full.

With me on the ride through Beijing's Monday morning rush hour were: Ed and Will, two farmboy brothers from the UK; Amit, a Cambridge scholar from the UK who had just graduated and had just completed a stint teaching English in southern China; Monique, on vacation leave from her post in the Dutch Army; two other guys whose names I forgot; and driver Joseph who was a master at the wheel, weaving in and out of traffic as good as the next guy. We arrived at the village of Jinshaling around ten, where I immediately rushed to the nearest toilet from holding my bladder in for the entire ride.

Relieved, I joined the others, including just two other van-loads of people, up through the village and along the dirt path up the mountain to one of the entrances of The Great Wall. Not only where we in awe that we were actually in the front of one of the Seven Wonders of The World, but the surrounding rolling green mountains were also just breathtaking -- or maybe we just had to catch our breaths from the steep hike uphill. Once on top of The Wall at our first of twenty-seven watchtowers we'd pass through, we took a moment to just let the moment process in our minds. For me, it was the big finale of my trip of on the Trans-Siberian/Trans-Mongolian Railways, which started upon gazing at St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square.

"No wonder they called it The Great Wall," Ed said.

"It's not just The Wall, the scenery is amazing," Monique said.

"I don't think they should have called it The Great Wall, they should have called it The Fantastic Wall," Ed said. "This pretty much whips The Forbidden City's ass."

While the section around Jinshaling was restored, it wasn't a walk in the park. "I thought when we were coming up the hill that at least that was the worst of it," Amit said, "Until this." He was referring to the fact that we weren't at a flat section of The Wall one could simply rollerblade on. The Wall followed the undulating nature of the mountains, going up and down, up and down, sometimes so steep that tall steps had to be built to ascend.

WE STARTED ON OUR 10-KILOMETER TREK on The Wall -- which seemed a lot longer since for the first half there were more uphills than downhills -- just like the ancient trader caravans did between Europe and Asia. Going up the steep inclines was like being on a StairMaster that wouldn't stop. The Great Wall was built to discourage nomadic barbarians from attacking from the north? I thought. These inclines are steep enough to discourage the people defending The Wall from going anywhere.

Our group split up naturally, the way big hiking groups do when everyone has a different pace. I spent most of the day with my new friend Amit, who was just as much of a shutterbug as I was, if not more. Unlike the madness I had heard about at crowded Badaling, for most of the time, it was just us two stragglers in the back with our cameras. We weren't completely alone though; each hiker was followed by one or two touts trying to sell postcards, books or drinks. At one point, Amit did the polite British thing to do: kindly telling the two women they were wasting their time and energy hiking along with us because we weren't going to buy anything. Monique once got rid of her tout simply by faking her out with a false step forward and then back -- the woman got the hint and left her alone. Two other Dutchmen we met actually bought water from their two girl touts -- that wouldn't stop laughing in the tower they were stationed in for I don't know why -- provided that we could take a picture with them. It didn't matter if we got rid of a tout because another one waiting down the line would start following. I'm sure not even David Copperfield could have made them disappear.

The farther we got from Jinshaling, the more The Great Wall was more in ruins -- the wall itself and its watchtowers as well. I noticed that a lot of the sections that were more beat up were at points where The Wall was lower or on a lower mountain -- an easier place to breach in wartime -- although some bricks were simply taken by locals over time to build their houses. Not every section was weak; as history had it, one guy in charge of construction of one section of The Great Wall was really anal about it, making sure everything was exact. His production schedule was way behind everyone else's and so he was killed -- but in the end, it was his section that was one of the strongest sections of the entire span.

"DO YOU WANT A BEER?" Amit asked me. I had a bit of a cold but accepted his offer. I mean, when else would I drink a beer on The Great Wall? We toasted our cans after making a short video on Amit's camera and shared some cold ones on a Wonder of The World before continuing on. We met up with Monique and hiked together, all adamant to stay on The Great Wall (picture above), even on the destroyed sections that the touts said were too dangerous to go over -- sections that were too narrow or had too high of a drop. Near the end of our hike we had no choice to stray off as the trail led off The Wall and down to a suspension footbridge over a gorge. At the other end, we had finally reached the end of our once-in-a-lifetime hike on The Great Wall, so great that I agreed with Ed -- it might as well be called "The Fantastic Wall."

The fastest way to get to the meeting point in the village of Simatai down the mountain and across a dam was via a zipline -- lo and behold, one was available to us for a small fee. One by one we strapped into a harness that took us over the dam to the other side where our van was waiting for us. Joseph the driver took us back to Beijing during rush hour -- there was more traffic the closer we got to the city, but most of us were too exhausted and just fell asleep not to notice.

"IT'S FUNNY, THIS IS JUST A RESTAURANT HERE," I told Ed at just-a-restaurant back in Beijing after we all had freshened up and regrouped for a dinner out together.

"Yeah, we're here going out for Chinese," he said.

"It's not Chinese food here in China, it's just food," I said. "These people aren't going out for Chinese, they're just eating out."

The restaurant, whose name was written in Chinese, was "authentic" -- locals ate there and the menu had no pictures or English, forcing us to pronounce words or point to dishes in our phrasebook. I sat between Ed and his brother Will at the table, which had been set up for us near the window to attract other foreigners in, even by shifting around patrons who were already eating to other tables. (It worked.) We shared a bunch of dishes and bottles of beer and hungrily ate like we had just scaled The Great Wall. It was a real feast, and all at the cost of about $1.50 (USD) each. At that price, I'm sure even if the restaurant's name was named after The Great Wall like a place that might be near you, I'd definitely call it The Fantastic Wall too.

No Common Denominator

DAY 310: What does a dead body, a heavenly temple, a lama, an old wise man and a dozen girls on a bike have in common? I've asked myself the question over and over trying to find an angle for this Blog entry but have come up with a blank -- my day was spent visiting a pretty random collection of sights within Beijing.

IT WAS A TUESDAY, my first day to experience Beijing's weekday bustle. Cars zoomed on the main thoroughfares along side buses and taxis. Crowds of bicycles went every which way like herds of cattle. My day began bright and early when I left the hostel in Workers Stadium and head out to Tian'anmen Square -- a fairly peaceful public square despite it being the site of the violent suppression of pro-democracy protesters in 1989 -- to line up with the hundreds of people to pay respects to Mao Zedong, the former Communist leader of China.

If I recall correctly from what my History of Modern China professor said in college, Westerners seem to summarize Mao down to merely China's dictator who brought forth the restricted-thinking of Communism to the country. However, the theories of Communism had already paralleled some traditional values of the Chinese culture -- mainly the fact that family and fellow man came before the individual in terms of priorities -- and it was Communism that elevated China into a modern world. If it weren't for the rise of Communism, China might never have become a world power that wins a lot of gold medals at the Olympics.

Since 1997, the year after his death, Mao's body lies in a mausoleum in the center of Tian'anmen Square in a similar fashion to the body of former Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square. Like with Lenin, people came in crowds, some with flowers for their former leader, to see the body embalmed so much to the point that it looked like a wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. The line, as long as it was, went pretty fast and before I knew it, I was moved along like sheep passed the continual open-casket wake. The actual body of Mao Zedong stood there in his casket, wrapped with a Soviet flag.

FROM THE "MAOSOLEUM" (I didn't make that up), I walked through a small commercial district and over to the 675-acre Tiantan Park, more commonly known as the Temple of Heaven, the emperor's place of worship to pray to heaven for good harvests. Originally built in 1420 under Emperor Yongle, it too had a balance of duality like The Forbidden City, one between heaven and earth. In fact, if you look at an overhead map of the park grounds, you see its surrounding wall isn't a perfect rectangle; the northern half is curved like an arch to represent heaven.

I entered through The North Celestial Gate in the heavenly half of the park to "descend" southbound to earth. It was here in the northern half that ceremonies to the gods were performed in the spring for good fortune at the main temple structure, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest (other picture above) on the Altar of Praying for Bumper Crops -- what many believe is the best example of the ancient architectural style of Ming. Inside the triple roof structure were four pillars to represent the four seasons, and other symbols to represent the twelve months and constellations.

The northern heavenly altar was connected to the southern earthly altar, the Circular Mound Altar, by means of the Danbi Bridge, a 360-meter long stone bridge, which subtlety represented the link between heaven and earth with a slight incline. I walked "down to earth" to the southern Circular Mound Altar, which was simply an altar with no upright building structure, where the emperors prayed to the goods in the winter. The lack of a structure wasn't with a lack of architectural symbolic thought; the center stone of the altar (a popular posing place for Chinese tourists) was surrounded by nine stones forming a ring. Surrounding that ring was another ring of 18 stones, the next 27 and so forth in multiples of nine, to the outer ring with 81 stones, representing the nine levels of heaven. No wonder there's a stereotype that the Chinese are good at math.

En route to the main Circular Mound Altar, was the Imperial Vault of Heaven, a complex of three buildings, where sacred tablets and props were kept. Protecting the buildings was the surrounding circular Echo Wall, designed in a way where one could talk to a person on the other side of the plaza by bouncing his voice on the wall -- although nowadays you probably couldn't clearly hear the conversation with the static of tourists trying it out.

The rest of the Temple of Heaven park was a fairly pleasant park with cedar trees and the other structures used in the harvest praying ceremonies, like the Fasting Palace, where emperors fasted for three days beforehand to purify themselves. To the west of the temple grounds were the Seven Star Stones, representing the seven peaks of Taishan Mountains, and the Long Corridor, a covered walkway now frequented by musicians practicing the violin and Chinese operatic singing.

THE BEIJING SUBWAY TOOK ME to the Yonghe Gong Lama Temple, the former residence of Prince Yin Zhen, which was converted to a lamasery in 1744 to house Tibetan Buddhist monks from Tibet and Inner Mongolia to study and pray to be lamas. A complex of several buildings, it holds its largest, the Wanfu Ge Hall where inside stands the Maitreya Buddha, a tremendous 18-meter-high statue carved out of a single trunk of sandalwood -- there is even a plaque by the Guinness Book of World Records confirming this.

Unlike the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, the Yonghe Gong Lama Temple was not merely a cultural historical building but an active Buddhist temple of worship -- people coming to pray and burn incense outnumbered the tourists. This was the opposite of the Confucius Temple and Imperial College across the street, which was practically deserted except for a handful of tourists including myself. The temple was built in a quiet hutong and served as a learning center to those learning the Confucius philosophy from the emperor in order to pass the civil service exam -- graduates names were etched in steles in the front courtyard. Passed the gate props and into the main courtyard, the Confucius Temple remains a quiet place to meditate away from Beijing's cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Confucius was born in the 6th century B.C.E. and rose to popularity as a thinker and a teacher -- more so after his death as most great thinkers are. In an attempt to bring peace to a chaotic society, Confucius combined his thoughts and proverbs into the Confucius Theory System, which sought to bring harmony between Man and his place in society and the world. Confucius served as a minor politician in the Lu state court, traveling from region to region to spread his philosophy -- a philosophy that was never intended to be a religion -- however, politicians got the best of him and he eventually left the political arena to wander with his students in the woods. Confucius' legacy lives on today, not only with modern day life in China but in fortune cookies around the world.

THE TWELVE GIRLS ON A BIKE come into the picture when I went that night to see Reverie, a Chinese acrobat show which was sort of like a Cirque du Soleil show without the French. Double-jointed -- neigh, quadruple-jointed -- Chinese contortionists twisted and bent their bodies in ways almost inconceivable to imagine by the average person. The Beijing Gongti Hostel couldn't have made it easier and cheaper to get good seats, and I ended up going with two Brits John and Adam and our driver who brought his wife and kid.

The show as absolutely mind-boggling; whenever an acrobat would do something you'd think could not be topped, it was. It was amazing enough when they got six girls to balance on a moving bicycle pedaled by one girl going around and around in a circle -- until six more girls climbed up. It was incredible when a group of tumblers jumped hoops five feet in the air in a synchronized, fluid pattern -- until they started jumping hoops eight feet in the air. Spinning plate tricks, guys in big wheels, extreme juggling of yo-yos -- and people -- and even the double pole stunts as seen in the remake of Ocean's Eleven entertained the audience of jaw-gaping people.

Ed and Will (The Great Wall) came late and paid their own entrance in the center orchestra section, and our driver encouraged the rest of us to join them after intermission. For the second half of the show I sat dead center in the 150 yuan seats, laughing with Ed -- he too couldn't believe his eyes. We practically sat the entire show thinking "Nooo... they won't do tha-- Holy shit! He did!" Nothing prepared us for when a guy sliding down a pole really fast just by holding on with his legs stopped short in the nick of time before smashing his head down into the floor.

AND SO ENDED MY LONG DAY of random things in Beijing. If there was any common denominator in what I had seen that day, collectively they all got me exhausted and put me to sleep.

No Summer Coincidence

DAY 311: "If there's anything I've learned [in my travels so far], it's that nothing is coincidental," my American roommate Paul from Kansas said as we entered a sort of deep conversation about the meaning of Life -- perhaps to balance out the fact that we had just watched Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Snoop Dogg in Starsky & Hutch on bootleg DVD on my iBook connected to our TV, which has no real redeeming philosophical value whatsoever.

"Yeah, whatever religion it is that says that everything happens for a reason, that's what I am," I said. The two of us had solidified similar philosophies on the road -- that there are no coincidences and that God (or some higher power) definitely exists and looks out for us. Paul, who had left the high-tech engineering sector of six figure salaries to travel long term (after reading Rolf Potts' Vagabonding and Travelers' Tales latest book after Hyenas Laughed At Me And Now I Know Why), came to the realization in his two months abroad so far that he was determined to find out the reason of his existence. He had been declared dead at birth, a stillborn baby, but had miraculously survived.

"Really I should be dead," he said. "There must be a reason why I'm alive right now." Until the answer presented itself to Paul, he was having a blast in the process of searching, traveling away from his native Kansas -- also keeping a Blog with the same self-deemed obligation of having to share his travels to people back home who might never go to such places as he.

IF YOU'VE FOLLOWED THE BLOG for the past several months, you no doubt have seen that I've developed a sort of Fatist philosophy on Life. For example, choosing to go out on a Sunday in Cape Town to a place I had already gone to before led me to a mugging at knifepoint, which led to waiting around for a replacement bank card, which led to flight cancellations, which led to traveling overland through central Africa, which led to meeting incredible American ex-pats in Zambia and ultimately Tanzania -- the last of which was someone who recognized me back in metro New York. (Perhaps that meeting wasn't coincidental and that Tangent of Fate hasn't completely ended yet.) While that path of Fate wasn't realized until after the fact, that's not to say paths begin or continue on a regular day.

"WHAT'S THE EASIEST WAY to get to The Summer Palace?" I asked Lily, the incredibly helpful girl working the desk at the Beijing Gongti HI Hostel.

"Go to the North Gate and take the 834 bus," she answered. She was also in the process of booking me a train ticket to my next destination of Xi'an and had asked me for 400 yuan up front to get it. I handed over the 400, almost the rest of my available cash in my wallet, and went off to the two ATMs in the area -- both were out of order. So not to waste time, I hopped on the 834 and figured I'd go to an ATM in the northwest suburbs near The Summer Palace, a fairly touristy destination in Beijing.

"[Where are you going?]" was what I think the bus conductor was asking me. She needed to know what to charge me for a ticket, based on my answer.

"Uh... gongdian," I said, reading the Pinyin for "palace" in my phrasebook. I think I managed to mess up the pronunciation because she didn't get me. "The Summer Palace," I said, hoping that maybe she'd understand that. Still nothing. She left me to attend to others getting on the bus. Passengers already in seats gave me stares.

"[Does anyone here speak Cantonese, or some other dialect?]" was the question I think she asked the bus crowd. I think she thought that perhaps I was Chinese, just not fluent in Mandarin. One woman responded and asked me, but we ended up not making any progress. I didn't have any map or guidebook on me to point to. The bus continued one, me still without a ticket.

"Where are you going?" a man in the back finally spoke up in a Chinese accent.

"The Summer Palace." He translated to the conductor and I got my ticket for three yuan. The conductor helped me out after that, tapping me on the shoulder when I had to get off about an hour later.

"Xiexie," ("Thank you,") I said and hopped off the bus near the Summer Palace's North Gate. There weren't any ATMs around, leaving me with just 53.80 yuan, which I thought would be enough to get through the day -- The Temple of Heaven was only 35 yuan. However, the entry fee was 50 yuan, leaving me with just enough to take a bus back to the hostel.

IT MAY BE OF NOTE that I had been feeling a bit under the weather since that rainy morning -- with a sore throat and the feeling of a slight fever, I was debating whether or not to go out or not -- but when the sun came out by noon, I decided to force myself to go out so as not to waste a day. My destination was the place everyone I met had raved about, Yiheyuan, known more popularly as The Summer Palace, the imperial summer resort of the Qing dynasty -- although it was famous as the playground for Empress Dowager Cixi whose rule led to the deterioration of the Chinese empire. I figured the Summer Palace would take 2-3 hours tops to explore, not knowing that it was much larger than the Temple of Heaven, a massive and beautiful park with over 3,000 buildings built on a big mound known as Longevity Hill overlooking Kumming Lake -- a place so big it'd require multiple visits to see everything. The "palace" had gardens, a shopping district, prayer temples, a three-story opera theater capable of three performances at a time, recreational boat facilities and more -- it was no wonder the Empress was distracted from her duties of the empire.

Of course I didn't realize how big the Summer Palace grounds were until I got really frustrated from getting lost -- even more so because I was still feeling sick -- and ended up spending my bus money to buy a map. Hopefully there'd be an ATM somewhere.

Still feeling a bit feverish, I pressed on seeing what I could, even in the humid air rising from the puddles brought forth by the morning rains. According to my three-yuan map, many of the buildings had names that sounded like they were in a kung-fu movie: "Quiet as Idle Clouds," "Strolling in Scenery," "Abode in Clouds and Pines," "Heart Purifying Pavilion" and "Natural Affinity of Water and Trees" -- most of which had been converted to gift or food stands. One entire area around a portion of the Back Lake known as Suzhou Street (modeled after the southern Chinese city of Suzhou) was completely converted for retail, with shops, cafes, little pedestrian bridges of wood and stone, and people offering services such as calligraphy.

The main buildings of the Summer Palace remained unfettered by commercialism, like the Tower of Buddhist Virtue (an active Buddhist temple), The Revolving Archive (where Confucian books were kept), The Hall of Happiness in Longevity (Empress Cixi's quarters), the Pavilion of Precious Clouds (picture above), most of which had the signature Chinese architectural element on the corners of its roofs I had seen in all the imperial buildings since The Forbidden City: a "parade" of animals led by a guy riding a rooster to ward off evil spirits. One other notable structure of the Summer Palace was the notorious the Boat of Purity and Ease, known more commonly as the Marble Boat, which Empress Cixi had built as a pleasantry using navy funds -- costing China to lose Hong Kong to the British.

THE SUMMER PALACE, A UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE, is one of Beijing's favorite sites amongst tourists, and it was easy to see why -- although in my illness I'm sure I would have appreciated it a lot more if I was better and I had cash on me. I had only 0.80 yuan on me (about a US penny), not enough to buy anything. As I walked around up and down Longevity Hill -- particularly up to the stairs to the Temple of Buddhist Virtue -- I got hungrier and hungrier. I felt even worse when I'd see a smiling person munch into a piece of fried chicken or ice cream bar. I got so weak I felt like collapsing.

I was near the East Gate when the park was about to close, leaving me in an unfamiliar area of the suburbs -- there was no time to get back to the North Gate where I had started. As Fate would have it, there were two ATMs at the East Gate, but Fate worked in mysterious ways because both were out of order. I walked away from the gate until I found a familiar main road the bus rode on that morning, and ultimately found a bank with an ATM -- that machine didn't work with my card either. Luckily there were ten more minutes left in the bank's hours, and I went to a teller to get an emergency travelers check exchanged. They didn't take it, and so, I head for the exit -- but turned around before reaching the door. Suddenly, I realized why I had left a 50 euro note in the corner of my secret pocket -- one I had kept off exchanging. The bank took that and I was saved. I immediately went to a fried chicken stand and got some food for the hour-long bus ride back to Workers' Stadium.

"COME ON, WE'RE GOING TO A BAR," Toni said back in my room with my two roommates that he befriended.

"No, I think I'm coming down with SARS," I joked. Then again, when you're in a place like China it wouldn't be unheard of.

Toni and my other American roommate Sam went out, leaving Paul and I to veg with my DVD player on my iBook. Afterwards we fell into that conversation about Life and the lack of coincidences. I'm not sure if it was my fate to get sick or to wind up in the palace grounds with no money, but at least I finally got the explanation to why I had been traveling with that 50 euro note in my secret pocket for so long.