On the road

June 25-26
GS
There’s a big yurt in my backyard.

My apartment building is one of several tall structures in this microdistrict, and they surround this large blue yurt with blue embellishments in the middle. I don’t know whose it is or what it’s for, and I’ll find out soon enough. But I was quite surprised when I looked out my bedroom window.

Ulaan Baatar is quite large in area, with a population of about 1.5 million. Half of this country lives in this one city. The rest live in yurt settlements outside.

I was able to see some of this countryside when I joined the foreign minister on the parliamentary reelection campaign trail on the 26th. I rode in her 4×4 SUV, sometimes in the back, squashed four across — her aide, me, my translator, her bodyguard — and sometimes in the trunk when her supporters wanted a ride somewhere and your humble correspondent, translator in tow, volunteered to bounce along in the back. The Mongolian hills from afar look like smooth curves. In reality the rugged potholes are pretty awful.

The minister and I talked about politics over her morning newspaper in the car and we briefly touched on mining, the story I came to cover, but she didn’t really want to talk with the election on her mind. We traveled to several of these settlements where she spoke and held really long townhall meetings. Adventures and interesting discussion ensued, but that’s the Coke recipe, the Whopper sauce for a feature story that’ll hopefully be published.

More thoughts on Ulaan Baatar later, but in the meantime, here are some images from the Mongolian countryside.

Vigorous Training

June 24, Tuesday
GS
After an uneventful night at the City Youth Hostel, I was up bright and early to start the 32-hour trip up the Trans-Siberian Railway. Boothmates included a huge Mongol who accidentally hit my head by unfolding the top bunk, then purchased a 40-oz Tsingtao at ~7:15 a.m. and finished it at precisely 7:22 a.m. He then slept so soundly for the next 7 hours that I couldn’t resist taking his picture, seen below. Across from our bunk was a pregnant young Mongolian medical student studying in Beijing who spoke Mandarin and translated between Huge Mongol and I. She was nauseous for most of the trip; I had to eat instant noodles down the car because just the sight or smell of it made her puke. And she did.

The scenery was beautiful. Even the remote Chinese towns that still had the industrial communist flavor looked interesting. I’ve seen plenty of them but everything looks more romantic to me from inside a train window.

New friends include a really amicable British couple on their way to Moscow (R and C: our plans to visit the ol’ Raj still stand) a gaggle of cute Christian missionaries and an Israeli who — seguing from a discussion of North Korean refugees and thus Korean gamers — expounded energetically on the merits of the Protoss carrier and reaver, the breathtaking realism of computer flight simulators, and how he was kicked out of Israeli flight school, for lack of flying ability, despite his profound addiction as a teenager to flight sim.

As the hills flattend into grassland, I had enough and went to nap. That night we stopped at the border town, Erlian, to change wheels to fit the narrower Russian gauge (Mongolia was long part of the Soviet bloc). The railroads were made that way so, in the event of a Sino-Soviet war (imagine that!), armies and their supplies couldn’t just easily roll into opposition territory.

The next morning we passed through the edge of the Gobi desert, seen below, and finally arrived at Ulaan Baatar in the early afternoon.

The huge Mongol

The other growth

June 23, Monday.
By GS
In late 2006, I had dinner with the Japanese wife of a German diplomat in her stylish Osaka apartment. After praising China’s remarkable economic growth, she railed against the lack of refinement among its burgeoning nouveau-middle-class.

And the much-vaunted Japanese humility and restraint went out the window.

She fumed to me of Chinese visitors in Geneva who trampled over lawns despite posted signs. Chinese tourists who spit, blew snot twenty meters, were loud, ill-mannered, and wore stripes that shitted on any common fashion sense. So on and so forth.

I nodded wholeheartedly, and let fall from suspended chopsticks another slab of delicious marbled tuna into my already brimming, lustily upturned mouth. Her daughter watched in horror.

I’m one of this guilty race, after all.

But the woman had a point.

Beijing has changed tremendously in the past two years. The subway system has been completed revamped. Three new lines have been added, with three more in the works that will ultimately blanket this sprawling city from beneath. The great systems of London, Tokyo or New York still have more extensive networks, but they’ll soon be leapfrogged technologically by Beijing, where new, sleek subway cars fitted with air conditioning and LCD monitors have replaced old, rickety metal cabins.

After a meeting with a news organization, I walked into a subway station on the main line. Two Swedish girls struggling with the touch-screen ticket machine jumped back then giggled in surprise when a subway attendant cursed and grabbed the money out of their hand and stuffed it into the sophisticated machine for them.

That reminded me: During a dinner at the home of a prominent observer of U.S.-China relations a few months ago, he told me that economic convergence is the easy part, it’s the 40 years afterwards, picking up the soft skills, the P.R. tricks, the manners, that’s difficult.

Economic growth is easy compared to cultivating the character of people to the world (read: Western) standard.

There’s an ever-so-slight colonial tinge to it all that discomfits those sympathetic to the developing world, but prudent observers will note that Emily Post convergence will naturally follow economic convergence, and given time, increased outside awareness will follow increased wealth.