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