Life

It's weird to pack your current life into a bag, get on a train, and hop over to a new country; it's even weirder when it feels like a perfectly normal day. I arrived yesterday morning on the train from Mongolia, stepped off into the crisp Beijing sunshine, and oddly felt more or less at home. Within about 30 minutes I equipped myself with local currency, got myself a Chinese phone number, and was comfortably checking my email and texting a couple of people. I'm not trying to brag about some kind of extraordinary proficiency - it's simply odd the way people adapt to things.

Good news: I did nothing today, and it was great. Today was laundry day, and with all of my stuff hanging up to dry, I was without enough jackets and such to really go outside. I plan to go outside tomorrow, and take a look at the summer palace and other touristy kinds of attractions. Beijing is a wonderful city at first glance - after Mongolia, everything looks all bright and shiny, and it seems that you can get anything here. There's a McDonald's, KFC, and a Papa John's on the street where I'm staying, and I fully intend to go down there tomorrow and stare at them for a good few minutes each. It's strange how the dumbest things become captivatingly comforting. Familiarity is very loosely defined at the moment.

For lack of content, I'll regale you with the tale of my amazing Mongolian adventure. Myself and four companions (two Brits, a Kiwi, and a Finn) set out for the vast Mongolian wilderness on the morning of Monday, the 10th, with eight bottles of water, an assortment of sleeping bags, and a Mongolian driver in our Russian van. The paved road ended after about an hour and a half, but it seemed we were taking a shortcut, because after a couple of hours of bouncing along arbitrary dirt tracks (there were about five at any given time, all headed in roughly the same direction) we came upon another paved road, which we followed for more or less the rest of the day.

The dirt tracks became something of a pattern from that point forward, as we spent the better part of each day save one flying around on them. No road signs, really. No civilization to speak of. Herds of horses covered the road at several points, or were substituted for by herds of sheep or yaks. Mongolia's a funny place, because when you think of Mongolia, you (or I did, anyway) immediately think of endless steppes, frosty mountains, rugged nomadic horsemen leading herds of cattle, and nothing to sleep in but the occasional yurt. It's a funny place because that's exactly what it's like. It's rare that you go somewhere that actually fully lives up to the stereotype.

Our destination was a place called White Lake (in Mongolian, which I didn't learn in 10 days), where we stayed for two nights before heading back for Ulan Bator. It's a large lake in an area that was volcanically active in the past. I'm actually not going to describe it, but I'll put up some pictures later. That's the only chance I'll have to give you any idea of what it looks like, I think, other than to tell you that it was beautiful, and I walked around on the frozen lake and took a bunch of pictures. The landscapes were all somewhat beyond description, actually, even for a photo. The horizons were too distant, the mountains too high, the skies too bright, the clouds too immense; the scale too vast, in short, to be captured in words or on film. I found myself making a couple of sketches simply to help me remember what they looked like to me - every photo was too small and insufficient - and the sketches were so poorly done that the indignation stirred my imagination to accuracy. I may try it more in the future.

We stayed in ghers the whole time we were out there, and ate Mongolian food for the most part. For your benefit, I have included my own Mongolian food recipe that I gleaned from carefully watching the cooking process at several institutions. I have recorded it below if you would like to try some at home. The whole trip was really a lot like backpacking - making fires to keep warm, sleeping in sleeping bags in the cold, no real civilization. I loved that part of it, because I associate backpacking in the mountains with vacation, and this felt like a vacation to me.

I must give a nod to my four companions, whose terrific senses of humor, stoic acceptance of our shared hardships, and unassailable optimism made the trip far more terrific than it might have been. (Let's just pretend that that's how it was, alright guys? And don't mention anything to anyone about the night I spent throwing up mutton on the cold, moonlit steppe under the watchful eyes of the family dogs, or any of the other 'rubbish bits' of the trip. I would 'fancy' that. I'm trying to pretend none of those things ever happened. Thank you.)

Eric's Mongolian Food Recipe

Cook:
1. Noodles and / or rice
2. An assortment of goat pieces (your choice, or whatever is on hand)
3. Potato, or substitute, preferably frozen, in chip or french fry form

Combine the above ingredients in your container. Add water to taste, making dry noodles, soup, or something exotically in-between. Serve hot. Enjoy with hand sanitizer and 1-2 Pepto Bismol tablets.

Note: Mongolian food is functional. To retain authenticity, do not 'spice it up'. Some Mongolians, however, use a small amount of spicy ketchup, and this is allowable; be sure your ketchup is well past expiration.