Past climbing
up my throath
being done waiting.

Decision made
in a possible hurry
of the regrets.

Burning flickers
with a long shadow
in serenity.

Can’t stop now
the movement
without want.

We got some mask the next day which made breathing in the smoke filled streets a bit easier. But even this way, Amy didn’t deal with the smoke very well, she felt pretty bad at the end of the stay. At least in the hotel the A/C cleared out the smoke, so sleeping was ok. It was good we didn’t stayed more than 3 days.

Moscow reminded me most of Paris, with it’s big alleys and the 19th century buildings. I liked the architecture a lot. We went to the Kremlin, Lenin museum (Lenin looked like a wax figure to me) and St. Basil’s Cathedral. Looked all very surreal in the smoky sunshine and the grey background. Like a bad version of communism from an old American movie. Nevertheless, pretty impressive overall, I definitely want to go back, when there is more life in the city … and more sunshine.

Novosibirsk wasn’t our first choice, we wanted to go to Tomsk. Unfortunately we didn’t have much time until the next train and Tomsk was pretty far away (like 6h). The relatively fancy hotel was for business people, it had free WiFi, a steak restaurant and a strip club. Otherwise Novosibirsk didn’t look much different than Irkutsk/Europe. A funny thing was the railroad museum. When we told the security guy we wanted to visit it, he almost fell over backwards. He had to get the museum curator to unlock the door. It was freshly renovated, but had no English guide or signs. So we just look at the pictures and models while the curator followed us three steps behind, switching stuff on and off as we passed it. One of the weirdest museums ever.

The next train, to Moscow, was long (2 nights), otherwise boring. I got used to the metal grid in the shower. We were really good at getting the nice foods from the stations. Only really cool think was when we crossed the Europe/Asia border in the Ural mountains.

On the second day, we went to Lake Baikal. Why the nature and views were great, there wasn’t a lot to do and the boardwalk was quite uninteresting. Especially the Baikal Hotel was bad, looking like an Eastern German hotel ca. 1987. What was great was the Omul fish (a species unique to the lake) they sell everywhere. You essentially buy it fried and eat it just like that. Delicious. We spend the evening hanging out with people from the hostel with a lot of vodka.

A big problem was actually getting our train tickets for the next leg. On the first day, we walked up the train station asking around, but everybody pointed us in a different direction and nobody understood English or the Russian phrases we tried. We gave up. Second day, we actually figured out that the train station has three separate buildings that are not connected. After that, getting the tickets wasn’t so hard. A station map would have been nice.

The second day we got ourselves on a road trip into the nomadic part of Mongolia (which is everything outside of UB) with bunch of backpackers from the hostels. I learned two things right away. The French and the Germans love Mongolia. Our road trip was with a bunch of German students and a couple from France. Most of the hostel was actually German, including an old lady who has come to Mongolia for years (and had some interesting knowledge about literature). Germans love it here, because everybody speaks German (due to the virtue of having studied in the communist brotherland DDR). And I mean fluently and everything.

The road trip was a bit weirdly organized. They first shipped us to Hotel Mongolia, a resort hotel build by a German apparently. It looked cool, trying to imitate an ancient Mongolian capital of the Khan era. But it was still a touristic re-imagination, not historic. Afterwards they drove us far into the country side which was cool, because there were no streets once were of the main road. They would just drive the jeeps randomly though the countryside forming new ways. I guess that’s the nomadic culture. After a brief stop at an abandoned Russian military base (I was ask if I heard about communism and the end of the USSR – they must have though I was American. ), we got to a family living in a Ger serving us Mongolian food. The food in general consist mostly of milk and lamb, which is a nice contrast to China. We got butter, cheese, lamb in milk tea soup and fried noodles with lamb.

The Mongolian countryside was absolutely stunning, a combination of hills and flat land with few trees. I wish we would have stayed the whole time outside of UB, maybe sleeping in a tent, but we didn’t know better. We ate multiple other combinations of milk and lamb in Ulan Bator the following day, plus a museums and scaring of pick pockets (almost got me once). And then we were already on our way to Russia.

The mountains in the Inner Mongolia were lovely, especially when you could see the Great Wall in the distance. Afterwards the Gobi Desert! I found the climate in the train rather nice, Amy on the other hand was not happy. So we were riding with open windows the whole time. Amy, the Dutch lady and me learned a valuable lesson. Train + Open Windows + Desert = Bad Idea. There was dust everywhere. Everywhere!