Kashgar, China: A Vital Oasis on the Silk Road Both Then & Now

​Our first stop and only city visited in Mongolia (also the only city in Mongolia, from what I saw of the rest of the country), Ulaan Baatar improved upon the food in the eastern-Asia part of our trip, continued the sad tradition of incredibly polluted air, and worsened the car traffic situation so far. It’s hard to say no to this city since it has so many Loving Huts and even better other vegan restaurants (I know! In Mongolia! So many!), but I think the annoying parts of it outweigh my ability to have good food. Luckily, we were there for Naadam, the national annual festival of the Three Sports of Men, dedicated to Genghis (pronounced Chingis here, and ya know what, I’m gonna call him Chingis because that’s the real Mongolian way) Khan. Naadam (for a separate post) was interesting and something big and fun to do. Without it, Ulaan Baatar is a dilapidated city with some temples and monasteries and museums but I quickly got tired of it. Exhausted, really. Maybe because I couldn’t breathe.

​After we landed in Ulaan Baatar at 6:30am, we DIDN’T walk with all our bags to our hostel! A first! We had a car waiting for us, thanks to the tour company we booked our countryside trip with. More on that shitshow in a later post too, but at least they drove us to our hostel. Of course the driver asked when he dropped us off if we had money to pay, even though he was from the tour company who offered the ride a perk of the package. We said no and he just shrugged and said goodbye, so yeah. That’s annoying. 

He dropped us at the Modern Mongol hostel, which had a sign on the door saying check-in was from 2pm to 6pm, and reception opens at 9am-11am, some time in there. Um. You cannot have a SIGN ON THE ACTUAL DOOR be the only way you communicate to guests that there will be no one to OPEN THE DOOR. I was so mad I was ready it burn it down. Like they didn’t send an email or say on their pages on booking.com or hostelworld that this was the case. You need to make sure your guests know this information BEFORE they arrive. It was freaking 7am! We had to wait at least 2 hours for a person to let us in? Bullshit. Luckily, another guest let us in, and there was a big lobby sitting area so we set up camp, got out our toiletries and camping towels, plugged in our devices, and showered in the pretty big shared bathroom, all before checking in. (This place had many more showers than toilets. Not the right ratio, guys.) We didn’t even care about how we were making a mess with all our shit all over the place. You don’t tell us the details about checking in (not even checking in to the room! Coming in to the place just to leave our bags!) before we arrive, we don’t care about making the lobby our own. We showered so good. It was lovely. I mean it was a shitty hostel and none of the showers had functioning drains (always bring shower shoes) but still. 

​Unfortunately, our beloved friend (and fellow lawyer/travel blogger) Sivani at Ever the Wayfarer was unable to join us for this Mongolia portion of our trip as planned, and we were very sad to not have her around to show us how to fashion a sink out of a twig and some fabric as we knew she could have once we were sinkless in the countryside. However, sorry Sivani but it’s for the best that you weren’t in Ulaan Baatar with us because our ‘triple’ room barely fit one person. We had to put all of our stuff on the bunkbeds because there was no floor space! You would have been sleeping with all my peanut butter and accidentally vegan cookie finds! (Actually that sounds amazing.) Also, we learned that despite appearances (of the lobby), this hostel was not great. It attracted all the crowds I despise: young teenage blonde girls who facetimed their boyfriends all night every night without regard for how much bandwidth they were using OR how loud they were being (so loud, heard them always); dirty older European backpackers who do their laundry in the sinks (despite their being a machine) as a GROUP ACTIVITY so people who actually need to use the sinks for regular usages are forced to stand behind them and give ‘are you kidding me with this?’ looks at them in the mirror as they take over all 4 sinks; older white female Americans who praise themselves for how liberal they are (while praising Bernie) while repeating the same story over and over about the one time they told a white man not to be racist (it was barely a story; do more, white women); and generic other yoots who have no consideration for how loud they are throughout the night. Oh and old Chinese men who shout at each other in the hallway in the middle of the night. Oh and people who play music in the common areas without headphones like they’re doing the rest of us a service. So, everybody I hate. Also, the wifi at Modern Mongol was so bad it was pretty much nonexistent (which is why we are now two weeks behind ughh I hate it I’m sorry). Hard no on a recommendation. 

​Out in the city, I was immediately struck by how bad the air was. It was like how Siberia was very polluted, but the car and traffic situation here is more like Bangkok – long, long lights, exhaust blown right in your face by substandard unregulated engines no matter where you stand, and dangerous drivers. At least in Bangkok there are a lot of overpasses for pedestrians to use on busy streets. This was a bad situation. And despite UB being the coldest capital city in the world (true fact, though we haven’t gotten a clear answer about whether that’s due to extremely low winter temperatures or a low overall yearly average of temperatures), it was hot and dry and burningly sunny most of the time. I felt asthmatic the whole time I was there, like my lungs were screaming and I couldn’t get a deep breath. That’s so awful! It also meant pretty much every time I stepped outside, I was exhausted, not being able to get enough oxygen. I must get a mask for China. I hope all you republicans enjoy when your part of the world has air like this too. 

​It’s hard to ignore the air when we need that to live, but the city apart from that was okay, I guess. It’s really nothing special, and the best part of it is the various vegan restaurants which we will talk about separately (because there are so many!) It looks clearly third world, and so many city buildings (aside from the skyscrapers) are very dilapidated – and almost every single building in the countryside is decaying or straight up falling apart. Literally half of the country’s 3 million residents live in this city, with the rest spread over the vast open spaces of the countryside. With UB representing so much of the country’s citizenry and most of its wealth, it’s clear that governmental corruption and mismanagement has done all of Mongolia a disservice, to say the least. 

​There are some nice tourist attractions though. We first went to the Chojin Lama Temple Museum, which survived the communist purge of all things religious by being a ‘museum’ of religion. It was really close to the hostel, so an easy first site. That also means it’s right in the middle of the city, adjacent to modern buildings and skyscraper-types. The juxtaposition of this super old temple with the sleek new office buildings was interesting, like how in London the Tower Bridge is like next to the Gherkin. I think I mean the Gherkin; it’s been too long already. 

-​OH OK – you know how in the Ulan-Ude post I talked about the lama in the monastery outside of town we went to and his body was embalmed for like centuries (or it was a ‘miracle’) but his head was papier-mache and I was like hey where’s your head? OKAY I WAS MISTAKEN. The Ulan-Ude shiny lama corpse was NOT papier-mache (you gotta say it the French way it’s funner) headed; he was fully intact just all head and body that’s been dead forever but still shiny. The papier-mache headed lama was HERE! At the Chogin Lama Temple. I KNOW, we are seeing SO MANY F-ING EMBALMED CORPSES that I’m mixing them up! It’s like I’m back in my internship at the D.A.’s office! JFC if you are mixing up your embalmed mummies you are seeing TOO MANY. And we have more to come in China! Sorry, I will try to keep them straighter but seriously how do you tell mummified lamas apart? (That sounds like the beginning of a joke.) Anyway, guess who has two thumbs and took a PICTUREEEEE? (imagine me pointing to myself with my two thumbs)

​The Chogin Lama temple was very pretty, and I enjoyed it because it was our first Buddhist monastery in Mongolia. I was not yet very sick of seeing the same faded colorful fabrics and dingy Buddha statues and crazy scary demon sculptures. I would indeed get sick of all this very, very quickly. 

​Husband made me do a face hole in the temple grounds, as he always does, so here is my reluctant agreement. 

​We lucked out with the bright sunny weather for these pictures, but we quickly realized that UB, and Mongolia in general, heat and sun are not playing. They are serious, and they are intense. Coupled with the terrible air quality, the immobilizing burn of the sun was pretty miserable. It rained one day and it felt sooo amazing afterwards. There was actual humidity and I could breathe! It lasted an hour. Whoever talks about how dry heat is so great is making shit up. 
 
After the Chogin Lama temple, we went to the National Museum of Mongolian History, even though I was so f-ing tired and crankpotting and oh yeah, I think I kind of hate museums. It was interesting though. They had good stuff documenting the country’s long, interesting history, from the Stone Age to the modern change from communism to democracy. It’s very centrally located by Sukhbaatar Square, which I’m going to spell differently every time I type it I think, not on purpose just by default. I decided that I deserved to listen to music while museuming because I was still not in a bed and thus super sad about that so I put my headphones in and shuffled some showtunes. It took me until an old Mongolian woman glared at me to realize that I hadn’t pushed the headphone jack into the phone far enough and the current song playing, “My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada”, was audible to all in the room. I hope no one understood some of those lines. Actually no I hope they did. 

​I liked this big statue of Chingis Khan (at least I think it’s Chingis…I mean it’s a statue and it’s in a museum in Mongolia, odds are that it’s Chingis) and a few ink drawings about his time, (1162-1227). The ink drawings were like recent, not from then, but still they were cool. Or I saw them in a brief moment of lucidity and that’s why they stuck. 

​Later in our stay, we visited the Gandan Khiid monastery complex, which was kind of far from everything cool (like 45 minute walk from wherever you were, literally, no matter where, like everything in this city actually but worse) and actually not cool itself. It was whatever. Maybe I’m down on it because the bathrooms were locked and the one staff member on the huge grounds was the living embodiment of the shruggie emoji when I said hey the bathrooms are locked. Maybe I’m down on it because the name translates to “The Great Place of Complete Joy” and like no, if you’re not going to let me pee this is nowhere near even partial joy. Anyway, it’s home to the spiritual head of Mongolia, the Khamba Lama. So many lamas! It’s the most important monastery in the country, which I would not have believed looking at it. Originally, the monastery was built on the site in 1785, and newer buildings and temples have been built up since, though we couldn’t go in most of them. The ground is filled with stupas and little temples and shacks that were locked. I couldn’t really get a handle on the place. (I can’t get pictures to load because Weebly is awful and the internet here is too so imagine another temple/monastery.)

Over 800 monks live there, which is crazy because I didn’t see any. 

We also visited the Bogd Khan Palace, which is down in the south of the city close to the Naadam stadium. Bogd Khan means ‘holy king’, and the palace is where the last holy king of Mongolia lived. The guidebook says it’s ‘full of ghosts’. The various small pavilions house statues of Buddhas of all sorts (who knew there wasn’t just a Buddha? Apparently anyone can become a Buddha, so we were told. Didn’t know!), lots of paintings of insane scenes of Buddha and friends and demons and all sorts of religious and wacky imagery, and random objects like musical instruments and, like, dishware. 

​There’s also a winter palace (like the Hermitage!) on the site that is a museum of the bog man’s personal possessions, like a lot of his furs and crowns and like, more dishware. Be warned, as I was not, that many rooms are full of bog stomper’s stuffed animals. I do not mean the cute fluffy kind that we all still sleep with. I mean real animals that were taxidermied. Rooms and rooms of them. All sorts. Big, small, birds, lions, polar bears, it was gross and unnecessary. Skip the winter palace. 

Our last museum in UB was the unique Intellectual Museum, a private man’s shrine to puzzles. So there’s this genius but probably kookoopants man who the staff refers to as ‘the founder’ which doesn’t sound culty at all who has been making puzzles since he was a child, so he was like why not put all this in a museum along with all my weird baby dolls? A guide takes you around and shows you how to do a lot of them, and gives them to you to try. It will successfully make you feel like an idiot. They are impossible to do without knowing the tricks and stuff, but the guide will do them all in like 4 seconds and it’s hard to remember that it was her job to learn how. Anyway, there are all sorts, from secret boxes that open their compartments if you pull the right pieces apart, to those silver keys that slide apart if you twist them a certain way but your brain does NOT want to ever remember how to twist them, to strings of metal balls that when aligned properly make a sturdy pyramid (this one I can now do! so proud), to wooden rubix cube type things that will just drive you crazy. In addition, there is an entire floor of all the elaborate, and I mean elaborate, chess boards that The Master made. He either made or designed everything in this museum himself, btw. He is an impressive, prolific, probably socially awkward guy. The chess boards range from tiny marble boards with coral figures to gigantic (like 15 foot) wooden boards that are puzzles to make the table and board, and then each of the figures is its own intricate puzzle. I mean. Crazy. The museum offers visitors a few of these puzzles and chess players to try to put together for cash prizes. They range from $1,000 to $100,000, and I don’t think anyone has ever won, they are so difficult. I bet Sydney Bristow could do it but I am just not a spacial puzzle genius person. 

The museum doesn’t let you take pictures, but if you have extra time in UB it’s a decent place to visit. You could get the same idea from buying a few of those wooden puzzle type jawns and trying to solve it for years and years until you go crazy because you just can’t, but it was cool to see all the different kinds and all the beautiful chess boards Our Great Leader made. I would have called it just a puzzle museum though, because calling it the Intellectual Museum makes it seem like the ability to solve this puzzles is what makes someone smart when that isn’t the case you just need to learn the trick to it I’m not upset about it at all. 

​On one of our UB days, we took a day trip (with Sunpath, the company doing our longer trip to the countryside) to see Terelj National Park, which I refer to as the Taraji P. Henson National Park, obviously. I think this was by far our best day in Mongolia – the best natural beauty in the country, fun sites, and none of the whole living-in-the-desert-and-not-showering bullshit. Taraji was beautiful (she is, girl) but the drive was a little hard. Haha, I would have killed for a drive that hard during our week in the desert. Coming soon.  

​With our teenage guide (they all are!), we hiked a nice hike to a meditation center slash temple that was pretty cool. On the walk, there are all these numbered signs with different sayings (of the Buddha I guess?), and at one point you are supposed to spin a wheel to see which saying you need to focus on. I got #41 (my favorite Dave Matthews song!), and this is apparently what I need to think about for the next year:

​Do all the parentheses mean you can replace words with new words? like Mad Libs?

​Taraji also included Turtle Rock, a natural rock formation that looks like a turtle. Cute! Our guide said we could climb up it so we did, which was a bad idea. It is a frightening climb up very steep staggering rocks. We didn’t expect such a challenging climb to be the result of the guide’s casual suggestion. At one point, you have to go through this hole. We watched a few people and then said hell. no. 

​The best part of the day trip to Terelj was seeing the GIGANTIC CHINGIS KHAN STATUE! It is 40 meters tall, but seems bigger, with Chingis just freaking enormous and depicted riding a horse so the whole thing is just so flipping big and fun and hilarious.

​Inside the complex (very nice complex!), there’s a museum that not-so-accurately charts Mongolia’s ‘illustrious’ history, and there’s a boot. The biggest Mongolian boot in the world. 

I highly recommend doing the day trip to Terelj and Chingis statue if you find yourself in this country for some reason. 

As has been the case all over Asia, we saw some amazing signs, like this club dedicated to our favorite Nicholas Cage movie.

​And of course we both immediately realized what our legal professions hold once we return to work:

​So, overall UB was okay. We had some good times, but mostly we were glad to be there for Naadam (next post) and some good vegan restaurants (actual next post). Really, we were excited to end our city time and go out for our week in the countryside and the desert, because we heard that that is where Mongolia really shines. Hoo boy. Next next next post. Stay tuned for that carnival of atrocities. 

June 29 – July 2
Dear little baby laptop diary,
​
I titled this post after one of the most random Broadway plays I’ve ever seen, “Three Days of Rain”, with Julia Roberts making her lackluster debut, Paul Rudd just being our universal boyfriend, and a not-very-famous Bradley Cooper, whom I knew from Alias and was super excited about. Who knew that in a few short years he would be the biggest star of the bunch! Anyway, it was a kind of boring show, and that’s all I remember, which is a shame because I am currently on a train with two days and two nights left to go, and I would like to be thinking about a play instead. How is it going so far, you ask? Let’s just say if I didn’t want to talk so much about Broadway whenever I had the chance, this post would have simply been called Three Days of Pain.

After our 24 hour stay in Yekaterinburg – our lovely, fancy-hotel-staying-to-reward-ourselves-after-the-24-hour-train-and-to-treat-ourselves-before-the-3-day-train stay- we boarded The Train. This would be our longest train journey yet, longer than the baby-sized sleepers we’d done so far, longer than when we took Amtrak from Chicago to San Francisco and thought we were so brave. I want to slap old me across the face. Amtrak was luxury. We had a tinier cabin but it was just the two of us, and man alive if I ever slam Amtrak bathrooms again, remind me of where we are now. I would kill for an Amtrak bathroom on this train. We boarded 10pm Thursday, as I write it is 2pm Friday, and we get off this Snowpiercer on SUNDAY at noon. SUNDAY. From boarding THURSDAY! Guysss I don’t know if I’m going to make it. Well if anyone is actually reading this it means I made it, because there’s no wifi so I have to post this after we disembark on that magical day (and actually, after I post all the other posts that come chronologically before this because that’s how I want to do it), BUT STILL, who knows how changed I will be. Who knows if I will still have the same likes, the same dreams and passions, the same hair or if I tore it all out in a ravenous fit of cabin fever unchecked by all the Ativan Caki gave me (thank you Caki)? Will I even be human? Are we human or are we dancers? It’s already starting, see. 

We boarded last night and found an empty cabin, which was nice so we could put all our stuff away without bothering people already there (this train started all the way back in Moscow). A very clean surprisingly non-smelly older gentleman (our first non-smelly gentleman in the whole country!) joined us, and he was fine. It was a lucky roommate to have! He was a history professor who was very nice and we chatted for like a minute before we all went to sleep. Perfect! Unfortunately, it was short-lived. The train made approximately 25 stops during the night, during which I started thinking about how excited my brother is for the new “Murder on the Orient Express” movie (me too what a cast hooray for Baby Leslie Odom (I decided to call everyone who is a ‘Jr.’ just ‘Baby’ instead, shout out to Baby Robert Downey)) but then of course I started THINKING about Murder on the Orient Express and how I’m as close right now to that situation as I’ll ever be and these strangers are always in our cabins and everyone smells bad and has knives because we all came prepared with days of food and the appropriate cutlery and I was like don’t let anyone stab anyone tonight Dame Judy! So then I couldn’t sleep for a while.  I finally started to maybe get closer to sleep, despite the rocking motion of this train being worse than the downtown trains of the NYC subway the ones you cannot possibly try to surf hands-free during else you’ll fly into the opposite end of the carriage, and much worse than the tube with all its own dragon noises and bumping and creaking and omg. But then, at 4am, our friendly cabinmate got off at his stop. Lucky guy was only on a train for 6 hours! That’s nothing! Then, unfortunately, it started. The kind of cabinmates I had feared started coming in our room. Our first new cabinmate was a smelly Russian man about our age who immediately took his shirt off and let the smell fester even more. I was on a bottom bunk, Husband was on the top, and Shirtless Youth was on the other top. Then a few hours later after another frighteningly jerky stop, our next cabinmate arrived. He is maybe in his 40s, maybe 50, and he is a giant flesh person. He is just a giant sack of human. This is a tiny f-ing cabin and either his endless flesh or his even worse stench is EVERYWHERE. We can’t put our legs down to sit on my bunk because his are there. We can’t breathe without breathing in his b.o. He is scratching right now while humming. He scratches his uncovered skin (he’s wearing shorts and like a belly shirt) and flicks whatever comes up all while humming, Guys. I’m trying to be strong and brave and grateful. I am grateful that he doesn’t smell like smoke. That’s literally all I got. 

I thought the unwritten but definite rule of these cabins was that whoever is on the top gets to sit on the bottom bunk on their side during the day and use the little table for their meals. Each side keeps to themselves. I begrudgingly learned this on our first long train when Husband and I both had bottoms so the woman on top of mine sat on my bed a lot. I learned, great, that’s how it’s done, she can’t prepare her food and eat up top. OK, I got it, sorry I gave you a bad look. But this morning, after I exercised outside our door in the hallway (there’s a bar running down the hallway of our cabin, it’s tight but it’s enough space to do barre exercises like I’m a GODDAMN BALLERINA and lots and lots of squat variations and calf raises. No one was up when I was out there so I also got out my resistance bands and worked my back so darn happy about that I think I’d go insane if I was cooped up here and couldn’t at least try to work a muscle), I came back to sit on my bed and read and Shirtless Youth was sitting on my pillow by the table making his breakfast. Like. NO. You get the bottom bunk and table part from the guy BELOW YOU. That’s the rule!! Omg! I guess he literally couldn’t because the Giant Flesh Ball Man was oozing out everywhere you turned and they couldn’t both sit on that bunk, but still, that’s not my problem man! I waited outside and did more calf raises and then when he got up I claimed my spot back and haven’t left since. Except to pee in the literal pits of despair. These toilets are so grimy and sludgy and I’m spending so much time in there because I pee a lot and Husband and I brought 15 liters of water on this trip with us and I have to drink it even though I fear it’s not enough for three days. That’s for two people! (We each carried a 5L jug and had three 1.5L bottles between us and I also had about 1/2 liter left in another bottle. Hey I guess that is 16L maybe we will make it.) 

OH MY GOD Giant Flesh Ball just went to the bathroom and came back shirtless and is now putting deodorant on while sitting next to me I am going to vomit. OH my god Shirtless Youth is also still shirtless and just got down from his top bunk by jumping onto my bed with his smelly feet right on my sheets, right next to my physical body. He was just ‘cleaning’ his grundle with his towel I cannot believe this. GFB Man is still humming and now is drumming his fingers in rhythm the whole time on the table omg I am going to LOSE MY MIND. 

Oh wait. Oh my god they both seem to be getting dressed! And not in their smelly sleep clothes, in real clothes with buttons and things! Ahh praise Jesus are they disembarking? Did we reach their stop? Or did we reach my melting point? We don’t stop for like 30 minutes I cannot wait to see how this goes! I’m so nervous and excited and scared that I’m getting my hopes up! Are they going?? Will our new neighbors be even worse? Even smellier? Even more in my personal space? Why do men think they have the right to my personal space? I guess we will see what happens in 30 minutes when we stop at some combination of letters I already forgot. I have to go pee before they lock the bathrooms at the stop (they get locked at every stop because, well, because everything ‘flushes’ onto the track, so at least it’s a civilized reason). We will see what happens. 

Oh my god she already locked the bathroom! We don’t arrive at the stop for another 30 minutes this is INHUMAN. GFB Man is brushing his crumbs from his side of the table towards me and the computer. That’s just swell of you. He’s still humming. Shirtless Maybe-Not-So-Young Man is now shirtless again, despite having dressed himself five minutes ago, so I have less hope of his departure now. He’s also sitting on his top bunk with his feet hanging off pretty much in my face (it’s tiny room) and they smell so bad my eyes are tearing. I’m also equally frightened that if they do get off, our newbies will be even worse. What if THEY reek of smoke? Ughhh that would be worse. And we have TWO FULL DAYS LEFT. Two more sleepless nights. Two more days of having to time my bathroom breaks between frequent stops. Two more days of constant Purell because there’s no soap in the bathrooms. Two more days of using precious bottled water to brush my teeth and wash my face because the train water would give me cholera. Two more days without contacts because no way I’m touching my eyes. Actually that last one is good, my eyes need a break from contacts. 

While I wait on my ability to pee and breathe from the smelly guys maybe leaving and cry from possibly worse new cabinmates, I will tell of all the food we had to buy and bring onboard for 3 days. No meals are included in our ticket and the dining car is very expensive, but also I think they have zero options for me anyway. Husband will check it out later or tomorrow I’m sure (we can’t both leave, someone has to guard our stuff). So in Yekaterinburg, we found a few giant supermarkets that were very expensive (they had no cheap supermarket, so weird! No little bodegas like have been all over the rest of Russia either). We found lots of good treats and bought a lot, but considering it’s three days worth of food for two people it’s probably just right. We bought jars of white beans in tomato sauce with some veg in there, which I’m sooo pumped about. Like mamma ‘taliano looking stuff, I hope. We also found vegetarian grape leaves in a can, another tomato sauced bean thing in a can, and lots of bread. And we brought that fantastic Russian staple, instant kasha! Sooo good. I used to think kasha was just a part of that disgusting Main Line Jewish dish of kash’ n’ bowties but aside from that it’s actually really good. And good for you! Along with cucumbers, tomatoes, and pickles (probably not the best idea because they smell, but if people don’t care how their bodies smell why should I care how my food smells), and more apples and orange, we are set. Plus we found a lot of chocolate in Yekaterinburg so happy dance. And cookies! Every city we’ve been in so far, I’ve scoured ingredient labels and found one package of accidentally vegan cookies. Never the same one, so we’re on our third try. The chocolate chip ones in St. Pete’s were still the best, but the cinnamon ones in Moscow were very yummy too. I will report back on these weird blueberry puffballs I found! I hope that when we eat all this stuff I don’t have a Meg Ryan in “French Kiss” train moment (LACTOSE INTOLERAAAAANCE who knows it? best movie ever I pretend Kevin Kline won his Tony a few weeks ago as a belated gift for “French Kiss”).

​There are good things. I got to have an instant Quaker oatmeal packet for breakfast today, which is (I’m sorry) one of my favorite foods and one of the easiest things to make because of the samovar in our carriage (every carriage has a samovar of endless (god I hope!) hot water, so anything instant is good). We also use the boiled water to clean our dishes and stuff. I read “Between the World in Me” already, which was wonderful, “The Days of Abandonment”, which I actively despised (sorry Kip), and David Sedaris’s new diary-entry book, which is better in short bursts than all at once. I also reread dear sweet Nora’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck” because it’s the best. I have a lot of podcasts on my phone, and I could listen to at least half of one Gilmore Guys (or five regular length podcasts) before my battery dies. Also, there are really nice Dutch women with two little kids down the car who we are talking to a bit. They smell fine. It’s a treat. 

Well, back to reality. The two smelly guys did indeed get off. But we immediately got two new Russian men who…I’m not yet sure, but I think they might be worse. They’re meaner, that’s for sure. When they came by, I said hello (in Russian) and smiled and they didn’t even blink or glance at me just threw their stuff on their bunks and went back out. WTF. A few minutes later, Husband did the same thing when they returned and again, no eye contact, no utterance of any kind in our direction. Stupid Russian jerks! Fine don’t talk to us, that’s good for me. But they smell a little smoky, which better not get worse. I’m promising myself two things: If they ‘magically’ get smokier (meaning they’ve smoked on the train, which is not allowed), I am going to say something (I am able to say ‘you smoked? where? not allowed!”); and if they sit on my bed at any point I am putting my foot down and getting super scary and yelling “NYET! that is your side, and this is our side.” I think I know how I say that. They know each other so that makes it easier. I hope it doesn’t come to my having to yell in very poor Russian at men I have to sleep next to for at least one night. Their phone noises are on, too, which is a big no-no, and just as the icing on the cake, their phone noises are incredibly loud bits of very bad songs. 

​Guys! The men all left super quickly and we had the cabin to ourselves for dinnertime on the second night! Then an army man joined us and was so well behaved and organized (and made his bed immaculately in 8 seconds flat, we were very embarrassed about how ours looked after that). He smells fine! The Dutch family down the hall has become our friends, and they are vegetarian so we are going to all meet in Mongolia (where we all end up for Naadam) at Loving Hut! And there’s a Danish girl (not to be confused with The Danish Girl) about our age who is now also our friend and we will probably see in Mongolia! Things are looking up in Duloc! Oh man it all really depends on your cabinmates, I guess. Well but the constant bathroom locking is terrible, especially for me, so that is really rough. But with decent, nonsmelly roommates this whole train thing might actually be…fun? Okay obviously I need a nap since I’m clearly losing it.