Novosibirsk is the New Brooklyn...

I had two weeks between the end of the Israel trip and the date I promised Max I'd meet him in China. My first impulse was to see if there was any way to hitch it, but unfortunately, the road between Tel Aviv and Beijing happens to pass through Baghdad, Tehran, Kabul, Islamabad, Kashmir, and a good chunk of the Himalayas. Tempted though I was by the prospect of immediate induction into the Crimethinc Hall of Fame, I eventually settled (sorry Mikey) on the cop-out, second-cheapest route: the Trans-Mongolian Railway.

The prequel to the trip, flying to Moscow on Aeroflot's discount competitor Kaliningrad Air, turned into something of an adventure in and of itself. Not wanting to arrive in suburban Moscow at 3AM in the dead of winter, I cleverly booked my ticket to include an 8-hour overnight layover in the Kaliningrad airpot. What I failed to anticipate was: 1) that the Kaliningrad airport closes in the evening, 2) that someone would forget to inform the humorless Kaliningrad military personnel that the Cold War was over, and 3) that I'd find myself sans clothes staring into the bleak, sleeting, pitch-black Kaliningrad night. This was not good. After a lot of begging and a few dollars' "change tax" - which I have good reason to suspect will not end up benefittng the good stakeholders of Kaliningrad Air - I managed a seat on the last flight out to Moscow that evening, arriving triumphantly in suburban Moscow at 3AM.

It's 6 days, 5 nights by train from Moscow to Ulan-Bator, Mongolia - 6,265km. In Moscow, I convinced this Dubliner kid named Steve to come with me, which was good since the two of us ended up being the sole non-Russian, non-Mongolian people on the train for the next 5,500km. Apparently late January isn't the peak of tourist season for Siberia. Steve affirmed all of my stereotypes about Irish people, which is to say he was incredibly amiable, was a minor drunkard, refused to pronounce the sound "th" (e.g. "tirty-tree and a tird"), and made up outrageous claims as to the exploits of various Irishmen. When you'd explain to Steve that such feats were simply mathematically impossible, he would respond in all earnestness, "No, no. Irish are hero people!"

Our best friends on the train were the party next door, the Mongolian Olympic Freestyle Wrestling Team. They were fresh from a competition in Krasnoyarsk, where apparently the squad performed quite respectably. In Nizhneudinsk, my buddy Bayaraa Naranbaatar (or "Sun Hero") bought a 5-liter plastic jug of beer to celebrate, and a good time was had by all.

The wagons on the train have nine compartments, each of which have four bunks and are about the size of a small prison cell (6'2" x 5'10" x 9'). Up above there's a cubby for blankets and whatever baggage doesn't fit beneath the bottom bunks, and there's a small table by the yellow-brown curtained window for tea or playing cards. The doors between each wagon are essentially the same heavy metal doors they use for industrial-sized freezers, and at each stop, the conductors spend 15 minutes chipping away at the ice that's accumulated on the bottom of the train since the last stop. For the first day and night we had a friendly young Russian trucker in our compartment - who successfully undermined my belief that Russians are uniformly the least adjectival hospitable people on earth - but for the vast majority of the trip, we had the cell to ourselves.

It took me a long time to realize what made the scenery seem so alien - aside from moonscapes of frozen lakes, the vast expanses of barren wilderness , and the occasional weathered, wooden houses with improbably colored shutters (yellow, bright turquoise, fuchsia, and dark blue are popular... together) - when finally I realized: there's no graffiti! It's really odd to spend so long on a train, cover so many miles, and not see the smallest piece on a passing freight train or village wall. Someone really needs to let all the hipsters back home know that Novosibirisk could, like, totally be the new Williamsburg. (It honestly felt like a relief to get to Mongolia, where there is an active hip-hop community, and see some tags again).

All in all it was a fairly easy and uneventful ride, but there were moments of terror, too. In my 24 years I feel like I've gotten myself into a respectful number of off-the-beaten-path places, and, if lucky, usually managed to get myself into trouble there. But this train ride produced probably the single most unsettlingly lonesome feeling I've ever had. It's 2AM and we pull into this little Siberian town called Zima (meaning "Winter," in Russian) where it's -20 degrees C. The stop is supposed to be for 25 minutes, and I haven't really stretched all day, so I put on all my clothes and wander outside. Through the window of a closed-down stall, you can see a healthy-sized bottle of vodka costs a third the price of one orange... seriously boondock country. And then suddenly, from a couple hundred meters away, you hear the sound of your train starting to pull away. (Luckily, it's just the engine being changed). It's the most sickeningly desperate feeling there is, and I didn't go further than 20 ft from the train the rest of the trip.