Trans-Mongolian

August 16, 2011 at 9:19 am

       I’m back on the last leg of the first leg of my trip; the stretch from Ulan Bator to Beijing that I traveled in my second week of the journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, only now the bit I’m on is called the Trans-Mongolian. They have trains operated by China, Russia, or Mongolia running on different days of the week. My train from Moscow was Chinese, and this one is Mongolian. By design they are essentially the same, but aesthetically the Mongolian train has been sort of done up in a cute and decorative way, and is spotless. All the employees aboard are women and they are constantly vacuuming and scrubbing windows. On the Chinese train all the employees were men, and they were constantly smoking and playing poker. It’s interesting to revisit the first places I saw in Asia after I’ve been traveling here for four months. This week I’ve seen a lot of the same scenery I saw at the beginning of May. Now it all looks different somehow.

They confiscated my knife during the security check in the Beijing metro. I’ve taken this knife through at least thirty security checks, including four others in the Beijing metro, and nobody ever said a thing, aside from at the Shanghai train station were they asked to see it and then handed it back to me, apparently unimpressed with the notion that I had the ability to do any damage. I sent it through the x-ray and I saw the young security girl start to get embarrassed and call her friend over. I figured she saw the knife and didn’t know how to ask me about it. I guess in the past I’ve just had the opportunity to get away before they work up the vocabulary to ask me for it. This time I had to go buy a ticket and they had a kid with some English under his belt corner me at the ticket machine and take it from me. Booo, booo I say! I needed that knife for camping in Mongolia. So far I’ve only used it to slice up sausage for sandwiches. I guess now it will live in Beijing and be put to use hacking through dumplings and melons.

Something weird is happening to me. The other day, when we were packing, I asked my friend if she had a jumper. As I said it I wasn’t even sure if I knew what a jumper was. Is it a sweatshirt, or a sweater? Or maybe it’s just a pullover long sleeve shirt? I don’t know, but she’s got one. I’ll have to spy on her wardrobe and solve this mystery. Last night we did some laundry at the hostel, in a washer with the brand name of Fashionable Washer. After two hours in the dryer our clothes were still wet, so we decided to hang them out around the train. Marguerita hung hers and asked me if I was going to hang mine and I started to say, “I can’t be bothered.” Oh no. If I do like Madonna and come home with a British accent someone needs to sit me down and have a talk with me.

Marguerita has been making fun of my accent, she’s Austrailian. Even though she can’t tell the difference between regional American accents, she has picked up on my Midwestern twang and is unwittingly parroting it. She sounds like the cow characters that are supposed to be from Wisconsin in those California dairy commercials. Well, it’s official then, I still have my Midwestern accent. This is a sore subject. Listening to people do overly exaggerated impersonations of me for over a decade has started to get on my nerves. One night when I was out with some drunken people, whom were having a lot of fun with it, I actually made them stop the car. I got out and walked home. It gets under my skin because people always say that I should have lost my accent after twelve years away from Wisconsin, but I argue, if I lived in England for years and came back all, “Cheerio, good day to you dear sir.” I would be considered a pompous jerk, so why should it be altered to be west coast? Anyway, she has no idea what she’s doing. She just thinks it’s a generic American accent. I’m getting in a good dose of mockery. It ain’t so bad.

We met a British girl on the train. She was telling me all about her travels in India. India has been one of the places that I’m extremely excited to go to, and everyone I know whom has traveled to India loves it. In light of the similarities between China and India (overcrowding, filth, cultural differences that are perceived as rude and intrusive) I keep wondering what is the cause for such a huge chasm in perceptions of the two places. There is something going on in India that is allowing travelers to look past all that uncomfortable stuff and see something else, something they love, while in China the majority of travelers express sentiments such as this.

I asked her what she thought and she said that she thinks it’s because India’s individuality is still intact. They have a very vibrant culture that is not trying to mimic western life, so that becomes the focus, the rest is just part of it all. I think she’s right. At my last hostel I saw a program on CNN where they where debating whether China’s cultural IQ has dropped below that of other countries, and they talked a lot about the Chinese people becoming divorced from their own culture. It makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes you do just feel like you’re walking around in a busier, dirtier, and ruder version of the States, and not really seeing much that’s authentically Chinese. I still plan to go back after Mongolia. I want to see more of the west and the south, which are supposed to be some of the more beautiful landscapes, and then go to Tibet. I’ll be keeping this all in mind. I’m interested to see if, and how, it all feels different within the context of another culture.