A Wall is for Adventure

Learn it. Like it.

Six months into my stay in Ulaanbaatar, I have two typical workdays. On the first, I wake up at 8:30 and head into the Mongol News Company building. On the second, I wake up at 7:30 and go to school, now as an English instructor.

I know the routine for both jobs. At the office of the UB Post, I check the internet for Mongolia-related stories, look at yahoo sports, look at my email. Then I write messages to people, like the man from the Mongolian Olympic Committee who never returns my calls. If it is Wednesday, I’ll edit stories; if it isn’t, I’ll head out for interviews around Ulaanbaatar. I used to have a Thursday paper route, but since last issue, interns took that over.

Three times a week, I hustle to a school four blocks east of my house, and teach. I know which kids I will send out of class, who will have their homework, and what time I leave. I also know how sorry I am for judging any of my former teachers. We students deserved it.

Writing Habit and Beating it

Every day I write something, or at least I’m supposed to write something. It’s my favorite activity, but it’s challenging work and frankly I didn’t expect writing to play such a dominant role in my Mongolian-newsman life. Wolf Blitzer, Jean-Paul Marat: great journalists I’m sure, but I planned on getting out as much as I could--like Belgian Cartoon Character Tintin, boy reporter. The best part about him: world famous journalist and you never see him working. He’s too busy adventuring.

I’ve had plenty of interesting interviews, but I wanted an adventure.

And then I caught the break I needed. Mongolian Customs Law says you must leave the country to get a new visa, and I needed one. That meant a chance to skip town, a vacation to Beijing, and a trip to see the Great Wall.

Kirril (my friend and former-colleague), Bijani and I took a new train south to Beijing. It’s a 30-hour ride that reveals the country outside Ulaanbaatar. From our cabin’s twin bunks, we saw dry expanses of hills, a fox, gazelle, a herd of camels, and a few dusty orange towns near the tracks.

Olympian City

I woke up in China. On either side of the train were mountains, farms, and automobiles (after six months in uneven Ulaanbaatar, perfectly paved roads looked fascinating). Within hours, our train rolled into Beijing, where we were greeted by 40 degree weather and Tony, a friend of a friend of a friend, who showed us around town for our first couple days.

“It’s summer,” we told Tony. He laughed—a cold wind would arrive from Mongolian tomorrow, he said. It didn’t matter; Beijing is a remarkable city. Every street is wide, but the metropolis’ main road, the one that passes Tiananmen Square, looks like a highway. Tony said Mao wanted it that way to land a bomber on it, in case things went wrong. By law, virtually every car in town is less than 10 years old and residual cleanliness, plus publicity, lingers from Olympic preparations.

All our city maps were misleading; it’s not the kind of place you can walk around quickly. A series of rings form Beijing’s districts, with many famous sites like the Forbidden Palace, Tiananmen, and Jin Shan Park (where people gather on mornings for tai chi, hacky sack and other exercises) impressively situated in the innermost circle. Toward its outer rings, the city becomes suburban; but downtown—outside alleyways that preserve an old-city style—everything, especially the buildings, seems huge and new.

On day three, Tony took us out of the city toward the Great Wall. Parts of this engineering marvel lie just over an hour outside Beijing, and we decided to visit one of the wall’s lesser known stretches to avoid tourists.

(to be continued)