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)

Slump City II

Pushing Buttons

It was 10 pm, it was 10 degrees, and my girlfriend and I were locked out of our apartment building—barred by a closed door and a set of buttons, four of which required pressing in some unknown sequence.

“We’ll systematically try combinations,” I told her. “There are only eight buttons—it’s just a matter of time before this works.”

Bijani suggested we go to the Emergency Services Department next door and ask for help; I started pressing buttons. Ultimately, I couldn’t keep track of the combinations I tried, so we went to a restaurant, hoping some longtime resident would open the door meanwhile. 20 minutes later, we returned. I pressed more buttons.

Eventually, my fingers froze up and we walked over to the Rescue Station. I found the words for ‘lock’ and ‘building’ in my Mongolian phrase book and after some pointing and smiling, two uniformed men very kindly agreed to accompany us.

Rescue… Men

Our new friends walked purposefully to our apartment and got out their flashlights where they looked the door over. They began trying combinations.

Neither one wore a jacket, but they stood there pressing buttons, and when that didn’t work, they walked around to nearby buildings, asking people if they knew how to get into our wing of the complex. A little after 11:00 they went back to the station, returning minutes later with three guys in orange jumpsuits. The six of us (Bijani had gone back to the Police station) shone our flashlights on the door. After a lengthy discussion, the newcomers started trying combinations, systematically.

When this tactic failed, we all started pulling on the door really hard, and finally we hit on an idea with some promise. One of the officers ran to the station, quickly rejoining us a hammer. As the rest pulled, he wedged it into the latch and with a pop, pried it open.

I went upstairs, comforted by the heat and the impression that guys everywhere are all the same. Bijani suggested we buy our rescuers some vodka, but they were on duty. I ran to the grocery store below our apartment and bought them a cake.

B-lighted

This event was the week’s highpoint. Later on we were briefly fired and my visa, which showed no potential for an extension, was set to expire. I felt bad for myself and, for the first time since I tricked her into coming here, I felt bad for Bijani for the following reasons.

A) I’d become a miserable cheapskate

B) Fun is a 14-hour workday, for me

C) She’d be alone here when I got deported

Then again, nobody is perfect. I set about looking for a loophole in the visa regulations. My original plan was to overstay my visa and go into hiding, but Bijani pointed out that the odds in favor of disappearing in a three-million person country are not great. Plan B, a train-trip to China, fell through when I couldn’t get a Chinese visa in time, so I booked a last-minute flight to Korea.

One of the advantages of living in a small country like Mongolia is that airfare barely costs more if you buy it the day of a flight. One of the disadvantages is that all the local currency you bring with you hoping to exchange it at Seoul International airport becomes worthless the minute you leave Mongolia. No one would touch it.

Redeemption

After two days in Korea, I flew back to Chinggis Khan International and received another three months on my tourist visa. Of course, this whole expedition was costly, but then, it turns out, I’m only a cheapskate when it comes to going out to dinner.

In order for us to stay and to pay for my expensive mistakes, we’ve both had to get second jobs as teachers, which hasn’t made things easier. And then we still face our share of problems at the paper and in day to day life.

But then, I tell myself, living in a foreign country, on your own for the first time, isn’t really any different than camping. Nothing goes the way you expect; there’s always work to be done and you constantly have to improvise and make do, but then, that’s the fun. Most days, I believe this, and in the end, I like it. Every so often, however, it requires some convincing .

Slump City

Beauty Beheld

I came to Ulaanbaatar intending to like it. A friendly reception and a job I enjoyed made that easy for the first few months. And then, the city has its own merits. Despite housing something in the neighborhood of one million people, Ulaanbaatar feels negotiable; surrounded by hills, even its worn soviet architecture, interrupted by an occasional skyscraper, can be very appealing.

I grew accustomed to seeing the best in the city, overlooking or accepting what might repel me in urban America. Traffic, garbage, dirt, 20-degree handicap ramps, walkways for the blind disrupted by ledges and poles: I ignored these things daily. Smog? Well, the city kind of smells like camping all the time.

Cold Shoulder

Then it got cold—not so cold, but enough to make life generally less pleasant. Then things started going wrong. Previously I laid out the UB Post, wrote four stories a week, and ensured the paper had sufficient, reasonably correct, English content. After the editor-in-chief returned from the countryside and I relinquished some of these responsibilities, I found that I now struggled to finish two articles-an-issue.

Every sentence I wrote looked like a slug trail. I spent lunch hours staring at blank pages, and making matters worse, I suddenly couldn’t land an interview. An official with Mongolia’s Olympic Committee canceled on me and then disappeared to Korea. A teacher and a professor I’d counted on delayed our meetings. I went to the US Embassy and the Vice Consul fainted at a press conference before I could interview him.

Better Luck Next Crime

These events made for a few slow weeks, but then it looked like I’d have a pretty nice recovery. Snow arrived, as did my girlfriend (and now co-worker), Bijani, from America, and I prepared for things to start going my way. They didn’t. Within a few weeks of her arrival, I impressed Bijani by getting robbed twice.

First I hung my jacket on a restaurant chair and my wallet disappeared. A few days later, I stowed my backpack under a seat at an internet café. I was speaking with my mother and father via webcam when I looked down to see my bag was gone. I ran out the door. My parents sat at their computer for half an hour, staring at the Russian guy who filled my seat.

My bag had a spare key and the address of my apartment. After some reflection, I sprinted home and sat on my floor until getting through to my editor. He called a locksmith. In addition to the usual difficulties of living with someone for the first time, these few days didn’t allow me to give Bijani the best introduction to life in Ulaanbaatar.

Writers, Lock

It got worse. Returning home from a late dinner, we found the main entrance to our apartment locked. The door has a combination: push the right buttons and it opens. I don’t know what they are; it’s never closed. Normally in these situations, one simply presses the most worn buttons. Workmen had painted our door the day before.

(To be continued)