Next station is Gloningen!

36 hours on a train = eating at least 5 pot noodles (they are growing out of my ears now) + trying to navigate above the toilet (because the thing is sooo dirty, you would never wanna sit on it… by the way imagine navigating in a moving train…only possible for the experts… oh and don’t forget to roll up your pants and to wear closed shoes, if you know what I mean :)) for about 7 times + not be able to go to the toilet for 6 hours when crossing the border + 4 times passport and visa check + running into I don’t know how many Westerners, let’s say 75% of the train + carrying around a backpack of about 30kg + 2 extra bags (which was actually really too heavy for me) + trying to push myself through the hallways of the train with the huge backpack on my back which was at least 20cm bigger than the hallways + spending 10 hours listening to my Ipod + reading 1,5 hour in other peoples Lonely Planets + trying to sleep for 6 hours + waking up 8 times.
That’s more or less the sum of what happens on the Trans Mongolian Train. This time not all the way to Moscow but dropped of at Ulaan Baatar (UB), Mongolia.
And why does it seem to be perfectly normal to meet your friends in far far away countries while they actually live close to your home (Holland, Germany…). It appeared that Jellina (whom I met in Bangkok) and her father were on the same train. So we have taught all the others on the train about Dutch train mathematics.
Now here I am in a country full of nothing. It is simply unbelievable 100s and 100s of kilometers passing by from the train window and all you see is grass, sand and a camel or gher here and there. There are not even 3 million people living here while the country is 3 times the size of France! Quite a shock when you just came from Beijing jungle.
The first couple of weeks I’ll be staying in UB the capital of Mongolia. I wouldn’t get too excited reading this since UB is not like the average capital. It’s relatively small; in the centre of the town you find a lot of communist buildings and around it the ghers again. More and more people give up their nomadic lifestyle because it’s becoming more difficult to survive in the countryside, they move with their ghers to the city.
The 2nd week of September we’ll probably be going up North. That’s when the real hard knock life starts. It’ll probably already be snowing by then…