Beijing Art

Finally arrived in Beijing after another day and night on the train, this time in a spotlessly clean, comfortable train which had been cooled to sub-zero temperatures. Exiting the carriage with my huge backpack (still need to lose some weight in that regard), the heat hit me like a wall.

I stayed with Bamor, a 31-year old marketing manager who kindly agreed to host me via Couchsurfing. Such a luxury, to suddenly have my own couch in a lofty apartment with clean bathroom and kitchen! Bamor couldn’t have been a better host. She has a wide smile, has travelled widely, has an interesting perspective on Chinese culture and society and not only opened the doors to her home but also to her circle of artistic friends to me. On my first night in town we had dinner with her friend Fong, as sculptor and tattoo artist, then went to the gallery opening party of two Austrian girls. There, I proceeded to be eaten alive by mosquitos while explaining every two minutes that I wasn’t an artist living in Beijing, but rather had just stepped of a train and didn’t really know anyone. I had a great time!

A couch, just for me.

The next morning, Fong and I went to visit the studio of Gao Zhen, whom I had randomly met in a café the day before while waiting for Bamor. Zhen and his brother use art as a political medium and are of the same generation of Chinese artists as Ai Weiwei. You might have heard of their hug performances. The studio space was impressive, with large sculptures, huge photographic works and some interesting paintings that I personally liked best. However, communication was difficult since Zhen only speaks little English. After we left to visit Fong’s tattoo studio, Fong remarked “He seems vain. Other artists talk about art, he only talks about himself.”.

Note: I'd like to include some of Zhang's art here, but I don't think it's published under a CC license. Have a peek at Fong's tattoo studio instead.

Lots of creative stuff going on here.

The tattoo studio was more authentic. Fong and three friends started it 6 months ago, and are working on designs with a modern twist to traditional Chinese themes. In China, tattoos are still frowned upon, especially on girls, but are quickly becoming a thing among the young bohème - the night before, 3 girls at the party had signed up for a session with Fong. Her workplace is located in a slightly grimy housing complex, on the 7th floor in an unmarked apartment. The guys seem to have made this their second home, with customers casually dropping in (or rather, being collected at the door since the buzzer is broken) and people ordering McDonald’s in preparation for a 2-hour tattooing session. With regard to tattoos, however, Fong was very meticulous, keeping a super-clean work area and sketching out her designs with a lot of love to detail. Since I had some serious sightseeing to do, however, I bid my good-bye before the burgers arrived and headed out into the Beijing smog.

Mongolian Gers

The train from Irkutsk to Mongolia definitely saw its best days back in the seventies. The cabins were smaller, the loos pedal-operated and the restaurant car was decked out in brown-in-brown design. However, it was actually quite comfortable to be riding in this rattling time machine. The beds were fairly comfortable, and once we’d survived the 4 hour ordeal of Russian and Mongolian border control and customs, we were rocked to sleep as the train crawled to Ulan Bator.

The capital of Mongolia is not a beautiful city. In the hot summer temperatures it’s quite dusty, and a large number of mostly Soviet-era houses seems to sprawl without much plan until the city fizzles out in suburbs that consist predominantly of the traditional Gers and wooden shacks. However, almost a third of Mongolians live in this city which only introduced street names a couple of names ago. The cab driver I caught from the train station to the hostel actually didn’t know any street names I mentioned, but asked his way around until he we arrived at my destination in a courtyard adorned with a playground that had withered away from decades of exposure to the elements.

After spending, one night at the hostel, and then caught a bus to Terelj National Park. I had booked a trip with a local “sustainable” travel organization called Ger to Ger, and suffered through a 2.5 hour introduction session on the day of my arrival. I’m all for giving travelers some background info and pointers, but an introduction that started with Ghengis Khan and included stories of heroic endeavours the founder of Ger to Ger had survived, seemed a little too much.

At the final bus stop in Terelj I was picked up by a girl with an oxcart, and - through a couple of small rivers that we crossed with a furt - was taken to the first ger, where the lady of the house welcomed me and served lunch (milk tea and fried rice). She told me that she was a shaman, but she didn’t seem very shamanic to my untrained eyes. For the hour I was there, she watched  a Korean Soap Opera synchronized into Mongolian on a tiny TV powered through a solar panel, while I was trying not to make any of the cultural blunders I was warned of in the introduction session. I thus diligently sat on the West side of the Ger, finished everything I was given to eat, and had lots of milk tea. Then her husband arrived, slurped down his lunch and motioned me to put on long pants - “horse, horse!”. The content of my backpack was transferred to two saddle bags, and I climbed onto one of the small Mongolian horses and into the incredibly uncomfortable wooden saddle. The next 2.5 hours, trotting through the national park, were both beautiful and by the end, very painful. I was certainly happy to arrive at the next ger where I would spend the night.

Oxcart idyll.

I spent the following two days in a similar fashion. Eat, eat more, be shuttled to the next family by horse or ox cart, sleep, eat, go for a walk. The nature is wonderful - quite lush and green, with a few small rivers undulating through the valleys, lined by sparse forest. A thirty minute walk will take you up to one of the rolling hills, from which one has an amazing view, with lots of valleys dotted with white gers up to the horizon. I did go for a few walks, considering there is not much to do apart from helping with the animals (goats, cows) in the morning and evening, and playing with the family’s kids and dogs. My feeling was that the herders looked at us tourists with bemusement - who would come from a far away country, only to want to help them complete their daily chores? Wouldn't we 'rich' people just want to sit in a nice hotel and be pampered? I did get the impression that for some of the families, tourists were in a similar category as their lifestock - and I don't mean that negatively. They just realized that tourists have to be fed at regular intervals, be given a place to sleep and a way to pass the time, and if you do it right you can make a nice living off of them.  

The herders are also incredibly diligent, working from dusk till dawn with the animals, tourists and spending large amounts of time cooking and preserving animal products. I’m surprised people don’t suffer from malnutrition - the only vegetables I encountered were boiled potatoes. Other than that, we had rice, pasta, bread, meat, and lots of milk products - boiled milk (served as dinner with rice), “dried cream” (serve on bread), fresh cheese, dried cheese and yoghurt. I steered clear of the fermented horse milk I encountered in one ger, where it lived in a huge blue plastic container until some locals dropped by and bought gallons of the stuff. Apparently, Mongolians drink lots of this alcoholic beverage in the spring, to “clean out their system”. It certainly seems to have a cleansing function.

Breakfast - fried flat bread, dried cream, sugar and milk tea.

A 8 hour journey by ox cart, horse, ox cart, shared “taxi” (8 people to 5 seats) and bus took me back to the heat and dust of Ulan Bator, where I collapsed on the bed of the cheap hostel where I'm typing. The next train leaves tomorrow morning at 8am. A Chinese train, to Beijing, where I'll exchange milk products and salty tea for Peking duck and rice wine.

Trains and Trekking

In my mind, I’ve always wanted to “do” the Trans-Siberian Railway. Something about the idea of covering such a huge distance by train intrigued me, and evoked images of unexplored frontiers. Also, my aunt had done travelled by train from Khabarovsk to Moscow in the 80s, and told stories of babushkas selling pierogi from strollers whenever the train stopped for more than two minutes. I wanted to try some of those pierogi.

24 years after my aunt had travelled in the region, I found myself at Leningradsky Station in Moscow, in hand a ticket with kryptic cyrillic characters that had, with foresight, been translated by the booking agency. Armed with my backpack and a daypack full with food, I handed the ticket to the Provodnitsa, or wagon attendant, and squeezed my way to the compartment I was assigned to. Two minutes later, my roomies for the next three days arrived: Dasha, Marina and Ksusha, three students on summer vacation. In comparison to their 18 bags and 2 suitcases, I was travelling light. The next couple of days they produced mountains of food, beauty and art supplies from those bags. At various intervals, our cabin was transformed into a nail studio, post office, picnic area and massage parlor.

Somehow my aunt looks a lot cooler than I. 

Life on the train is actually very pleasant. The Russians mostly sleep and eat, sleep and eat. It’s a bit like going to a health resort, minus the hot springs. I read a lot, and met fellow passengers. However, one of the parts I’d most looked forward to - spending hours in the restaurant car, drinking tea and watching the landscape change from wooded taiga to wide open tundra - didn’t really work out as planned. The lady in charge of the restaurant had set up shop on one of the restaurant tables, complete with table cloth, desk lamp, laptop and printer. As far as I could tell, she never left that seat, and she didn’t like company. Which is why she kicked people out as soon as they had sat down for longer than ten minutes, even if they still had their full drinks in front of them. She had a distinct resemblance with Roz from Monsters Inc., complete with reading glasses on a chain. We took to calling her “the Dragon Lady”.

Since the restaurant car was not an option, the international travelers met on the platform whenever we stopped for more than 10 minutes. We had all been looking forward to the Russian babushkas peddling their wares, but it turned out that they seemed to have been replaced by kiosks selling instant coffee, cold drinks, yogurt and the occasional pierogi. Only upon entering Siberia, at a stop in the middle of nowhere at 7am, a couple of local women were selling berries, dried fish and - in the summer heat - fur hats and jackets. This, however, turned out to be the only appearance of the babushkas. From then on, we had to make do with instant noodles prepared with hot water from the samovar.

After 3.5 days on the train, we arrived in Irkutsk, a place the Lonely Planet calls “the unofficial capital of Eastern Siberia”. It does have the feeling of an old gold rush town, which can’t be too far off since 200 years ago nearby towns on Lake Baikal experienced an influx of gold diggers looking to make their fortune. While you can find recognizable brands on the high street and coffee shops everywhere, Irkutsk still resembles an outpost keeping wild Siberia at bay. The general population appears to be rather poor, with facial features now markedly more Asian. Prices are low - a bed in a hostel dorm costs around 9 EUR, a ride on the tram a mere 5 cents.

I decided to spend the 4 days until the departure of my train to Mongolia at Lake Baikal, and took a minibus to Listvyanka, which functions as a sort of resort town for Russians on summer holidays. Apart from a candy colored monstrosity masking as a hotel, Listvyanka consists of wooden cabins with brightly painted window panes, and is famous for smoked Omul, a local type of fish that resembles trout. I stayed in a hostel, and decided to trek to Bolshiye Koty the next morning, an old gold digger outpost 20km to the north of Listvyanka. 20km sounded easy enough, but it turned out that the famous “Lake Baikal Trail” tends to be unmarked. At certain points, it is not more than a goat path, passing along the face of a cliff. Nonetheless, I thought I was making good progress when I saw a couple coming towards me. I asked them where they were headed. "Bolshiye Koty", they answered. Turns out I had walked back back towards Listvyanka for about an hour. 

Glad someone told me.

Arriving in Koty in the early afternoon, I found an idyllic outpost of civilisation, with a couple of cabins and one shop run by two women with gold teeth. When I entered the shop around 2pm, they were arguing loudly with a very drunk man dressed only in trousers and swinging a half-full bottle of red wine. I didn’t buy anything. Overall, though, the place was very tranquil and a welcome change from the stuffiness of the train cabin. Surrounded by woods, Koty looks out on the perfectly blue Lake Baikal, which is so cold that it took my breath away should when decided to take a dip. I was looking forward to gliding across its surface on my way back to Listvyanka in the hydrofoil. However, my dreams ware shattered by the owner of my hostel, who declared in no uncertain terms that I would have had to buy the ticket back in Irkutsk. "Maybe you walk?", he suggested.

At 6am the next morning I was thus on my way back by foot. I came across by a secluded beach with two tents, a few empty vodka bottles and a guy seemingly passed out by the edge of the water. His companions, tending the fire and drinking the rest of last nights provisions, appeared undisturbed. I walked through two other camp sites in similar condition. At one of these, a big German shepherd decided to join my trek and faithfully walked with me for the next three hours, taking a break in the shade when I did. At some point, we passed a group of Russian hikers. The guys were wearing military pants, boots and nothing else apart from thick golds around their neck, blinking in their chest hair. The girls were sporting shorts and bras. The dog, maybe finding them familiar, changed allegiance and turned around to follow them. I waved good-bye, and emerged from the woods just in time for my minibus back to Irkutsk, back to the comfort of a tiny train cabin. 

 

Russian Metropolis

I arrived in Saint Petersburg in the early hours of July 30th. Since it was 3am, I decided to splurge on a cab to downtown - in retrospect, I’m glad I was half asleep while we whizzed past soviet-style high rises adequately painted dark against the light sky, with and average of 60kmh over the speed limit in 40kmh zones, with smooth jazz playing on the radio for calming effects. Saint Petersburg, by daylight and especially in the early evening when the light takes on a slightly rosy color, is quite beautiful. The broad boulevards remind me of some areas of Berlin, and the nicer parts of the city center or Warsaw. The city is proud of it’s palaces and museums, in particular the Hermitage. Visiting it, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of things - the number of Asian tourists, squeezing their way through the entrance gates, the number of halls and rooms and artefacts, which are exhibited in a way that I could not make sense of. In one room, visitors marvel at hundreds of tiny little Japanese teapots from different centuries, but once you step into through the doorway to the right, you find yourself amidst medieval armory, only to be surprised by a wonderful Bruegel in the next corridor. Unless you speak and read Russian, it seems like the best strategy is to just follow the flow and be impressed by the sheer vastness of the space, and the number of items on display.

Small Cloakroom, indeed.

In contrast, Catherine Palace a short distance outside of the city itself is much smaller than you’d think from the outside. That is, there are far fewer rooms you can visit than the size of the compound would suggest - mostly because the palace was destroyed so thoroughly by the German army during it’s occupation that in the 55 years since the end of the war only a handful of rooms and the outside of the complex were restored to their former glory. The gardens, however, were wonderful, and mostly untouched by the flood of Chinese tourists that jammed the golden hallways of the palace.

On Sunday, August 2nd, I took a Sapsan train to Moscow. Six short hours on a train that feels much more modern than the German ICE or the French TGV. Thanks to Couchsurfing, I had a place to stay and a host who took it upon himself to show me all the must-see elements of the capital within the 12 hours I had in the city before my train to Irkutsk was to leave. Hüseyin is originally from Istanbul, and has been working in Russia for 3 years. “It’s okay”, he says, “better than Oman”. Hüseyin loves photography, so, armed with our cameras (I bought a new one for the trip), we started out at 11pm to explore the city. At this time of the day, the red square was nearly empty, but beautifully lit. Quite a serene atmosphere. Weirdly, Lenin’s mausoleum with the Kreml as a backdrop is juxtaposed with one of the most exquisite shopping centres in Moscow, which, with it’s turn of the century style, elaborate illumination and lush flowerbeds reminded me of a mix of Disney-esque shopping mall and a the grand warehouses of Paris. Moscow, in general, loves luxury. We passed many fancy restaurants and bars where apparently wealthy men were dining impossibly thin girls in very short skirts and incredibly high heels. The clubs we could see from one of the bridges reminded me of the stylish open air bars in Tel Aviv, well lit in warm colors with lots of plants to accentuate the outdoor feeling. Certainly in contrast to Berlin night life with it’s gritty clubs where you can hardly see enough to make your way to the bar. I might need to come back some time, armed with some heels and dresses, and explore the night life.

Leaving Google

In April 2015, after 4.5 years of working for Google, I decided it was time for a change. I had been part of the International Product Partnerships team (which does business development for a number of Google products), and spent my time building relationships with books publishers in mostly German speaking countries. When I joined Google, the product I worked on was Google Book Search, which was part of Google’s effort to digitize the world’s information and make it searchable and universally accessible. In late 2010, we launched the first version of Google eBooks, a commercial extension of this original idea which finally allowed users to purchase titles that they had found via our web search not only in physical, but also in electronic format. In the coming years, this product was merged with Google Play, and subsequently formed one of several verticals offering digital content to Android users - similar to iTunes’ offering for Apple users.

While Google is an incredible company to work for, it is also a life in golden handcuffs. The food is amazing, the perks are incredible (free massages, beautiful offices, free gym, talks, lectures, etc.), and compared to the industry standard we’re really well paid. Add to that colleagues who are all in a similar age range and many of which have become friends over time, it’s really hard to imagine a life “out there”, without Google. However, at least for me, there was this nagging feeling that I wasn’t stretching myself enough, and that I was becoming complacent and not learning as fast as as much as I should have done. Looking for new challenges within Google proved difficult, at least if you’re not looking to become a cog in the sales engine or do not have an engineering background that would open the doors to one of the famed “moonshots” - really exciting projects that a chosen few of the Google population are allowed to work on and which the rest of us gets to hear about once every six months when they are celebrated at our weekly global TGIFs. Here, Larry and Sergey, resembling a nerdy version of the comical duo Laurel and Hardy, open the stage for teams to present their work in a meeting that is broadcast around the globe. And while I’ve always left those TGIF streamings feeling inspired and grateful to be working for a company with great ambition, I also felt that I myself wasn’t actually contributing to move the world forward in the grand scheme of things. Once you’ve launched the x-th “Books on Google Play” store in yet a new country, you know how things are run and you begin to wonder whether another thousand books online will really make a difference - to anyone.

So, having come to that point in my thoughts and being faced with the dilemma of having a job that other people would kill for, I decided it was time for a radical cut. A cut, because from within Google many other options look “not quite great enough”, and because your priorities begin to shift in weird ways - you start evaluating other jobs by the stylishness of the work space, and by how delicious their canteen might be. Actually, leaving Google feels a bit like leaving the perfect boyfriend: smart, loving, good-looking, with a great job and a stylish aparment. Everyone tells you how lucky you are to have him, but deep down you know that things aren't how they used to be, and that it's time to move on. 

In April of 2015, I coincidentally listened to this podcast  by Tim Ferriss (in the foreword of which he, ironically, warns his listeners that it might cause them to quit their job) and decided that the time was now right to leave my cushy position and apartment behind and go travelling for at least six months. One week later, I handed in my 3-months notice in line with German law, and in the following weeks informed friends and family of my plan, cancelled the lease for my apartment, sold lots of stuff on Ebay, shipped the remaining items to my grandmother’s house in Munich, and handed in my Google badge.

All packed up, ready to ship

Since July 29th I’ve been on the road. I’m taking the trans-mongolian railway from Russia via Mongolia to China, will then spend some time in South Korea and Japan before flying to the US for Burning Man festival in Nevada and visiting friends and potential future colleagues in the Bay Area. October, November, December I’ll spend in Costa Rica & Nicaragua as an Expedition Manager for Raleigh International’s autumn expedition in the region. I’m planning to be in Argentina for Christmas and Brazil for New Years Eve. Beyond that, it’s open to inspiration. That's part of why I'm travelling after all - to open my mind to new ideas.