Train time!

Hey everyone!

We just arrived in Mongolia which means that I can access the blog. Blog websites and facebook are blocked in China (somehow our phone was still able to access facebook:-)! We left Beijing yesterday morning for the first leg of our trans-mongolian adventure after two fantastic weeks in China. This first leg, which was 30 hours from Beijing to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia was amazing, truly! We approached the trip expecting the worst, having been told that the Chinese trains were even worse than the Indian ones! Ha! First of all the train station was great. We didn't have to maze our way through hundreds of people sleeping on the floor or dodge grown men and women taking squats on the tracks! When we got to our actual train, they had guards at each of the car entrances and even checked our tickets BEFORE getting on so there weren't sleezebags walking through and stealing bags (story to come). Our berth only had 4 beds instead of 6 and instead of being covered in dust and dead bugs, they were covered with sheets! There were no chai wallahs yelling every 5 minutes either! Oh yes, we were in heaven! We got to sleep flat on the beds instead of having one bag under our heads and one under our feet because our berth had a door with a lock and we were the only 2 in it! Worse than India! Psh.

For 30 hours all we did was stare out the window at snow falling on beautiful mountains or across the plains of Mongolia. Can you believe its still snowing at the end of April! To show you how cold it is, we were talking with a guy from Ulan Bator who said that this winter 5 million animals froze to death. And I believe him, because every now and then you would see a horse or goat frozen solid. I wasn't even cold on the train, but after seeing this I decided to keep my heavy coat on as a precautionary measure. Between reading our novels and taking naps we just barely found enough time to eat our peanut butter and banana sandwiches, ramon noodles, snickers and hot tea.

While the train ride was heaven, it wasn't without one major scare. Around 9:30 at night we stopped to cross the border into Mongolia. We were told the stop was for 3 hrs because they needed to check everyone's passports and change the wheels on the train because the type of tracks change at the border. There was a "supermarket" in the train station and I was dying for some hot chocolate, so Micah and I followed the crowd to stock up. We only had about 30 yuan left between the two of us so we were being very careful with our choices, walking up and down each of the aisles 2 or 3 times to make sure we got exactly what we wanted. Well, about 30 min. later as we were still shopping we heard a train honk its horn and pull out of the station. We looked around with horror and realized we were the only ones left in the market. We ran to the door only to find it was chained shut and we were locked in. Looking out we saw there were no more trains at the station!! At this point we were in complete freak out mode. All of our bags were on the train and the border agent on board had taken everyone's passports so at this stage we had no passport and about 5 yuan between us! As we were desperately motioning at one of the workers to unlock the door for us, a man in English yelled down to us from the second floor. He explained that the train HAD left, but just to change its wheels and would be back in an hour. Relieved we went upstairs and discovered a whole mass of people calmly sitting there eating snacks. It took awhile for us to calm down, but once we did we had a good laugh...

Alright, well I will try to make up some lost ground and update on the past two months soon. As for now, we are safe and having a great time!