A Big Commie Protestival

After almost three weeks in Istanbul, I've finally got out and saw some of the sights. The first sight was a lot of people.

May Day is apparently a day of protests and communist folk songs. Only the second year since people were allowed to protest in Taksim Square, the place was packed with thousands of commies out of the hundreds of thousands of people present. There were other people protesting too, it was sort of like a protest festival - or protestival - but communists are the most interesting.

I could hear the music from my apartment, which is really close to the square. I headed out with two of my flatmates and one's girlfriend and father.

Roads were barricaded and filled with people rather than cars for a change, people were wearing red, there were banners of Turkish communist martyrs, and even portraits of Chairman Mao on some of the banners. One dude had a Che Guavara t-shirt on.

That's my flatmate's dad in the picture. Apparently my flatmate's parents are still in the communist party and Dad there was really amped to get out and do some protesting.

The highlight of the May Day festivities, after the labyrinthine detour through crumbling side streets just to get into the entrance, was watching people rock out to protest songs from the 70s and 80s that occasionally sounded like Irish folk tunes with some trilling, and later, I ate a really good sandwich of little spiced meat patties and veggies for $2.

I followed up this mind-broadening day out by my first real day of touristy sightseeing. Coming soon.

The Border By Bus

Old Korean buses go to Russia to become new Russian buses. City buses running through the cities I stopped in had partially scraped off Korean lettering, and I even saw a bus from Gyeong-sang Buk-do, the province I used to live in. It really warmed my heart.

Long distance buses in Korea are extremely comfortable. They usually have spacious reclining chairs, three to a row. Sadly, it wasn't one of those buses that Adam and I took across the border to Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar.

I got into Ulan-Ude at 6AM and took a taxi to the opera house to meet Adam and get on our bus. It was an old Korean bus, sure enough, but it was four seats to a row with about a foot of leg space between the edge of your seat and the back of the next.

I didn't really notice the problem until the guy ahead of me reclined all the way. Whatever else can be said about this bus we were on, the seat really reclined a lot. Bad news for my legs. I couldn't get comfortable enough to really get a good nap, which is a shame, because the roads were actually smooth enough to sleep on. Theoretically.

I sat next a Russian Buryat girl on her way to finish her final year at the university in Ulaanbaatar. She was a strange case. She had light eyes, bleach-blond hair, and what looked like bleached skin. I guess she wasn't a big fan of the appearance her race bestowed upon her.

Adam was three seats up since I wasn't sure if I was going to get the last couple days out of my Russian visa and wound up buying our tickets separately.

It was a twelve-hour trip. It doesn't seem bad compared to three days on a train, but twelve hours is still a long time. About two of those hours were eaten up by customs procedures. Twice, Russian officials got on our bus to check our passports and visas, then we went through the customs building, and were checked once again.

The Mongolian side was a lot quicker. We went through the customs building and then an official checked our documents once we were on the bus again. It was at least half as long. Communism - 0, democracy - 1.

We immediately saw horses roaming the plains and hills on the Mongolian side, and cruised through run-down shack towns occasionally before stopping at a heavily Westernized Mongolian restaurant for a long overdue lunch. It was the first thing we had eaten since we left about 9 hours previously. My eyes were almost bigger than my stomach, but I finished my beer, fried chicken-layered-on-beef-and-cheese, salad and rosemary potatoes.

By the time we got to Ulaanbaatar, we still had a long ride ahead of us. The traffic in the city is a complete fucking mess. It was like we were on an overcrowded and really slow conveyor belt, but we finally got in and were met by the woman who ran the guesthouse we booked for our first couple nights.