Regina Glei's Blog, page 20

A Trip to Mongolia – Day 4

I checked out of the hotel and the same guide as the day before picked me up for the sightseeing tour to Ulaanbaatar that would be concluded with them bringing me to the airport. My stomach wasn’t in the best condition but it was okay and heading back to civilization also meant that the toilet problem would be eased.

Our first stop in Ulaanbaatar was a hill with a socialist monument on it that overlooks the entire city. I love such overview places and Ulaanbaatar looks quite nice from above.







On the long stairs up to the monument was an elderly guy selling self-made pictures of camels, horses and the plains plus some leather purses. He had a very cute camel portrait and a nice big leather purse too and I bought those off of him for 3000 yen, since I had no Mongolian money and survived entirely by credit card, which of course this guy didn’t take. He was super friendly and nice and so happy that I bought something off of him. What a big difference to the street sales guys I experienced in India who are so persistent and want you to buy their whole produce.

Next we went to a cashmere factory as a “forced” part of the tour, but also there, no obtrusive sales staff who bother you and want you to buy their store. This works much better with me and I bought a cashmere shawl relatively cheap too for cashmere. Next we went down into the city to the parliament square and hall where Ghengis Khaan sits big and impressive.



On led the way to a department store where I got an hour for shopping and you need that hour to get through their one floor full of souvenir stuff. Next up was the most famous temple of Ulaanbaatar, which has an impressive 25 meter Buddha statue in its main building, plus 1008 small Buddha statues around it. There is much Tibetan influence in this form of Buddhism and there were also plenty of prayer wheels around. You are not allowed to take pictures inside the temple.





Then I got a special treat which was not on the regular program. My guide and I had talked about dogs a lot the previous day and he knew I love dogs, so he took me into the suburbs to a dog breeder-seller he knows, who specializes in big dogs.

The trip to the suburbs was quite something. Only the main roads are asphalt, then it’s dirt roads again. My guide said the people buy a patch of land, then put their gers on there because they have not enough money left for also a house. Their gers of course have the same issues as those on the plains, no running water, no drinking water, no toilets. I have no clue how these people manage. They try to find work in Ulaanbaatar and then save money to build a house maybe, one day? Despite the dire situation they are, in contrast to India, at least taking care of their trash.





The dog breeder… Wow. I better not post picture of this, since animal activist might go bananas. The cages looked still relatively clean to me though and I guess there are even worse animal handlers, but that was a bit tough to see.

We went on to a large food market and that was it. Ulaanbaatar has no public transport system except for buses by the way, no trains, or subways. There was a lot of traffic but not as desperately crowded yet as for example 15 years ago in Bangkok before they got a train system, where I remember having spent hours upon hours in traffic jams.

However, in my opinion Ulaanbaatar needs some urgent city planning. There are three million Mongolians and about half of them live now in and around Ulaanbaatar… The town is not made for so many people. Also my guide said that Ulaanbaatar is laid out for 500,000 people but now there are 1.5 million.

My guide asked me if I wanted to go for dinner with live folklore music, but my measure of experiences was about filled, I was not very enthusiastic about the idea to have to smile politely at folklore music I am inclined not to like and to eat food I don’t care for, especially with my still upset stomach. So I asked my guide to bring me to the airport. Having to kill six hours there until the night flight… Well, I spent once 17 hours in Ho Chi Minh city’s airport

A Trip to Mongolia – Day 3

A tough day awaited me with a seven hour tour to the Hustai national park whose main attraction are wild horses. At the hotel’s reception I talked to a Japanese couple who made the tour two days earlier and anxiously asked them about a justifiable concern. How about toilets? The answer was as expected. Brace yourself, the situation is dire. Uh, okay, understood. Since my hotel caters to mostly Japanese tourists, I got a Japanese speaking guide, who arrived together with a driver who spoke only Mongolian.

Off we went over a bumpy highway, then turned into the much bumpier dirt roads and rumbled along. In a Toyota Prius by the way, which I found astonishing, having expected a jeep. The first stop was the “mini Gobi” which are a few sand dunes, all right, but which were covered in grass, since it has rained a bit more than usual and thus they didn’t look like desert sand dunes at all.



Well, you gotta be grateful for the rain here. Then we went on to the official entrance of the national park which comes along with a ger village which is a hotel of sorts, but a cheaper one than I stayed in. They had common toilets and a common shower. Of course I used the toilet stop, but it was only ten in the morning. They made me watch a fifteen minute information movie in the visitor center in German, wow, then we went with the Prius into the park. There are quite a lot of marmots around and one even posed for the camera, cute!



But no horses far and wide. At one of the mountains my guide made me walk up half that mountain with him because he claimed to have seen horses in the few trees up its top. It was quite a hike but no horses anywhere. Though the landscape and the view were fantastic.



We hiked for the better part of an hour and were back at our car at noon. On we went to another horse hotspot over bumpy dirt roads with at times terrifying tilt angles. Such bumpy roads are not good for your bladder. We passed one building that my guide explained to me was a horse research center and next to it stood a stall. “I guess that’s a toilet.” “Well, if you want to go there…” Yes, I did. It turned out to be a nasty deep hole in the ground with four wooden walls around it. But better than nothing. As the pictures show you cannot go behind a bush, since there is no bush…… So, don’t look too closely, hold your breath and get it over with. My guide did not drink anything the whole time, the driver sipped from small water bottle once in a while and their bladders are made of steel. I also took care with the water intake, not so advisable considering the heat though.

At the second horse hotspot we walked for another half an hour and no horses, the only thing we found was the skin of a snake

A Trip to Mongolia – Day 2

Glorious sunshine awaited on the second day and after breakfast I was out for “revenge” and went to the same spot as the day before though this time without rain. This Buddhist prayer flag post was at a great spot overlooking the surrounding valleys.



The only person I met was a rider who was phoning while riding. When I came back to the hotel compound there was an unusual meetup, the gentleman from the day before whose real ger I visited, was with his car inside the hotel’s compound grazing his horses there. So, his deal with the hotel includes also that. We greeted each other and I think he asked me where I went and I told him up the hill to the prayer flag pole. I asked him if those were his horses and we sort of understood each other without speaking each other’s languages which was kinda funny. Then I walked on and a bit later he sped with his truck into the field and was herding his horses with his car! Haha, modern horse herding in Mongolia

A Trip to Mongolia – Day 1

In the breakfast building of the “ger” hotel, overlooking them, I chatted a little with one Japanese guest family and one Mongolian waiter who lived in Japan for a while and whose Japanese was perfect.

The Japanese family traveled with a four year old girl and a seven month old baby. Interesting place to visit that they chose

A Trip to Mongolia – Getting There

Every journey starts with getting to your destination somehow. Sometimes that goes smoothly and sometimes not.

There seems to be one or the other direct flight from Tokyo to Ulaanbaatar but they didn’t show up when I researched this trip and I ended up flying via Seoul.

The flight from Tokyo to Seoul was 90 minutes delayed due to the delay of the incoming aircraft, which didn’t bother me too much, since I had five hours of layover in Incheon. The flight was packed and in the row in front of me sat what I suppose was a Chinese man in his fifties and his twenty something daughter. Maybe the girl was tired of her dad or maybe she had a fight with him, because she was constantly hiding her face from him behind an uchiwa fan (cheap plastic and paper fans usually given as presents for advertisement purposes in Japan) with some boy band guy on it. Now that was awkward, lol.

In the four people row to my right was a Korean mom and dad with two children in their midst aged around four and three. Those two behaved like little devils terrorizing their surroundings. The only ones who didn’t care were the stoic parents

Novel Gardening

They say that there are two basic author types, the architects and the gardeners. The architects construct the plot, framework, outline of their next novel in detail and when they start writing they “follow the plan” and fill the skeleton with flesh. The gardeners start from a naked field and let things grow as they go along without much outlining, structuring, chapter lists etc.

I always considered myself a hybrid between those two, there was usually some planning going on. For some novels I have made a chapter by chapter outline, thus being quite an architect, although I often didn’t stick to the original plan and threw the chapter by chapter outline over board to let gardening take over.

My newest endeavor though, which is as of today 48,000 words long, is the most extreme case of gardening I have done so far and I’m surprised at myself

A Big Thanks to the Characters of the Anatomy of Anarchy

Five years after the “Dome Child” the second “Dome of Souls” novel “The Anatomy of Anarchy” is now out there in the ether.

Of the books I have published so far, this is the one that causes the fuzziest feelings. The characters in this book all feel like relatives or at least good old friends. And good old friends they are, the first version of the Anatomy dates back from around the year 2001. I invented them a bloody damn 15 years ago. No wonder they feel like family. The original version of the Anatomy was written in screenplay format then abandoned, until the “Dome” bug bit me again and I pulled the Anatomy back out in 2014 and rewrote it from scratch.

The characters have much evolved since their first infant version in 2001. They truly have grown and become adults.

Master Darnar, my good old villain buddy. What a wonderful asshole he is, cunning and shrewd plus a bit crazy.

His brutal side-kick Mortimer.

The loud and shiny Juggernaut.

My wonderful Dome Guild Master – Eveless – the bitchy white goddess.

Her side-kick Henry, whom you just want to hug and kiss on the cheek.

Eveless’ melancholic partner Marusar who you just want to slap and shake the whole time.

The slippery Zero, Master of the “Bottom Guild”.

My wise and too honest alien, Lofgar.

Darryl, that old coward of a sect guru.

The nasty, slimy inquisitor Brother Mathew.

That unbearable brat Rila.

The prudish and tragic Claude.

The always drugged inventor Talip.

The weird Bottomers – the Admiral, Creeper, Pinky and Zora.

The mutants… oh, the mutants.

And the one who holds them all together – my tragic hero Floyd Takashimoto. Floyd feels more like a brother to me than my actual brother. Floyd who tries to do good, who only wants the best, but never quite makes it. Floyd, who has brilliant moments and qualities that have never been nurtured, as Master Darnar once says.

It’s quite an ensemble in the Anatomy of Anarchy and all play their part in the inevitable outcome. It felt overwhelming and a too big task to write this book, my longest and most complicated as of yet, but once I was again surrounded by all those familiar guys and girls who I invented 15 years ago, the inevitable ending pulled everything in place like a center of gravity.

It’s been great fun writing you guys. I’m kinda sad that it’s done now.

But the “Dome” continues and “Jeronimo” awaits, which is the true center of gravity and which was the beginning of the “Dome” idea in 1997… OMG! Next year, 20 years on, the plan is to finally, finally get this off my chest. Like the Anatomy, Jeronimo was originally a screenplay, last year it became a novel, written from scratch again like the Anatomy and after some more polishing it shall come out next year.

But for now – here’s: The Anatomy of Anarchy

And thank you my dear characters, I’ve had a great time with you!

Movie Reviews August ’16

I can rarely sleep on planes, so I usually spend the time writing and watching movies…

The Revenant

Oh my… Leo suffering for two hours. He did deliver a great performance, yes, granted, but that doesn’t make the movie easier to watch.

I wonder how they shot the scenes where the grizzly made minced meat out of him.

Another main character in the movie is the landscape, which I found to be utterly uninviting. What a ghastly, unforgiving and lonely place. Fascinating how you can steer the impression people get. It could have been breathtakingly beautiful but it was shot so that it all looked ugly, uninviting and desolate.

The more I see of Tom Hardy, the more I admire the guy. He is one damn fine actor. While I’m a great fan of Mad Max Fury Road and watched it some five times already, I won’t be watching the Revenant again, too tough. Even if sleeping inside the corpse of a horse to keep warm during a snow storm is a new thing that I haven’t seen before.

Granted, the fellows portrayed in the movie were tough as nails but any normal human being would’ve died ten times over faced with the fate of Leo’s character. That disbelief made the movie watchable, but if I were a real and true Leo fan, I guess I would’ve passed out at some point

Finnish Midsummer – Vaasa

The day of the Nummirock festival was also the day when Brexit was announced…

With BBC news in my Seinaejoki hotel, I watched some of the craze on the 25th shaking my head constantly while packing my bag to continue the journey. Now, a few weeks later, all gut feeling that this was the stupidest decision of the UK in all of history, remains and is confirmed.

Then, just yesterday, 22nd of July, a case of a student running amok in Munich where I lived for ten years… Luckily that turned out to be a non terrorist deed, but nevertheless, since Brexit there has been terror in Nice, Istanbul, coup d’etat in Turkey, terror in Bangladesh and Iraq and and and… I thought for a moment to make today’s blog entry about terrorism and complete shitheads like Boris in the UK and Donald in the US but decided not to… I shall not give the fuckheads what they want – disruption of our lives… so, back to the planned blog entry – my last one concerning my great trip to Sweden and Finland in between business trip to Germany.

The weather was getting worse again after Nummirock, cloudy, no sun out, but no rain yet. I was very lucky with the weather the day before when my favorite bands played!

I was only going back to Vaasa that day but also that was easier said than done. There seem to be four trains per day from Seinaejoki to Vaasa

Nummirock and Elks

I’ve been to quite some heavy metal festivals in recent years and many of them are off the beaten track so as to not disturb the neighborhood. Nummirock resembles Wacken in terms of remoteness, however, Nummirock is even more remote. In Wacken you at least have Hamburg a hundred kilometers away, which is a two million people city and which has a real international airport. Nummirock is the remotest thing I’ve been to so far. Brutal Assault in the Czech Republic is also pretty much nowhere, but at least it’s only twenty kilometers from a train station that has a direct link to Prague some 90 minutes away. Further, Assault is laid out for international fans and they have a bus service to a contracted hotel at that train station, which brings you back and forth for free every day. Brutal Assault remains the best organized and most non-camper friendly festival I have yet been to. Nummirock is a truly local festival and you can only get there by car, period. I heard two three words of English but the international fans at the festival were few.

Arriving there at 12:30 was shocking. There was nobody there! If they have one thing in abundance it’s space and there are a staggering four stages. One amateur stage where local bands play and also cover bands, and three professional stages, the Main stage, the Inferno stage and the Chaos stage. It’s next to the beautiful lake Nummi and the weather was gorgeous.



Luckily there was no need for rubber boots, the ground was astonishingly dry. Well, the water flows down softly to the lake. I estimate the total number of visitors at below 10.000, was it even only 5000? It was hard to tell since there was a lot of coming and going between the festival ground and the camping ground across the street.

The festival grounds are lovely, trees here and there that give shadow, since even in Finland it can be too hot when the sun shines end of June, and plenty of tree trunks to sit down on. Further some bars with sofa areas. While there is no sitting down in Wacken anywhere inside the stage area, Nummirock offers plenty such opportunities.

The first band that played on the Chaos stage at 13:00 or so had seven customers? Poor guys!



Everything was super laid back and it was even kinda weird if you were eager to see your favorite band. Never has getting into the first row been so easy as at Nummirock. I was prepared to wait for 90 min in the first row but nobody stayed there and I could wander off again seeing something else and half an hour before the gig, the first few fans strolled to the front row of the next gig, lol. In the central area were a few food and goods stalls. The food was the crappiest I have yet eaten at a festival