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There are few things that inspire me more than large cities, sprawling with buildings in all directions. This year I’ve seen a fair share of them. Tokyo, Marrakesh, Ulaanbaatar, Novosibirsk, Seoul, Amsterdam, Beijing, Inverness, Irkutsk, Kyoto, Moscow and many more.
It was a magnificent day for departure with clear skies and 11 degrees Celsius. Me and Frida donned our heavy backpacks at the Central Station in Gothenburg and boarded the first train of many to come.
I walked alone in the streets of Tokyo and felt like a benign Godzilla. Everywhere I went, people stopped in their tracks and stared. I started humming on the song “Big in Japan” by Alphaville as I was a six-foot-five gaijin in a sea of people shorter than me.
It is a strange sensation to wander around in a Japanese town as a six foot four gaijin, a foreigner excluded from the language and everyday rituals that everyone within sight silently obeys.
The name of Hiroshima will forever be connected to the horrible event in 1945. On August 6, the first nuclear bomb to be used against mankind detonated 580 meters above the city, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
I am currently sitting in a dark room at a hostel in Seoul, South Korea. Trying my best to recover from an exhausting day of warfare study. Earlier this morning I looked into North Korea with binoculars, seeing their flag shaking defiantly in the wind.
After a long train journey, I had finally arrived in Beijing. First thing on the list was to get some food. I had hoped to casually sweep through the food court like Anthony Bourdain, but my noodles were awful and I felt more like John Hurt in movie “Alien”, just waiting for the chestburster to appear.
I am currently in Ulaanbaatar after sleeping a couple of nights in a traditional ger tent on the Mongolian plains. It feels good to be back in civilization (sort of) with an internet connection and a warm shower.
I got off the Trans-Siberian at 7 am after four nights of irregular sleep. While placing my dusty shoes on the pavement of the Ulaanbataar railway station, I looked around the area. When tired and hungry, you are an easy target for the shadowy existences walking around here.
I shared cabin with a Russian couple on a night train from Helsinki to Moscow earlier this week. They told me that a plane had crashed near Perm with 80 dead and some damage done to the Trans-Siberian railway.