We were awake for 30 hours straight to do this climb: 3,756 m (12,323 feet) from the bottom to the top of Mt Fuji. The saying in Japan is that everyone should climb Mt. Fuji once, but only a fool would do it twice. The top part of the climb is really steep so there is a giant staircase covering the last 1 hour part of the trail. Since we were there off-season, the stairs were covered with several feet of snow, so we had to scramble up some cliffs instead.
Eventually we found our base camp near a river. We would be staying here several nights inbetween the riding trips and camping in tents in the prairie. We were welcomed in by the host family and shown around the two Gers (or Yurts), which are traditional nomadic portable housing structures. The best part was all the baby animals which crowded around the outside (and some even inside) the Gers.
If you’ve ever been on the Indiana Jones Adventure Jeep ride in Disneyland, riding off-road in a real Jeep in Mongolia is Exactly like that. Our Soviet-era (with a red star and the words “SSSR” marked on the spare wheel) jeep crossed rivers, sped alongside wild animals and rolled off of small cliffs with admirable ease. We were tossed all around the back seat and had to hang on to the (padded) ceiling to prevent head injury. As we approached our destination, our driver frequently exited the jeep to scream in search of our nomad host family – they move every season, and nobody was sure exactly where they would be.
We spent our first day in Mongolia at a Buddhist temple in Ulaanbaatar. Buddhism is a much gentler religion than we are used to – children are encouraged to play with the pigeons, the monks spend their time singing songs and making colorful trinkets, and praying is done by spinning shiny gold drums. It was nice and sunny and everyone looked happy.
Our train stopped for 5 hours on the border between Russia and Mongolia, giving us plenty of time to wonder what we have gotten ourselves into. We met some other foreigners on the train and explored the town with them – cool guys. They later gave us some guide books to look through and a business card with the name of a hostel – this was the first and only helpful information that we learned about the country.
That, behind me, is a cow. For a very long time we didn’t have access to google and were very confused about whether that was a cow or a bull. We thought it might be a bull because it had horns, or a cow because it didn’t attack us. Turns out that bulls are a subset of cows (the male version) and that female cows can also have horns. Also cows are very stupid and lazy and not scary at all.
These photos are actually from a really long time ago, but graduating from Mudd reminded me of this. Better posted late than never! We were on the Laserfiche clinic team working on software for dewarping photos of document pages, where the pages were physically distorted (e.g. book curves). Fun times.Â
I got to fly home for my graduation! While technically I finished a semester ago, it was really cool to walk in the official ceremony with my friends and classmates.
Of course it was sad to be leaving, but it’s nice to know that all the hard work paid off! Graduated with distinction, honors in mathematics, and got the NSF Fellowship for graduate studies at UCLA.
This is at a new underground mall in the center of Moscow. The sakura trees were a nice reminder of Japan.
This is the neighborhood of our apartment. All of these are taken within a 10 minutes’ walk from where I live! The first two photos are of guys fishing through a hole they made in the ice over a frozen lake.
