/lit/ - Literature

>>12498292
If you spend any time east of the Urals in your country there are parts that are not entirely dissimilar so it depends how well-travelled you are. For all its problems and its bleakness though I still think of it as one of the last remaining truly romantic countries. There really aren't many other places in the world like it - maybe Kazakhstan or Siberia. On the gelid, barren, windswept steppe you'll see the world at its most brutal and most sublime. There are rugged nomads, squalid shantytowns, soaring falcons, biting frosts, rotting carcasses and a horizon of infinite nothingness. In Ulaanbaatar, people are torn between that and post-soviet modernity but it all still exists in their psyche and outside the capital. One of my most memorable experiences has been driving for hours to the very middle of nowhere, getting out of the vehicle and seeing the flat, empty steppe reaching out to eternity around me. Just nothingness, a nothingness in the most absolute sense, stretching into the beyond. Go during early-mid spring when the frosts are milder and the midnight sun of the deep north starts to linger on the horizon and the night escapes away.