FEELING IN CALIFORNIA.

Kamasu Livingston is 39 years old. A man of wide-ranging experience.

Like many people in California he is in fact an actor who is still waiting for his breakthrough. So he often works as a model or stuntman. From time to time he plays the part of a police officer in some US series. Thanks to this, he has, for example, learned how to handcuff someone, like a pro.

Kamasu is a man of many talents. He has recently taken up yet another job, one that is only indirectly connected with acting. He is an expert for DriveNOW, BMW's car-sharing programme in San Francisco. He taught us how wonderful it can be not to use any fuel - to glide along, almost silently, propelled only by electric power. And how nice it can be not to own a car. No down payment, no instalments, no taxes, no insurance premium, no servicing.

And yet you can still travel in style. With a "driving machine" from the car pool of electric cars in San Francisco. The white special editions from Bavaria can travel 80 to 100 miles on a single charge, before you have to plug them in again. The cost is affordable - in the electric drivers programme. A trip to the airport is charged at 12 dollars, deducted digitally. The same trip by cab would cost 50 dollars. On top of which: there's the feeling. As so often in California: it's amazing.

Landgang:
der Autor und
sein mongolischer
Fahrer

MAY 2012

RARE EARTHS.

It was another of those days when you hardly have time to tuck in your shirt.

There they stood, in the mild wind of the Mongolian steppes. On rare earths. Or on copper, probably on gold.

That was the moment he decided to bring that remote country to the attention of the Western world through a series of short stories. But first, he had to cough.

Beijing had already been a disaster. Another sandstorm from the Gobi desert. But people are always coughing in Beijing. The taxi drivers cough particularly noisily, even when there isn't a sandstorm. Having to go through that for days on end had made him age rapidly. The author seemed weary.

Mongolia is a rare and strange patch of earth. A society where the Middle Ages meet the modern age. A rich country, of late. A treasure trove full of natural resources, raw materials just waiting to be extracted. Yet almost 50 percent of Ulan Bator's inhabitants live below the poverty line. How is that possible? Are modern and medieval times really such a happy constellation? The people of Mongolia have certainly arrived in the global world, though, bang in the middle of the 21st century...