I’d like to introduce you to my good friend Josh Day via a podcast conversation. Josh and I met while I was riding my bike in the Altai Mountains in Russia along a roadway that leads to the Mongolian border. We ended up hitting it off and cycled together for over one week as Josh taught me Russian, (originally from England, he learned the language by studying in his tent at night, taking classes in Kazakhstan, and listening to language learning audio while pedaling in Central Asia and Russia), provided insight into the world’s largest country through his language skills, and cooked me Russian buckwheat every evening for dinner.
Josh and I split up in Mongolia that August, as I had to go back to work in Korea, but he continued cycling through Mongolia and into Siberia during winter (while sleeping outside every evening) before taking a boat from Vladivostok (a city in the southeast part of Russia) to South Korea. After cycling for a few days in the Gangwon province of Korea, he and his bicycle appeared outside of my apartment building in Seoul in December, where he rested and refueled with kimchi stew from my neighborhood restaurant and ramen noodles from the local convenience store.
Josh has many stories to tell and our conversation lasted nearly four hours. In order to break things up a bit, our talk was split into two episodes- this is part two.
