Well, we didn't wander too far from the capital city, but we did get a fantastic introduction to the country of Mongolia. This was one of my long-awaited trips while living in Asia, and we finally made the adventure happen this month. We spent a week in a guest house apartment in the center of UlaanBaatar. Accompanying me on this journey were Norm, Rebecca, Daniel, and our family friend D'Arcy. The kids had arrived on July 18, and we took off on Mongolian Airlines (MIAT) the next morning. The flight was only about 3 hours, and I was relieved to see that we were on a Boeing 737 plane, American made! This is one trip for which we concluded we had to buy reserved seats, because the KAL flights for stand-by were all packed with other tourists and businessmen. Our flight was full too. Sometimes it pays to pay a little more for a lower stress level. Stand by flying is wonderful most of the time, but not to Mongolia in July!
I knew that Koreans were making their presence known in Mongolia, but I was amazed to see such an obvious, pervasive presence everywhere we looked--Seoul Street downtown, Korean restaurants everywhere, Korean cyberstores, Seoul Hotel, and even a Seoul Tennis Club. You may know that Mongols are responsible for the Korean race, so I went all week long not knowing by facial appearance if I was watching Koreans or Mongolians. However, their language and dress identifies them pretty well. Mongolian language is based on the Cyrillic alphabet. So, it was a strange mixture of Russia (Soviet) and Korea.
As I read the signs like "PECTOPAH" ["restaurant"] and remembered my rudimentary intro to Russian language during our past visits in Russian cities, I discovered that the Russians have left their mark there just as they did in the Communist years in Ruskieland. But Mongolians have taken their former Soviet government buildings, which abound, and turned them into lots of other things, such as snooker or pool parlors. We got a kick out of seeing a huge base relief Lenin head staring down from the wall inside the foyer of one such edifice, which is now a local billiard parlor, right next to a newly built movie theater building (one of only two theaters in the whole city of 1 million residents.)
We spent our week alternating between roaming around the city museums and performances, and venturing out on daytrips into the countryside. Highlights in the rural area were the visit to Terelj National Park (where we ate lunch with a nomad family in their ger home and rode horses for a while) and the Chinggis Khan Calvary March supershow out on the steppe, featuring 500 costumed characters and our main man, complete with music, blowing dust, and a lot of video and still pictures from the grandstands. That event started in summer 2006 as a big tribute to the 800th anniversary of the Mongolian nation, when Chinggis Khan united the many nomad tribes of Asia to form his mighty empire. He is truly the Hero of Mongolia!
One pleasant discovery is the restaurant [pectopah!] scene in the city. We were all sort of concerned about what we would do for a week if we had to eat a mutton-based simple nomad diet for the whole week. On our first night there, we did a little research in the neighborhood and found lots of modern, clean, ethnic restaurants that take VISA, contrary to what we had been told. So, one of our daily highlights became deciding where to eat each day, alternating among Mongolian and Italian, Russian, American, and Chinese cuisine. And the best part is the low price to dine in style there. On our last night we splurged at the only Mongolian BBQ restaurant in town. I am still trying to figure out how Americans connected Mongolia with this type of Asian grill menu, because we saw nothing like it anywhere authentic, anywhere we went, except B-D's on Seoul Street, an obvious tourist trap and ex-pat hangout.
I see that I have focused on Daniel the most in our 5 alloted photos for this posting, so I will add some more with the next section, and get back to it asap. We are off to the 63 Building in Seoul this evening with Rebecca, who leaves us tomorrow (July 31) to return to Utah after a great 2 week stay in Asia!.
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