Breakfast and walk
Unable to sleep, yet again, I awoke around 5 a.m. I showered and readied myself for the day. Today is again the coldest day so far this trip, at -26C, so I finally break out the snow pants that I’ve been itching to wear. They don’t fit well: they’re made of a waterproof outer layer that doesn’t stretch at all, squishes my trunk flat…now I don’t know what I’m going to do with all that junk. And they make crinkly noises when I walk, but they are made for this exact purpose. I went downstairs for breakfast and I’m not sure there are any other guests in the hotel. There were chafing dishes for a breakfast buffet, with juices and cereals and milk at the end, but no food. A waitress brought me a plate and said ‘dessert’. It consisted of a Russian pancake (blini) with a slice of cheese, a sliced apple, 2 chocolate chip cookies, and a yogurt cup. Since it was ‘dessert’, I left it in the middle of the table. Then she brought a bowl of soup, a clear salty brothy soup, maybe chicken? maybe kind of a very runny egg-drop soup, as it appeared to have bits of egg floating in it? I dunno. I ate the soup and asked for a coffee. Then the waitress brings me my breakfast plate. 2 slices of toast, bacon, a beef sausage, olives, whole kernal corn, some steamed veggies, a fried egg, I think that’s it. Hmmm, this is new and interesting. There was no process by which to order food, so I have no idea if this is some version of ‘western’ breakfast they made up just for me or if this is their normal spread. And I’m all alone in a whole restaurant room that is clearly used for karaoke in the evenings. Every 3rd restaurant is a karaoke bar. I was kind of flattered, after having learned how expensive pork is here, that they actually found some bacon for me.
After breakfast I headed out into the brisk morning air. -26C, still completely dark outside, and 7:30 a.m. We passed a mall a couple of blocks away and google says it is open from 7a.m., so I figure it’s a 10 minute walk, let’s go. I put some hot hands in my gloves and pull on my neck gaitor to try to brace from the cold. I walk the 10 minutes to the mall and….it is clearly not open or almost open. Hmmm, my other idea for a place to go today was the Narantuul market, which google says opens at 9. It’s a 30 minute walk from where I am, so I say why not, it’ll be 9 when I get there. I wander the streets of Ulan Bator, going from the fancy mall area to a residential area with huge apartment buildings and stores at street level. But I am noticing, as I am walking and the sun is rising, even the coffee shops are still closed. It’s Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m. and the coffee shops are closed. Mongols are not morning people. I meandered, chatting with Joe and observing the city, until I arrived at…not my destination. Using google maps, the market is in the middle of like a square block. Google assumes it’s equally easy to get there from all 4 sides, so sent me down some narrow alleyways between towers of apartments right to the edge of a cliff… So I had to find my way back out to the street and circle the block to find the entrance. It’s still cold, and there’s so much ice. I have nearly fallen on my face more times than I remember, but managed to stay upright for now.
There was a trickle of peoplewandering into the market, about half of whom were carrying goods to open their stalls, pushing or dragging carts and wooden crates. Though it was well past 9 at this point, it was clear that this would not be a bustling marketplace for a couple of hours. This is fine by me, as all of the reviews indicate that it is a haven for pick-pockets, with many saying to just leave your cell phone in your hotel. At this hour, I was able to easily wander about without ever coming within a few feet of anyone. As I walked, I realized I wsa in but a small corner of the market. It stretches on for ages, this massive web of tarps and metal frames for stalls. My guide had told me that the market is very small in the winter, with mostly just food vendors and they move to an indoor warehouse. But this was not that. I never found the warehouse where there is raw meat and dairy and produce. It was like a flea market, but very densely packed with stalls, rows and rows, and then another section of rows and rows of stalls. The first area I was in, maybe 1 in 10 stalls was open, and that might be as many as will open in the winter. It was mostly housewares, kitchen gadgets and wall hangings. Then there was a large area of Christmas trees and decorations. Not like souvenir-y ‘Mongolia’ ornaments, but like boxes of colored glas and plastic globes and Santa Clause figures and garland, and of course, dozens of fake trees. I laughed to myself at the irony of there being a flocking station in the snow. I continued to wander and found an area with beads and jewelry/ornamental decoration supplies. Then I found the bolts of silk fabric area. Beautiful vibrant brocades abound. Then there was an area of clothing, mostly winter supplies: hats, gloves, fleece tights. There were more areas, in what seemed like a never-ending maze. It was still outdoors and I’d been walking for a couple of hours at this point, but was pretty comfortable overall. I tried to keep my neck gaitor pulled over my nose to hide my pudgy pink cheeks and avoid unwanted attention. One stall-attendant noticed me and began speaking Russian, but I instinctively replied in German and was on my way. Still a curiosity, I felt more and more uneasy as the aisles began to fill with people. And the goods were similar to a flea market, not really commercial goods, just random odds and ends and always just in boxes you’d have to sift through to purchase anything. I had neither the time for that nor the desire to be watched and gawked over, so I made my way back towards the mall where I had started.
Taking a different route, walking more briskly this time, I made it to the mall in the prescribed 30 minutes. It is next to a tall hotel of the same name, Shangri-La, so it’s easy to spot from across town. I went inside this fancy mall, and was suddenly surrounded by about 50% European luxury goods and 50% Mongolian luxury goods. There was a godiva chocolatier, a rolex store, many European and Japanese cosmetic stores I was unfamiliar with. But there were very interesting Mongolian goods as well. Expensive fur coats, casmere stores, even a couture evening gown store by a Mongolian designer. And the dresses were quite risque! Illusion mesh all around. Every store name is in the Latin alphabet, not Cyrillic, which Mongolian is written in. It’s weird, obviously designed for foreigners, not locals, but also easy on the eyes after a few days of sounding out wortd phonetically, trying to read cyrillic characters. It has a small footprint, so the mall feels very vertical. I rode the escelator up, up, and up, until I reached the 4th and final floor. Herein lies the food coart and all of the other European people in Mongolia. There are maybe 5 restaurants at the food court. There is a white guy standing at the ‘Nuclear Steak’, a woman and 2 children at another walk-up counter, and 3 sit-down restaurants. It was 10:45 in the morning, and none of them were open. I had desparately wanted to find a Mongolian hot pot for lunch, but every restaurant I passed on my walk wouldn’t open until noon. Not morning people.
Lunch
Fortunately the mall restaurants open at 11, so now I just had to wait 15 minutes. I surveyed the options and decided I had time for a sit-down restaurant and a beer, which left 2 options: Broasters, a sports bar with wings, burgers, fried chicken, and Paulaner on tap, or Ruby Room, a place with GEM Mongolian beer on tap and no indication of what kind of food it might serve from the outside. I chose Mongolian beer and unknown food, which turned out to be burgers. I am greeted and sit at a table, and order the beer. They even have 2 taps: light and dark GEM. I of course had the dark one and it was very delicious. Then I looked at the menu, and it was full of burgers that were clearly designed to appeal to Westerners. No Mongolian spiced burgers or even like ramen burgers or Asian/Chinese style food. I ordered the ‘Mexican burger’, which was a burger topped with cheese, jalapenos, and avocados. I couldn’t resist…but I should have. The burger arrived, and it was huge. It looked delicious! Served on a wooden cutting board with a strange type of fries and 3 dipping sauces. It looked like anything you’d get in a restaurant at home. I picked up the top bun, to make sure there were not *too* many jalapenos and immediately noticed that the ‘jalapenos’ were a very pale green, so I picked one up and bit into it. There was a huge pile of them on the burger, but it turned out they were more like bell peppers, not at all spicy. There was thinly sliced avocado, actual avocado. So I put the bun back on top and took a huge bite. Immediately, regret came rushing through my body as I struggled to swallow. While I had thought to check the number and type of peppers, it had not occured to me that then very generously applied red ketchup-looking sauce might be a sri-racha type sauce meant to mask the lack of spiciness from the peppers. The top bun and top layer of peppers were drenched in this red death sauce. I took off the top bun and scraped off as much sauce as possible, eating the bottom half of the burger with a knife and fork. At this point, I am a bit rushed for time, so I eat quickly, finish my beer, and hike back to the hotel to meet my guide at noon. At least there was beer.
Final Sightseeing
I arrived at the hotel just in time to grab my bags, check out at the front desk and head out. We went first to a Buddhist temple, where we walked around, but his intention to show me the monks chanting was thwarted, as they were on mid-day break. So we left for the Mongolian war memorial, which is, of course, at the top of a hundred or so stairs. There is a memorial to the Mongolian/Soviet cooperation against the Japanese in 2 wars. My guide has talked over the last couple of days about how much things have changed culturally here since the fall of the Soviet Union. He has many stories of being in a country stuck between 2 countries that control all media. Mongolia allied with the Russians over the Chinese when the Chinese cultural revolution happened, and so allowed many soviet soldiers to occupy Mongolia and protect Russia from China, with Mongolia being both a buffer zone and a protected area. His stories of communism and oppression and propoganda sound familiar. But then there is the story of the end of communism and the adoption of democracy in Mongolia, which is quite an unfamiliar story, compared to those of Eastern European countries. There are photos in the history museum we visited yesterday of soviet tanks, put on a train, peacefully just leaving Mongolia. I still am unsure why. My guide says there is a good relationship between Mongolia and Russia and they were never ‘occupied’, they agreed to it. But I think there might also be something involving the crumbling USSR and fears that Mongolia could side with China and completely take down Russia…leaving peacefully was probably their best strategy. So since the mid-1990’s Mongolia has had access to everything the rest of the world does. My guide wanted to talk about the Terminator movies with me, having seen it once on Russian state TV and then once later, seeing that the Russian station had edited out half of the movie. It seems a strange and tenuous relationship, but the attrocities committed by the Japanese were far worse here, and the Russians were their allies. Nothing is ever simple. The memorial is on top of a mountain, overlooking the city, so I take a few shots of the city landscape and we are on our way. The city runs on 4 coal power plants, each one can be seen on the edge of town, towering smoke billowing out. The smell in the city is awful, and the view from the mountain really shows how the smog collects in one valley, leaving other parts of the town slightly less blanketed.
Last Stop
Our last stop before the train station, we stop at the supermarket for some snacks for the train, and he promised to help me pick out a beer, one of those huge bottles, to share on the train. Standing in the junk food aisle, I ask if any of the cookies are made in Mongolia. He looks around….. ‘These are very good!’. On the package: ‘Lecker! Gut gesmack!’. I’m like…those are German. So he finds some that are made in Mongolia, from condensed milk, and I grab a pastry from the bakery. Then we left for the train station. Traffic in Ulan Bator is a nightmare; all times day and night, there is stop and go traffic. We made it to the train only 20 minutes before departure time, and luckily there is no security check as in China. They checked my ticket and passport and I was on the train. Good-bye Mongolia, it has been fun!
