During my four years living in Poland, I've traveled for work to a lot of places around Europe - from big tourist destinations like Moscow, Prague and Budapest, to less "glamorous", but equally beautiful places like Romania, Slovenia and Estonia. My last trip, to Mongolia, was possibly the most exotic of them all. It's a funny question why I would travel to Mongolia since I work in the Central and Eastern European region, but for some reason they fall under our umbrella. It meant an extremely interesting trip, one which saw me spend more consecutive days there than I have in any other country in my life, besides the US and Poland. After 19 days, even the locals thought I was Mongolian (they actually thought this even on the first day). Because I had to fly to the US directly from Mongolia for Geoff and Hannah's wedding in Chicago, then Byron and Aileen's in San Francisco, I was out of Warsaw for an entire month. And this was the start of an around-the-world journey.
The trip didn't start off so smoothly, as I locked myself out of my apartment on the morning of my flight, with my suitcase still inside. As the taxi was waiting to take me to the airport, I decided to take the trash out just before I went to the taxi. I left my suitcase inside the front door while I went out to the bin, but when I came back to get my bag, the electronic key pad on the door wasn't working. The door wouldn't open, so I couldn't get my bag from inside. At first I was calm, trying the key pad over and over again, but as 10 minutes passed, and the key pad wasn't responding, I started to panic. The taxi driver called me, asking where I was, to which I responded "I'm coming, but the door isn't working" in Polish. This probably didn't make any sense, but it bought me a few extra minutes. Then some drunk looking kid came up to the door and tried to buzz one of the apartments. He also noticed it wasn't working, so he tried calling someone (his friend who lives inside, I imagine), and started banging on the window closest to the front door. A couple minutes later, the kid who lives in that apartment came outside in his towel, looking around, but his friend was gone. I didn't bother explaining what happened, I just said "excuse me", grabbed my suitcase, and ran for the cab. To this day, I'm not sure if he thinks it was me banging on his window, or the drunk kid who may or may not have been his friend.
Packing for this trip was pretty difficult. I had to spend 8 days teaching training, a weekend in the city, a week in the desert/countryside, then time in SF, Chicago, and Seattle, including a couple of weddings. I tried to bring the bare minimum of clothes, but not knowing what the weather in Mongolia would be, it made it pretty difficult. I ended up bringing a lot of clothes I didn't mind just leaving there, in case I ran out of luggage space (after souvenirs and buying more stuff in the US, which I always do).
I took a flight to Moscow, then a red-eye to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia (I don't think it's a coincidence that the name of the city has so many a's in it, and they have so many sheep who say "baaaaaaaaa"). I love that the locals call it "UB", because it sounds hip, and makes it a lot easier for people to say. I tried learning some Mongolian words when I was there, but they are really difficult for me to pronounce. Some of the words sound a bit "slobbery", like they haven't swallowed their saliva in a few hours. I just couldn't get this. People's names were also difficult (and long). I had to ask everyone in the office to say their names a few times, and to tell me their "short" names, which were much easier (and pretty cute and fun). I was also confused as to why many of them have the same first name as someone else's last name. And by "many", I mean everyone. The reason is that people use their father's first name as their surname. So, instead of Tristan Sakura, I would be Tristan Frederick. It explained a lot, and now I would like to call you all by your father's name.
Car talk:
On the way from the airport to my hotel, I immediately noticed that the concept of roads is different in Mongolia than where I am used to (and this doesn't even consider that outside of the capital, there are not many paved roads at all). There were 3 lanes for cars on this stretch of highway, but there wasn't any clear sign who was entitled to which lanes. Clearly the right lane is for traffic going in my direction, and the left for cars coming the opposite direction. But the middle lane was being used by anyone and everyone that wanted to. Big 4x4s were going in all directions using the lane, swerving in and out just when you thought there would be a massive explosion of vehicles, everyone honking like they were having a honking contest. At least my driver used his blinker diligently, to warn others about his planned craziness. I was gripping my seat with white knuckles. As a side note, some of the cars have the steering wheel on the right side, and some on the left, which is awkward, but it also makes it harder for cars with right-side steer wheels to overtake others...they can't check for oncoming traffic without going halfway into the other lane, which causes more swerving and honking.
We also had an adventure in the car on the weekend, coming back from Terelj (more on that later), where there was so much traffic on the two-lane road (one in each direction), that the cars going back to the city (as we were) started driving on the shoulder. Then when that filled up, a third lane formed on the dirt next to the shoulder (which went really off-road, veering away from the road, behind houses, through a small stream, then back), and when that filled up, and other cars stopped coming in the other direction, people took over the other lane as well. So on a road built for one lane going towards the city, we had four, and we were barely moving. It reminded me of the opening scene from The Walking Dead, where you see all of the lanes of stopped cars, after everyone got eaten by zombies. Luckily there were no zombies.
Sometimes it was easier to call a taxi, rather than walk, and sometimes hailing a "gypsy cab" was easier than calling a taxi. Similar to in Moscow, if you just put your hand out along side the road, cars will pull over asking where you want to go. And generally they'll take you to most places in the city for $2-3. Once I tipped $2 in a taxi, as well as to the guy helping me with bags in the hotel, and they looked shocked. I guess a $2 tip is a lot for them, as normally people don't tip.
Generally it seemed that drivers everywhere were a little impatient, as we could hear honking all day from the office conference room. They also don't stop for pedestrians, but that doesn't deter people from playing Frogger to get across a busy street, with or without the help of a crosswalk or a red light. I even saw people standing in the middle of a 6 lane road, with cars going in both directions on either side of them, standing on the yellow line separating the lanes. They had crossed the first 3 lanes and were waiting for a chance to cross the other 3. This worried me a bit, but apparently others don't even notice.
Get in my belly:
Before I arrived in Mongolia, I was warned that I would be sick of sheep meat by the end of the trip. I didn't think it would happen to me, because generally I can eat the same thing every single day (like how I have cereal, fruit and a tortilla for breakfast every day). But since everything has sheep meat in it, and due to other reasons which I will write about later, I am definitely sick of sheep meat. That being said, there were still a few really tasty dishes (and some not so much), even those that included sheep:
- Khuushuur - fried meat dumpling (probably usually sheep) - very good
- Aaruul - dried/hardened yogurt "chips", probably made from sheep or goat milk - strange
- Buuz - meat (aka sheep) dumplings with a little broth inside, similar to Georgian khinkali - good
- Tsuivan - fried noodles with meat (i.e. sheep) and a tiny amount of vegetables (a small slice of carrot and onion) - good, when you don't want to throw up thinking about sheep meat
- Sheep head - they just put the cooked head on a plate and you eat everything that you can separate from the skull.
- Fermented mare's milk - One of the guys in my class said "you have to eat sheep head and mare's milk, but be careful about the mare's milk because some people get sick from it". I was more concerned about a sheep head, to be honest. Until I tried mare's milk and I gagged.
- Dried beef in milk tea - no thanks
- They really had a Mongolian grill restaurant, where you put meat, veggies and noodles in a bowl and they cook it on a giant hot plate in front of you. I'm guessing it's made for tourists.
- Sadly, Mongolian beef, as I grew up eating at House of Hong, was nowhere to be found.
The guys in the office helped me find a restaurant that served sheep head, so I could try it (I don't know why I wanted to). When the head came out and was placed in front of me on the table, I almost fell out of my chair. We were supposed to share the head, and of course, they gave the knife and fork to me, as the guest. I had no idea what to do with it. Most of the face is just skin, and there really isn't any meat, except in the cheek. So I sliced off a piece of forehead skin (foreHEAD skin; that part of the word is very important) and chewed it a bit before swallowing. Gross. Then they made me try the eye ball, but I couldn't get it out of the socket, mostly cuz my hands were shaking and I was nervous to cut an eyeball out of a face. It's normal to be uncomfortable doing that, right? Ody helped me out then warned me not to eat the black part of the eyeball. Of course I won't, everyone knows that. In it goes, and down it went. It actually wasn't too bad. No eye ball juice burst into my mouth when I bit into it, so that was a pleasant surprise. The tongue was relatively tasty as well, but the rest of it (lip, marrow, and other random parts of the face), were not too tasty. In the end, my stomach felt fine and I lived to tell everyone from the office about it.
Generally there were no fresh fruits or vegetables, as they don't grow there, and since the people in the countryside are nomadic, they don't develop farms, tending only to animals. Once in a while, they'll go into town and buy groceries at a shop, but can't buy any foods that will spoil quickly, so they stick to potatoes, onions and carrots. I really missed fruits and veggies, and when the guides and drivers around the countryside didn't eat theirs on the rare occasion we were given some, I was happy to help. It pleased my bowels as well. Speaking of the nomads, because their animals need to graze in different areas throughout the year, they move their tents every few months, which must be super annoying.
I also ate a lot of Korean and Japanese food there, as it was easier to find some good Asian food than in Warsaw. It's not bad in Warsaw, but I believe in the law of proximity...the closer you are to the source, the better the food is going to be. Plus there was a Korean restaurant in my hotel.
Yes, I worked:
So I actually did work while there, teaching four different training courses in the office. Everyone was super nice and made my visit extremely comfortable. I think they are used to having guests and taking personal care of them, because they are really good at it. Everyone said hello to me around the office, people that I didn't really know invited me for lunch and dinner, even to meet on the weekend for a movie/drinks/day trip. With the exception of the people on my team, that hasn't really happened for me in 4 years in Poland.
The training sessions went well, and it was nice to get to know a lot of people there, which I did, since I was working until 9 or 10pm each night, just in time to go back to the Korean place for dinner. At the end of my time there, the guys in the office gave me a fancy scroll with my name written in the old Mongolian script (looks like Arabic), which was a nice gesture. I'm just not sure which side is up.
Sightseeing:
Besides eating, working and dodging cars, I was able to do a little sightseeing. Ulaanbaatar is similar to many small-ish capital cities, with big buildings, heavy traffic, and statues for Ghengis Khan. There are about 1.5 million people in the city (which is about half of the whole country's population). There's also a lot of history and culture I was interested to learn about.
I really wanted to go to the Natural History Museum, but when I found it, it was closed due to "an unqualified state of the building" per the sign in front. Indeed, the building looked like it might collapse on top of me if I tried to pull on the front door. So I went to the National Museum, to learn a bit about the history of Mongolia. A large part of the museum is about Ghengis Khan and how he united the country back in the early 1200s. The word "united" could mean he peacefully inspired all of the tribes to cooperate and come together, or it could mean he killed anyone who stood in his way. It's strange how we admonish current political leaders who try to conquer others, fight for separation, and who generally disrupt "peace". Yet, there are so many leaders from our history that we admire and treat as heroes, even if they killed countless people in war, and doing a lot of the things that the so called "bad guys" these days are doing. Most "great" rulers in our world's history spent a lot of time killing and mistreating a lot of other people, yet their names are said with reverence by a lot of (at least the American) history books.
On the Sunday, Nomin and Tenger took me out to Terelj, a National Park about an hour outside of UB. It was a great scenic drive, through small villages with colorful roofed houses, with horses and goats drinking from the small streams, rolling hills and rocky mountains in the background, and scattered ger tents throughout the open grass fields (steppes). We did a bit of hiking, stopped for a nice rest and lunch of sheep dumplings, enjoying the peace of quiet of the countryside (opposite of the noise of the city), and went to a really fun horse show. The show re-enacted some story about Ghengis Khan, including battles on horses. The riders were mostly young boys, riding around at 100 miles per hour, sword fighting and jousting around the arena. It reminded me a lot of a battle scene from Lord of the Rings. Some of the horses even "died", falling to the ground and laying still until the scene was over. They didn't really die. And I was fascinated like a little kid.
Some other interesting things about UB and Mongolia
- They use the Cyrillic alphabet. Like a lot of Central and Eastern Europe, they were under Soviet/Communist influence until 1991, which probably led to this
- Before the Soviet influence, they were occupied by China until the 1920s (there is still a lot of animosity between the 2 countries).
- His name is actually Chinggis Khan. It took a while to figure out this was the same as Ghengis (so why do we call him Ghengis?)
- Ulaan Baatar is the coldest capital city in the world. In August, it was a very comfortable 80ish. In the Winter? Around -15F.
- Their biggest currency paper bill is 20,000 MNT, which is worth about $10. If you need to make a big cash purchase, you have to carry around a duffle bag full of cash, or a briefcase handcuffed to yourself. I had to pay my travel agent in cash for a plane ticket, and all the necessary bills hardly fit in my wallet.
- Bars in the city close at midnight on the weekends. Boo.
- Companies that deal with foreigners charge in US dollars, to reduce the risk of currency valuation loss.
- The Mongol Derby is a 1000 km horse race where participants ride for 40ish km, then swap horses and keep riding until they feel like resting, similar to the old postal system (it takes 10 days or so). Sounds awesome except my butt started to hurt after 30 minutes of horse riding. This is a cool article about it.
- Pine nuts come from pine cones (surprise surprise). Not just any pine cone, but a kind that you can find in Mongolia. It was really fun to peel back the petals to find a little nut under each one. Then you had to bite off the shell of the nut before you could eat it. It made for a fun activity during the long car rides.
- Here's a timelapse video on youtube of UB so you can see how it looks.
Coming soon: Living a nomadic life in the Gobi, and the time I ate sheep poop before it was poop.
The trip didn't start off so smoothly, as I locked myself out of my apartment on the morning of my flight, with my suitcase still inside. As the taxi was waiting to take me to the airport, I decided to take the trash out just before I went to the taxi. I left my suitcase inside the front door while I went out to the bin, but when I came back to get my bag, the electronic key pad on the door wasn't working. The door wouldn't open, so I couldn't get my bag from inside. At first I was calm, trying the key pad over and over again, but as 10 minutes passed, and the key pad wasn't responding, I started to panic. The taxi driver called me, asking where I was, to which I responded "I'm coming, but the door isn't working" in Polish. This probably didn't make any sense, but it bought me a few extra minutes. Then some drunk looking kid came up to the door and tried to buzz one of the apartments. He also noticed it wasn't working, so he tried calling someone (his friend who lives inside, I imagine), and started banging on the window closest to the front door. A couple minutes later, the kid who lives in that apartment came outside in his towel, looking around, but his friend was gone. I didn't bother explaining what happened, I just said "excuse me", grabbed my suitcase, and ran for the cab. To this day, I'm not sure if he thinks it was me banging on his window, or the drunk kid who may or may not have been his friend.
Packing for this trip was pretty difficult. I had to spend 8 days teaching training, a weekend in the city, a week in the desert/countryside, then time in SF, Chicago, and Seattle, including a couple of weddings. I tried to bring the bare minimum of clothes, but not knowing what the weather in Mongolia would be, it made it pretty difficult. I ended up bringing a lot of clothes I didn't mind just leaving there, in case I ran out of luggage space (after souvenirs and buying more stuff in the US, which I always do).
I took a flight to Moscow, then a red-eye to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia (I don't think it's a coincidence that the name of the city has so many a's in it, and they have so many sheep who say "baaaaaaaaa"). I love that the locals call it "UB", because it sounds hip, and makes it a lot easier for people to say. I tried learning some Mongolian words when I was there, but they are really difficult for me to pronounce. Some of the words sound a bit "slobbery", like they haven't swallowed their saliva in a few hours. I just couldn't get this. People's names were also difficult (and long). I had to ask everyone in the office to say their names a few times, and to tell me their "short" names, which were much easier (and pretty cute and fun). I was also confused as to why many of them have the same first name as someone else's last name. And by "many", I mean everyone. The reason is that people use their father's first name as their surname. So, instead of Tristan Sakura, I would be Tristan Frederick. It explained a lot, and now I would like to call you all by your father's name.
Car talk:
On the way from the airport to my hotel, I immediately noticed that the concept of roads is different in Mongolia than where I am used to (and this doesn't even consider that outside of the capital, there are not many paved roads at all). There were 3 lanes for cars on this stretch of highway, but there wasn't any clear sign who was entitled to which lanes. Clearly the right lane is for traffic going in my direction, and the left for cars coming the opposite direction. But the middle lane was being used by anyone and everyone that wanted to. Big 4x4s were going in all directions using the lane, swerving in and out just when you thought there would be a massive explosion of vehicles, everyone honking like they were having a honking contest. At least my driver used his blinker diligently, to warn others about his planned craziness. I was gripping my seat with white knuckles. As a side note, some of the cars have the steering wheel on the right side, and some on the left, which is awkward, but it also makes it harder for cars with right-side steer wheels to overtake others...they can't check for oncoming traffic without going halfway into the other lane, which causes more swerving and honking.
We also had an adventure in the car on the weekend, coming back from Terelj (more on that later), where there was so much traffic on the two-lane road (one in each direction), that the cars going back to the city (as we were) started driving on the shoulder. Then when that filled up, a third lane formed on the dirt next to the shoulder (which went really off-road, veering away from the road, behind houses, through a small stream, then back), and when that filled up, and other cars stopped coming in the other direction, people took over the other lane as well. So on a road built for one lane going towards the city, we had four, and we were barely moving. It reminded me of the opening scene from The Walking Dead, where you see all of the lanes of stopped cars, after everyone got eaten by zombies. Luckily there were no zombies.
Cars make their own lanes
Including this one, just to avoid traffic
Sometimes it was easier to call a taxi, rather than walk, and sometimes hailing a "gypsy cab" was easier than calling a taxi. Similar to in Moscow, if you just put your hand out along side the road, cars will pull over asking where you want to go. And generally they'll take you to most places in the city for $2-3. Once I tipped $2 in a taxi, as well as to the guy helping me with bags in the hotel, and they looked shocked. I guess a $2 tip is a lot for them, as normally people don't tip.
Generally it seemed that drivers everywhere were a little impatient, as we could hear honking all day from the office conference room. They also don't stop for pedestrians, but that doesn't deter people from playing Frogger to get across a busy street, with or without the help of a crosswalk or a red light. I even saw people standing in the middle of a 6 lane road, with cars going in both directions on either side of them, standing on the yellow line separating the lanes. They had crossed the first 3 lanes and were waiting for a chance to cross the other 3. This worried me a bit, but apparently others don't even notice.
Get in my belly:
Before I arrived in Mongolia, I was warned that I would be sick of sheep meat by the end of the trip. I didn't think it would happen to me, because generally I can eat the same thing every single day (like how I have cereal, fruit and a tortilla for breakfast every day). But since everything has sheep meat in it, and due to other reasons which I will write about later, I am definitely sick of sheep meat. That being said, there were still a few really tasty dishes (and some not so much), even those that included sheep:
- Khuushuur - fried meat dumpling (probably usually sheep) - very good
- Aaruul - dried/hardened yogurt "chips", probably made from sheep or goat milk - strange
- Buuz - meat (aka sheep) dumplings with a little broth inside, similar to Georgian khinkali - good
- Tsuivan - fried noodles with meat (i.e. sheep) and a tiny amount of vegetables (a small slice of carrot and onion) - good, when you don't want to throw up thinking about sheep meat
- Sheep head - they just put the cooked head on a plate and you eat everything that you can separate from the skull.
- Fermented mare's milk - One of the guys in my class said "you have to eat sheep head and mare's milk, but be careful about the mare's milk because some people get sick from it". I was more concerned about a sheep head, to be honest. Until I tried mare's milk and I gagged.
- Dried beef in milk tea - no thanks
- They really had a Mongolian grill restaurant, where you put meat, veggies and noodles in a bowl and they cook it on a giant hot plate in front of you. I'm guessing it's made for tourists.
- Sadly, Mongolian beef, as I grew up eating at House of Hong, was nowhere to be found.
Buuz
The guys in the office helped me find a restaurant that served sheep head, so I could try it (I don't know why I wanted to). When the head came out and was placed in front of me on the table, I almost fell out of my chair. We were supposed to share the head, and of course, they gave the knife and fork to me, as the guest. I had no idea what to do with it. Most of the face is just skin, and there really isn't any meat, except in the cheek. So I sliced off a piece of forehead skin (foreHEAD skin; that part of the word is very important) and chewed it a bit before swallowing. Gross. Then they made me try the eye ball, but I couldn't get it out of the socket, mostly cuz my hands were shaking and I was nervous to cut an eyeball out of a face. It's normal to be uncomfortable doing that, right? Ody helped me out then warned me not to eat the black part of the eyeball. Of course I won't, everyone knows that. In it goes, and down it went. It actually wasn't too bad. No eye ball juice burst into my mouth when I bit into it, so that was a pleasant surprise. The tongue was relatively tasty as well, but the rest of it (lip, marrow, and other random parts of the face), were not too tasty. In the end, my stomach felt fine and I lived to tell everyone from the office about it.
I don't know what to do with this
Oh, now eye know what to do
I also ate a lot of Korean and Japanese food there, as it was easier to find some good Asian food than in Warsaw. It's not bad in Warsaw, but I believe in the law of proximity...the closer you are to the source, the better the food is going to be. Plus there was a Korean restaurant in my hotel.
Yes, I worked:
So I actually did work while there, teaching four different training courses in the office. Everyone was super nice and made my visit extremely comfortable. I think they are used to having guests and taking personal care of them, because they are really good at it. Everyone said hello to me around the office, people that I didn't really know invited me for lunch and dinner, even to meet on the weekend for a movie/drinks/day trip. With the exception of the people on my team, that hasn't really happened for me in 4 years in Poland.
The training sessions went well, and it was nice to get to know a lot of people there, which I did, since I was working until 9 or 10pm each night, just in time to go back to the Korean place for dinner. At the end of my time there, the guys in the office gave me a fancy scroll with my name written in the old Mongolian script (looks like Arabic), which was a nice gesture. I'm just not sure which side is up.
Sightseeing:
Besides eating, working and dodging cars, I was able to do a little sightseeing. Ulaanbaatar is similar to many small-ish capital cities, with big buildings, heavy traffic, and statues for Ghengis Khan. There are about 1.5 million people in the city (which is about half of the whole country's population). There's also a lot of history and culture I was interested to learn about.
The main square from the office window
On the Sunday, Nomin and Tenger took me out to Terelj, a National Park about an hour outside of UB. It was a great scenic drive, through small villages with colorful roofed houses, with horses and goats drinking from the small streams, rolling hills and rocky mountains in the background, and scattered ger tents throughout the open grass fields (steppes). We did a bit of hiking, stopped for a nice rest and lunch of sheep dumplings, enjoying the peace of quiet of the countryside (opposite of the noise of the city), and went to a really fun horse show. The show re-enacted some story about Ghengis Khan, including battles on horses. The riders were mostly young boys, riding around at 100 miles per hour, sword fighting and jousting around the arena. It reminded me a lot of a battle scene from Lord of the Rings. Some of the horses even "died", falling to the ground and laying still until the scene was over. They didn't really die. And I was fascinated like a little kid.
Mountains in Terelj
Some ger camp in the fields
Horse battles like in LOTR
Dead warriors and horses
Some other interesting things about UB and Mongolia
- They use the Cyrillic alphabet. Like a lot of Central and Eastern Europe, they were under Soviet/Communist influence until 1991, which probably led to this
- Before the Soviet influence, they were occupied by China until the 1920s (there is still a lot of animosity between the 2 countries).
- His name is actually Chinggis Khan. It took a while to figure out this was the same as Ghengis (so why do we call him Ghengis?)
- Ulaan Baatar is the coldest capital city in the world. In August, it was a very comfortable 80ish. In the Winter? Around -15F.
- Their biggest currency paper bill is 20,000 MNT, which is worth about $10. If you need to make a big cash purchase, you have to carry around a duffle bag full of cash, or a briefcase handcuffed to yourself. I had to pay my travel agent in cash for a plane ticket, and all the necessary bills hardly fit in my wallet.
- Bars in the city close at midnight on the weekends. Boo.
- Companies that deal with foreigners charge in US dollars, to reduce the risk of currency valuation loss.
- The Mongol Derby is a 1000 km horse race where participants ride for 40ish km, then swap horses and keep riding until they feel like resting, similar to the old postal system (it takes 10 days or so). Sounds awesome except my butt started to hurt after 30 minutes of horse riding. This is a cool article about it.
- Pine nuts come from pine cones (surprise surprise). Not just any pine cone, but a kind that you can find in Mongolia. It was really fun to peel back the petals to find a little nut under each one. Then you had to bite off the shell of the nut before you could eat it. It made for a fun activity during the long car rides.
- Here's a timelapse video on youtube of UB so you can see how it looks.
Horse riding in Terelj
A pine nut cone, or however you call it
Coming soon: Living a nomadic life in the Gobi, and the time I ate sheep poop before it was poop.
