Mongolia -- Day 2 (Ulaanbaatar)

Our second day in UB began with a schedule change. Originally, we had been scheduled to go on a five-day excursion into the Mongolian countryside from May 3rd, accompanied by a French person and a British person. But one of them pulled out at the last minute, and so could we leave on the tour tomorrow instead? Of course this was fine with us, and imagine our humor when we discovered that our new travelmates were two Japanese people.

After that, we set out for the Natural History Museum. Along the way we were pseudo-accosted by a man brandishing a shovel -- mainly, he ran at us shouting just to freak us out, eliciting laughter from his friends and some colorful language from Fig. We grabbed lunch at a restaurant called Nomad Legends, which was quite good, and proceeded into the museum.

It was really weird. Apart from the oft Engrishy exhibition text (for some reason I was particularly tickled by odd phrasing of "the big science of biology"), there was an eerie plethora of taxidermied animals. Though one would of course expect some stuffed animals in a museum of natural history, the sheer number of them -- and worse, their sometimes blatantly amateur construction -- was striking. Birds' feathers were tatty and mussed, fish were affixed with dollar store googly eyes, and snow leopards wore expressions of almost comical surprise. In short, the museum often walked a narrow tightrope between morbidly comical and just plain sad. Of course, that said, my suspicion is that the funding for the museum was so lacking that they didn't have much of a choice. Apart from the dinosaur section, which was decently impressive, the exhibits (while interesting) had a distinctly unembellished and haphazard air.

Next, we took a brief spin through the Parliamentary Gardens, such as they were, but most everything was brown and dead, so we kept walking on through to Sukhbataar Square. This was perhaps the first place in Ulaanbaatar that honestly impressed me. A broad open square in the middle of the city, it boasted the huge parliament building at one end, with statues of Chinggis Khan and some of his generals. In the middle of the square was another statue of the eponymous Sukhbataar, who evidently led some revolution in Mongolia in 1921. (From what I gleaned of history while we were there, I think that's the one in which Mongolia ousted the Chinese in favor of the Soviets...but don't quote me on that.)

There were people loitering around trying to sell things like postcards to foreigners, sometimes using English. To fake them out, I would speak in Polish instead -- "I'm sorry, I don't speak English. I'm a Polish woman." It worked like a charm.

Fig and I then attempted to visit the Mongolian Artists' Exhibition Hall, only to discover that they had just finished taking down the current exhibition. However, one of the artists stopped to show us some of his work, which was for sale fairly cheaply. In the end, we both bought some. As we were taking the paintings back to Idre's Guest House, though, they sustained minor damage when a Mongolian teenager essentially body-slammed Fig. Well, body-slammed might be exaggerating, but there was a definite collision. As consolation, we decided to write off the little crinkles on the paintings as part of the "genuine Mongolian experience."

That night we ate dinner at a spot called the California Cafe, did a little preparatory shopping for our countryside excursion (i.e. toilet paper, wet wipes, tea bags, etc.), and then had a nice long conversation with another traveler at the guest house. His name was Pasi, a Finnish guy somewhere around thirty years old, who was on vacation from his job as a market analyst in Lithuania. Pasi was super friendly, if also super talkative, and we decided to meet up again when we got back from our tour.

After that, it was just a packing extravaganza as we reorganized our luggage for the tour, and I managed to squeeze five days into one backpack. Mongolia, ho!