I know I have been whining, begging for cold weather. Well, I will never ever make that mistake again. To say Mongolia has been cold is an understatement. Everyday has been around minus 20. Its no so bad in the sense that we are well and truly rugged up...but it seems to just suck all the energy out your body, as well as your will to live, and I'm afraid to say that in Ulan Batoor, Anthony and I have been apathetic travellers.
Ulan Batoor is quite a small capitial city and is more western than Moscow. In saying that, it is cool to walk around and see the population dressed both in traditional costume and western clothing alike. It has also been our first look into buddhist temples and eastern Palaces which are beautiful in a completely different way to the churches and castles of Europe. The people here are really friendly, though kids sometime stare at us as we kind of stand out.
One thing, I must warn all future travellers to Ulan Batoor that crossing roads here is a life hazard. Forget Turkey and Italy, Mongolia takes the cake. The first couple of day here I went into a panic every time I had to cross the road and would literally alter my travels around the city to avoid certain crossings. Imagine trying to cross a very very busy road that are covered in a thick layer of very slippery black ice and zooming cars that do not obey road rules or stay on the correct side of the road or slow down for stop lights or pedestrians. Instead they beep their horns to kindly warn you that they are about to run you down. In a few of the major intersections there are pedestrian crossings with lights or traffic cops. This make absolutey nor difference. I feel like a deserve some kind of medal for suriving this experience.
Ulan Batoor itself, is in a flat basin surrounded by mountains. The weather here is sunny and its the first blue skies we have had on this trip. As I said before the temeprature is constantly below freezing so the ground is covered with ice and snow that fell weeks ago. Besides the temples and palaces, we have also been to the museam of politcal persecution, which covers the mass killings of intectuals and preists by the soviets in the 1920's and 30's. Most of the museam are pictures of these people and their life stories; the tragic thing being that many of these people helped to bring communism to mongolia in the first place. Suddenly you turn a corner and you a faced with a room of skulls,eached cracked by a bullet. The skulls belong to llamas (preists)killed to clense the country from the influnce of religion. The other painful sight in MOngolia is the children living on the streets. It gets so cold here that the lids have to sleep in the sewers at night. You can actually see that it happens as many of the manholes are left open. One woman we actually met on the train was going to Mongolia to work in an orphanage that was set up to help tackle this situation.
One very cool thing to do in Mongolia is to go to the black market. Here you could find absolutely anything. Unfortunately it is outdoors and we didn't last very long in the exposed air. The whole market seems to rest on ground covered in ice and the pain in my feet out weighed my desire to shop.
In Mongolia we ran into friends we spent time with friends we made on the train, Paul and Anna, who we are also seeing alot of in Beijing. With them, we experienced MOngolian night life which wasn't too bad.
WEll, thats Mongolia. Next is Beijing.
