Our first week in Mongolia has been a nice mix of sightseeing with taking it easy. The adjustment to the time zone hasn’t been too bad – we’re seven hours ahead of where we have been. Both of us have had a morning or two where we’d wake up early and have a hard time getting back to sleep. We started off with two nights at the Kempinski hotel before moving to our apartment on Wednesday. We had picked up some bananas at the Nomin grocery store on Monday night, so we had those Tuesday morning and then headed out for a walk-run combination of about five miles to the National Park. It’s a large green space area set aside for the citizens to enjoy some exercising and at busier times, they’d have food stalls open. We took the outer loop and enjoyed the time away from the traffic. On our way back to the hotel, the rain started to come down. It was a cold rain and the air temperature dropped to the high 50s.
We dried off, cleaned up, and Sandy found a good breakfast spot across the street called Café Papa. I had an English breakfast and Sandy had a vegetarian omelet. Both were very good. The afternoon’s activity was a 90-minute massage for each of us in the hotel spa. $50 each including the tips for a 90-minute massage was a good deal – how could we pass it up? The services were great and then we went back to the room and relaxed, taking a short nap. We had read that we needed to register with the government of Mongolia. The information on the internet wasn’t consistent. We asked our hotel front desk. The manager completed the registration for us. We contacted the Mongolian Immigration Agency via email and called them to confirm what we needed to do. They indicated we didn’t need to do anything since we were not staying more than 90 days. We kept all of our documentation. We don’t want any issues when we leave the country because we didn’t register properly. With rain still looking possible, we looked for a dinner spot close to the hotel. We decided on Zet Café where we had grilled salmon. Then we headed back to the room and had an early night in.
Wednesday was moving day – just from the hotel to our apartment, which is a little more central – quite close to the city’s main square, called Sukhbaatar Square. Before leaving the hotel, we got a workout in at the fitness center downstairs and walked back to Café Papa for breakfast. The hotel called a taxi for us – there is an app that works like Uber, but you need a Mongolian phone number and my sim card does not have one. I think the sim card I have right now is from Thailand. I’m only using them for data so the numbers aren’t usually a consideration for me. Anyway, the taxi ride cost $3 and took 15 minutes. It was an easy check-in to our apartment, getting settled by around 2pm.
Later in the afternoon, we walked four minutes to Greeno Healthy Food Café. We love this place and we’ll be regulars here during our stay. The menu is a lot of vegan food – not exclusively, but quite a bit – and smoothies and these really tasty vegan chocolate brownies. More rain followed but we needed to get our grocery shopping done. We walked to the State Department Store, which houses a Nomin grocery store and did our shopping. As usual, we need to translate the vast majority of what we are looking at, although we did find our first boxes of Cheerios since we left Sarasota. 😊 The rain stopped while we were shopping, so the ten-minute walk back to the apartment was easier than the rivers of water in the road we had to dodge on the way.
We did some walking around our area on Thursday. First up was Sukhbaatar Square. It’s a large open square that hosts festivals and celebrations at various times. It is surrounded by a statue of Chinggis Khaan and two of his sons, the parliament building, the State Opera and Ballet Academic Theater, the post office, the stock exchange, and other buildings. We went into a cashmere store and saw the beautiful local cashmere products. We stopped at a Gobi Chocolate store and shared some chocolate covered raisins.
A note on Chinggis Khaan – in English, we know the name as Genghis Khan. There will be much more to say about him as we spend time here in Mongolia. He is honored in many, many ways and I learned that he was named “Man of the Millenium” in several surveys of historians at the end of the 20th century.
Next we walked over to Beatles Square. For some unknown reason, a man wanted to honor the Beatles with a statue of them here in Ulaanbaatar. It’s become a prominent meeting place and the public was emphatic about it needing to be moved in tact when a developer built over it’s original location.
After the statue and square, we walked to the State Department Store to explore it more in depth than just the grocery store last night. The building has nine floors and they are filled with various shops and restaurants. Once we got to the top, we found the New York Empire restaurant, which offered nice views overlooking the city. We had lunch there – and it was our first experience with mutton, which I’m sure we’ll eat a lot over our time here. I can’t remember having mutton before, but it was surprisingly good. We had two dishes – one is called buuz (pronounced boose) and it is mutton in steamed dumplings and the other is khushuur, which is mutton inside what is sort of like a deep-fried potato pancake. Mutton can be goat or sheep and ours was sheep – it comes from older sheep. If I hadn’t been told, I would say that it is very similar to beef – it reminded me a lot of garlic beef, maybe garlic skirt steak. Our meals were served with pumpkin soup and hot tea. We picked up a few more groceries and then we went back to the apartment.
In the evening, we stopped at a pharmacy and got our blood pressure tested. We had tried to find contact solution but the grocery store and pharmacy didn’t sell any. We stopped at an eye glass shop and they had some to buy. We looked for the tourist information center because we wanted to get information on some events coming up. They were closed but we did come across a fitness club not too far from the apartment. That worked out well because we found a place to do our workouts here and the manager spent a lot of time with us talking about the events we want to see. He became the tourist information center for us.
The weather was starting to get a little crazy so we headed back toward our apartment for dinner. The wind was really picking up – I’d say it was up to 30 mph and gusting higher. It was clear a storm was coming in. There is a restaurant on the first floor of our apartment building called Mirage and with the weather coming in, we opted for it since it was so close. Good choice. Nice variety on the menu.
We knew there was a storm coming on Friday and we weren’t disappointed. We woke up to a snowstorm on this – the longest day of the year and first day of summer.
This is not common for Ulaanbaatar at this time of year. We enjoyed watching the locals come out of the office buildings around our apartment and take selfies and you could tell they were getting a kick out of the snow. We ended up with two to three inches. It was a perfect day to settle in and eat all of our meals in the apartment and watch a couple of movies. We watched Transsiberian and The Eagle Huntress. We enjoyed both of them and Sandy made chili for dinner – just a perfect day of relaxation. Oh, and of course, we played some Christmas music on Amazon Music while enjoying the snow.
Yesterday’s (Saturday) main activities started with a 30-minute workout climbing up and down the 55 stairs inside our apartment building, so we didn’t have to do our cardio outside in the cold. Then we walked to the Chinggis Khaan National Museum. This is a gorgeous building opened five years ago – actually, the top two floors are not yet open. They’ve done a really nice job with the exhibits and they take you through the history of Mongolia from prehistoric times and cave drawings up through the fall of the Mongolian empire in the 15th century and the last of the kings in the early 20th century. After the museum, it was lunch time and we headed back to Greeno Cafe to get enough fuel to last us until later in the night. We walked over to the opera and ballet theater to see if we could get tickets to the opera tonight. We had tried last night online but one needed a Mongolian bank card. The box office was not open, so we walked around the theater to see if we could find anybody working there that might be able to help. The box office was supposed to be open according to the hours shown. We walked in through the stage door in the back (we didn’t know that – we realized it when we saw the performers getting ready) and a nice lady walked us through the backstage area up to the front where now the box office was open. We picked up fourth row tickets for $17 each. The opera was one neither of have seen – Madame Butterfly. We were pretty excited when we realized that’s what it was. The posters were not in English, which is why we didn’t know what it was we were seeing. The performance was very good – especially Madame Butterfly herself. Very powerful and the orchestra was awesome. The opera was in Italian and the subtitles were in Mongolian – it’s a good thing we read the storyline before we went to the performance. 😊
After the opera, we walked to Dublin Irish Pub, which was Ulaanbaatar’s first Irish pub. We enjoyed burgers and Chinggis beer and then walked home. It was a little chilly after the storm yesterday – highs in the upper 40s, but all was fine.
Today, we started with “Sandy Starbucks Time” at the Musee Café (there are not any Starbucks in Mongolia). They did have chai tea latte for Sandy. I usually get hot chocolate but they were out of it so I tried a local favorite, warm honey milk. It tasted okay. It may be more of an acquired taste. Then we had breakfast at Greeno. Yes, it’s that good to have now been there a third time. Sandy had buckwheat pancakes and I had a veggie omelet.
Then we walked over to the Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts. Zanabazar was a spiritual leader and artist in 17th century Mongolia. He is very well known for his sculptures, many of which are on display in the museum. We don’t know a lot about Buddhism, but over the next few months here and in other parts of Asia, I think we’ll become much more educated. His sculpture, The White Tara, was our favorite, but he had many beautiful sculptures and paintings.
There were many other works of art through the museum that I thought gave a good overview of Mongolia’s art history. It has me even more excited to get to know this country.
From the museum, we finally got to take our first public bus ride. I really enjoy figuring out the public transportation in cities around the world and Sandy humors me. Here, we purchased cards for roughly $1 each and then loaded $1.50 on each of them. When you get on the bus, you tap your card on the machine and when you get off the bus, you tap again. Each ride here costs right around the equivalent of 14 cents. Crazy! We took our first bus to an area called Misheel City. It has a walking street of 15 or so restaurants and then a whole mall of stores meant to fill your new home or apartment – lighting, furniture, artwork, appliances, IKEA products, you name it and it’d probably here.
The lowlight of our time at Misheel was seeing what looked like delicious chicken wings on the menu at Red Tap, placing the order, and then receiving a mix of fried chicken nuggets basically. The highlight was at the same place we had our first beer flight of the entire trip. We know we didn’t have any beer flights in Morocco and we can’t remember having any in Europe during the Depeche leg. All five beers were excellent. We walked across the parking lot to check out the Mongolia equivalent of Home Depot. We caught the bus back – unfortunately the first one had a mechanical issue so we had to change buses and pay again. Another 14 cents each. The shame!
It was a great day. Nicely paced, saw some cool things, and the weather was beautiful. Sandy commented how it felt like a crisp fall day in Minnesota or Wisconsin. Our apartment has wonderful windows that we can keep open (they are screened) and the breeze comes through. It’s fantastic.
With our first week complete, our first impressions are very positive of Ulaanbaatar. They definitely need to figure out the traffic issues – the city is not built for the 1.7 million people who get around here. There are backups and the pollution can be pretty bad – especially in the winter. I’ve read that it is among the worst in the world. Outside of that, it’s quite modern. The newer buildings are fascinating. The restaurant scene is very diverse – even if they don’t always have what the menu shows. We aren’t finding many people who speak English, even just a little. But it’s an easy town to get around and we’re excited with what we still have to see in the capital and then to get out into the countryside.
2 responses to “Getting Our Bearings in Mongolia”
That’s not near enough pancakes for my girl!
She completely agrees!