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We are wrapping up our third week here in the capital and it is definitely starting to feel very familiar.  It’s nice to spend this much time in one place.  No moving days and getting into routines, feeling like home.

Monday was July 1^st and that has generally been an “office day” for us.  We plan to get all of our logistical types of things done – bills, picture backups, laptop backups – those kinds of tasks. We ate our meals in – cereal, Greek salad, sandwiches for dinner.  Once our work was finished, we got out for a four mile walk around Sukhbaatar Square – walked four laps around the block, which includes the square and the Parliament building.

Tuesday started by watching the disappointment of the US soccer team getting knocked out of the Copa America.  A 9pm start on Monday at home meant a 9am start here on Tuesday morning. I heard a knock on the door and an electric meter reader requested to come inside to read the meter.  After the game, we headed out for some walking and sightseeing.  We had a postcard to mail and the process here was a little different in that once it was stamped, I had to put an ink stamp on the card and then the postal worker did the same.  I don’t know why those extra steps were necessary, but so be it.

Our walking route took us to two monasteries.  The first one is called Dashchoilon Khiid.  The monastery includes several temples housed in large concrete gers, one of which has a large buddha and was supposed to have large prayer beads, but we didn’t see those. 

The second was Gandan Khiid. We’ll see more monasteries as we get around the country and the history is important to understand. For centuries, Mongolia had been primarily a Buddhist country.  When the Soviets came in and Stalin, in particular, the massive purge of monks and monasteries began because there could not be worship to anything greater than the State.  It took until the 1990s for the Mongolian people to openly start their Buddhist practices again. An interesting story about this one – when the US Vice President visited in 1944, he wanted to see a monastery; the Prime Minister had laid waste to the country’s religious heritage and it was this monastery that he quickly had cleaned up and it became a “show” monastery for visiting dignitaries until the re-opening of open religious practices in the 1990s.  Today, the monastery has more than 600 monks and it is a beautiful and peaceful place to spend time.  In the main temple, there is an 85-foot tall statue of Migjid Janraisig, one of the Buddhist deities.  This is one of the tallest indoor statues in the world, if not the tallest.  It is very impressive as soon as you walk inside the temple.

There is a very small café in the monastery called Little Buddha Café. It’s offset and so we didn’t see many other travelers inside – just a few monks and workers. Although they didn’t speak English, they were so friendly as most people have been and we figured out what we would eat.  They offered a sample of dried curds (requires a bit of an acquired taste).  We ordered beef brisket, tsuivan (which is steamed pasta with meat), and they gave us two kinds of teas to drink.

After the monastery, we walked through a small part of the ger district on the northwest side of Ulaanbaatar.  These are poorer areas and house families that typically have come from the countryside, leaving their nomadic lifestyle hoping for better lives working in the city.  Like elsewhere in the world and in cities across the US, the services are lacking in these districts. They just don’t have the funding (I suspect the tax base) to develop the services.  The roads are not paved, there is no running water to the homes – they need to go to a more central sport in the district to get fresh water.  They have pit toilets. There aren’t as many gers as you might think given the name but if you look at a satellite picture on Googlemaps, you can definitely see them – and we saw them as well.  These areas are the main contributors to the awful air quality in the winter – one of the worst ranked cities in the world.  For warmth, they burn coal in their homes and that smog blankets the city. The city is trying to address it by providing more clean energy heating sources for the families in the districts.  We walked home from the ger district and had a simple dinner of cheese and crackers and toast.

Wednesday morning started with me watching the Tour de France and Sandy went for a walk around the square.  While she was out, she was interviewed by a film crew asking her questions about her experience in Ulaanbaatar and also her interactions with the student police who we have seen around the square and offering help to travelers.  For lunch, we found another excellent spot. This one is called Loving Hut and we had really good bean wraps along with lemon ginger kombucha.  We might have to make our way back before we leave.  After lunch, we caught a city bus to the bus station that has routes that go to the east of Ulaanbaatar.  We are interested in spending a few days in the eastern part of the country when we leave here and we wanted to understand bus options.  We got the information we needed and headed back to the center on a bus.  It was slow going – traffic at a standstill. Here’s a picture of a typical bus ride.

The Blue Sky Hotel towers over the central square and we had dinner up at the top.  There is a restaurant and lounge on the 23^rd floor.  Obviously, spectacular views over the city in all directions.  The bathrooms even each had a stall with windows of views over the city.  Sandy had salmon and I had pork loin and then we came home to watch some TV (the Tour, Amazing Race, and Cheers) and work on our plans for next week’s big Naadam festival.

We went to our local gym on Thursday for our workouts and then went over to Greeno for lunch.  We went to the grocery store and then headed home to do some logistical planning.  Sandy went out for a walk to see a couple of the malls near the square and green space on the east side of the square.  We made veggie omelets and toast for dinner.

Friday was run day and we headed by bus back down to the Tuul River trail that we did last week. We found a small American store that has products we can buy back home (like Tide, Dove, candy, etc.).  We didn’t find anything we wanted or needed.  Back home afterward, Sandy did a couple of loads of laundry for us and we had our Greek salads.  We headed out for our Friday night fun.  Dinner and karaoke were on the agenda.  For dinner, we walked about 20 minutes to the Bier House, which is a restaurant inside the Novotel hotel.  We looked at the menu last weekend and it showed buffalo wings and fish n chips, one of our favorite Friday evening meals.  Well, they had the wings but not the fish n chips.  So, Sandy had beef bourguignon. Both meals were great – still looking for that real buffalo sauce and still looking for ranch dressing to dip the wings in!  They had Chinggis Dark beer on draft and we think that is our new favorite here in Mongolia.

After dinner, the first karaoke bar we went to was closed – same one we had tried last week.  We found a couple of others that had good ratings (there are plenty to pick from – they are all over the city) not too far from our apartment.  The one we went to is called Venice Karaoke.  We were hoping to find a place that offered public singing – not for us to sing, but for us to watch others sing.  It seems like that is not really a thing here.  We asked Jonah at the gym and he said culturally, singing in public is not very common.  So, we got a private room and we did our own singing with each other.  The song book probably had more than 100 pages worth of songs to pick from and less than ten of the pages were in English.  The videos that played during the songs were shot all round Mongolia.  We probably could have just sat and watched them the whole time. We had a couple of hours of fun with songs from Pink, One Direction, Pharrell, Les Miserables, Erasure, and others and then called it a night.

This morning, we were up early and Sandy found a restaurant called Millie’s Espresso, which had our favorite American breakfast menu items.  I had Eggs Benedict, Sandy had scrambled eggs and bacon and we shared orders of pancakes, waffles, and French toast.  Excellent breakfast.  Then we walked over to the Musee Coffee Shop in the museum for our usual Sandy Starbucks time.  We walked in and it was completely full.  I’m going to guess there were about 50 people and only one barista working.  She handled everything on her own and maintained a totally even demeanor the whole time.  I’m going to attribute the great service to the fact that it culturally seems like people are in less of a hurry – certainly not as pushy as what I feel like we are in the US.  Except the driving – that’s about the same.  Since people generally seem more patient, the pressure is less on the server, and she just kept right on with the task at hand.  Getting the orders done as quick as she could and taking orders in between.  It was impressive.

After a late night of karaoke and an early morning for breakfast, we caught a nap in the afternoon.  We happen to be here when the first Subway in Mongolia is opening – it opened yesterday.  I wanted to experience the opening days fun, so we walked over to the shopping center.  There were around 50 people in the line but we waited.

Since it was the opening days, there was no customization of the sandwiches – they had a limited menu and you ordered the sandwich and you got whatever came on it.  Sandy had tuna and I had the Italian BMT. The line to order took about 70 minutes and then about 20 minutes to get the sandwich.  If someone told me I’d wait 90 minutes for Subway at any time in my life, I’d have thought they were crazy – but it was fun.  We did meet several LDS missionaries from the US (a couple from Utah) and it was a pleasure to chat with them about their time in Mongolia so far.  They offered contact information for us in case we need anything while we are here.  It was a great experience all the way around and it was exciting to see the great turn out for the franchise owner, whom we talked with, and learned that he is planning to open five branches here.  I headed home to watch more of the Tour and Sandy spent an hour in the park near the square.

Tonight’s dinner plan was Bull Hot Pot (they have several locations around the city).  The wait when we got there was 50 minutes and we decided to try another time.  It’s kind of funny that we waited over an hour for Subway but didn’t want to wait for Hot Pot. We looked at our list of restaurants that we want to try here and chose MB Beer.  Great choice.  We each had a flight of their four beers (added up to a liter for each of us) – Sandy’s favorite was the amber and mine was the Black Consul.  I had a burger for dinner and Sandy found her fish n chips.  Sitting outside in the cool evening, it was just a perfect Saturday evening.