I just got back to Beijing after a wonderful 12-day trip to Mongolia!  I had a truly amazing time and I have just written a bunch of posts with anecdotes and photos from my trip, which will be here on the blog over the next few days.

Image : Lonely Planet

I would like to send a huge bai rist’la (that’s thank you in Mongolian) to my grandmother, Virginia Swanberg, who generously microfinanced this trip.  I know you’re reading this, Grandma Ginny, and I appreciate your enthusiastic support so much!

Here are some random tidbits:

I stayed at Golden Gobi.  Highly recommended!  The hostel is centrally-located, with nice English-speaking staff, cheap dorms ($6/night), and private rooms available.  Golden Gobi organized both of my tours, a 3-day, 2-night trip to Terelj National Park (which included hiking, horseback riding, food, transportation by van, accommodation in two different gers, and more.  We paid $109/person as a group of 5.) and a 4-day, 3-night trip to Central Mongolia (which included camel riding, horseback riding, food, admission to the famous monastery at Kharakhorum, wild horses at Hustai National Park, van transportation, accommodation in 3 different gers, and more.  It covered a longer distance than my previous tour, and we paid $205/person as a group of 4.)

I met a Swedish couple on the train back to Beijing, who had traveled with Stepperiders, a horse trekking company.  They raved about the tasty food and excellent service and semi-wild horses, as they recovered physically from four days on a horse.

My favorite restaurant in Ulaan Bataar: Luna Blanca.  I ate at this vegetarian restaurant three times.  The menu is vast and everything is delicious!  Over the course of my visits, I sampled the pumpkin soup, dumpling soup, green salad, Indochina rice noodle salad, Mongolian dumpling sampler plate, hand-cut rye noodles, and vegan chocolate cake.  Just typing this makes my mouth water!

Ulaan Bataar has a surprising selection of international cuisine.  I also enjoyed scrumptious meals at Korean and Indian restaurants and Café Amsterdam.

The State Department Store, which is about 100 meters from Golden Gobi, is a six-story complex of cosmetics, clothes, cashmere, groceries, and more.  The supermarket features products imported from absolutely every country you can imagine, a much broader selection than in any Chinese supermarket I have seen, at prices that seemed quite cheap to me.  I think this is a product of two factors: limited Mongolian industry, and lenient import laws.  (Actually packaged goods were cheap but fruit was expensive.  The apples come from Chile.  This is the first time I have ever seen kiwis priced lower than bananas.)

Women in Ulaan Bataar are so glamorous: high heels, tight dresses, short skirts, lots of makeup!

I met a Mongolian woman named Suren at Café Amsterdam.  When she found out that I was from California, her face beamed with glee.  She had spent three years in California, studying English at Alameda Adult School (super small world: my initial experience as an ESL teacher was as a volunteer at Berkeley Adult School, just a few miles away) and running a seafood restaurant at a mall in Yuba City.  Three of her children had attended high school in Oklahoma, living with a generous woman Suren referred as “my American mother.”  Her son graduated from the University of Missouri and now runs a mining supply company that imports products from China.  Suren works with him part-time, and spends the rest of her time studying English and cooking delicious meals for her grandchildren.

On the plane from Beijing to Ulaan Bataar (which my travel agent friend Jeff booked) I sat next to Philip, a World Bank consultant from Papua New Guinea.  A mining engineer, he was traveling to Mongolia to work on an economic development project on mining safety.  Mining is the biggest industry in both Papua New Guinea and Mongolia, and both countries have economic rivalries with their more powerful neighbors (Australia, and Russia/China, respectively.)  Philip had spent four years studying in Japan.  Globalization at its finest!

Louisa Lim from NPR did an excellent series of stories about Mongolia last year.  I highly recommend this segment on Mongolian hip-hop and youth culture.

Image : Louisa Lim for NPR Members of Har Sarnai and Ice Top, one of Mongolia’s most popular bands, shoot a music video in Ulan Bator. Ice Top’s Damdinbazar Manlai (left) and Kobe flank Har Sarnai’s Amraa (center).

One night we went out to Mongolia’s hippest club, Strings.  Located in the White House Hotel, the bar has a Filipino band and lots of prostitutes.  I met a guy from San Diego who had just moved to Ulaan Bataar to teach 3^rd grade at one of the city’s international schools.  This was his first time out of the United States, he had just started a two-year contract.  Already wearing his warmest clothes in September, he was nervous about winter.  I heard that Ulaan Bataar is the world’s coldest capital.  Most major cities are either further south or closer to water.

More soon!

Leslie

Amended October 4, 2010, to clarify that “dumping soup” is indeed “dumpling soup.”  Thanks Ankur for calling me out on my lazy proofreading.  So nice to see you yesterday at the Modern Sky Festival :)