Ulaan Bataar

Asian influence has hit in Mongolia so the food has some rad asian elements. It definitely reads more asian than russian for example, in how people look, in the Buddhist (with Hindu influence I think) temples, in architecture (it spent some time as a Chinese protectorate).

In Ulaan Bataar we decided that Mongolia is ground zero of the zombie apocolypse. We are staying in an apartment that is above a medical clinic. Good spot to take out the first floor stairs and have a supply of meds and a clinic/ prep and storage facility. The doors were incredible. The one in our apartment had a metal door, triple bolted with entirely mechanical locks, with get this a little flap that opened to a guard that had a hole just large enough to shoot a bolt action crossbow out of if there was a zombie at your door.

There are just a lot of abandoned playgrounds with one sad metal slide in them and that sort of thing, that make you feel like you did just wake up in 28 days later.

But the people of Ulaan Baatar is like a whole nation of people on a first date. Everywhere you go there are couples of dressed up adorable kids holding hands, sharing a soda etc. It's a real weird contrast to the post apocalyptic feel of the surrounds. But I think these guys will band together into plucky bands of survivors pretty quickly.

We hadn't seen any movies since we left the US because language barriers so we went nuts at the IMAX. I got to see Star Trek, Independence Day 2, Nerve (this was all the same week so we were scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point) and Suicide Squad (the next week when we got back from our tour).

Structure was 3 days UB, then 5 days ger camp, 1 day in cottage by tour operator, 7 day tour, 2 days UB.

We ran all our touring through Minjin, a woman we found on couchsurfers.com. After our 3 apartment nights we stayed in her guesthouse, her family cottage and she took us out to find the ger camp and organised the tour so it worked out well with transfers and stuff.

It was also a big help because I was freaking pretty bad on money, feeling out again only a month after Jeremy had bailed me out. Jes and I did a lot of math and discovered she had some money built up since May. We also wound up working with Minjin because she had prices about 2/3 what the other operators we looked at had. So we wound up figuring we could make it through these two weeks on the money we actually had and then work through my salary, probably surviving the month. By then we'll be in Japan, that's a problem for future Maile.

The national museum had a small collection, couple of hours max but it was very quality for what mongolia has. Ancient deer stones, traditional mongolian clothes (so elaborate and cool, I think they ripped Queen Amadala's wardrobe off of this stuff) Gers and their furnishings, and some stuff from Genghis Khan (Actually Chiinghis haan) era, including some cool clothes, armour, weapons and horse tack from centuries ago. So some really cool artifacts, limited in scope and period, but really good for the significant parts of mongolia.