Arrived!

After a much longer journey than expected, and help from many wonderful people,* I have made it to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.  I’ve been here a little over a week, and I’m starting to settle in a bit.

My first impression of UB was how different it is from anywhere I’ve ever been.  The city is laid out in large square blocks, so it’s easy to know what direction I’m going, but the streets names are all written in Cyrillic, if there are street signs, and no one really knows the street names anyways, so I don’t know much more than what direction I’m going.  It absolutely sprawls from east to west, and a bit less so from north to south because the hills begin to get in the way.  The architecture is an interesting mix of modern, Soviet, post-Soviet (all of which I’m sure are loaded architectural terms, the meanings of which I don’t actually know). The outskirts of the city are full of ger districts (ger being the Mongolian word for yurt).  

UB is bustling right now with construction and public works projects, I’m told because it is too cold most months out of the year to do such work so they cram it all into the summer.  There are different roads closed off every day and occasional, scheduled power outages to deal with power lines and such.  All of the digging makes the city really dusty.

Crossing the street is similar to Cairo in that the one thing you know is that the car will not stop for you.  So at least the drivers here are more predictable than those in Boston.

There are little Mongolian fast food restaurants everywhere which serve tasty things like buuz (steamed meat dumplings) and hushuur (fried meat dumplings).  There is also an enormous selection of restaurants serving food from all over the world; my favorites being the ones with the weirdest ethnic food combos.  The Mexican at the Mexican and Indian restaurant was not bad and I haven’t yet had the chance to try the Mongolian and European restaurant.  I have had good Korean, decent Ukrainian and am looking forward to trying the Uzbek place.  There are about 5 or 6 different places that have “Irish” in the title and a chain of vegan restaurants called “Loving Hut.”  I don’t think I will run out of new things to try.

Grocery shopping is still a bit tricky.  I think in the last week I’ve probably spent about 25 minutes standing in front of the dairy sections of various grocery stores and still have little idea what I’m looking at.  Spices aren’t too common and I haven’t found any fresh herbs yet.  The chocolate selection is AWESOME. 

This evening I’m off to try some pub trivia with my roommate.  I promise more updates as I figure some more things out!

*Many thanks to all of the extended Baloch family, Heidi, mi lovely madre, and all who kept me sane during my 3-day, surprise layover.