What a day

Saturday is a great day to represent why I find the town so bizarre.

In the morning, I got up and walked to a place called Grand Khan Irish Pub. Myself and a number of other foreigners living in UB got picked up by van to go about 40 minutes outside of town to ride horses through the hills.

 They saddled up 12 horses for us and they went through a selection process that was not particularly transparent to choose which rider would ride which horse. One by one they pointed at one human, then one horse and helped us mount. Sometimes then telling us to get off because the horse wasn’t quite right. It was a bit Harry Potter sorting hat and a bit Goldilocks. But I certainly had no idea what was going on. Finally everyone was on horses of varying degrees of spirit and stubbornness and we made our way into the steppe.

My horse could be described as a homebody. I was trailing behind the entire ride out as he had no desire to go in that direction. My kicks and calls of “CHOO” (which is what we were told to yell to make them go) did nothing. When we would move a few feet, he would start veering off a little bit and then when I pulled on the reins to try to correct him, he would attempt to do a 180 and head in the direction of home. We rode through some hills and past a couple ger camps before turning around. On the turn-around, I suddenly pulled into the lead. The kicking and choo-ing and yanking a meandering horse back onto the path turned into pulling on the reins to try to slow his gallop and prevent him from running too fast downhill.

We all eventually made it back safely and ate some tasty vegetable hushuur (fried dumplings, somewhat like hot pockets) before heading back into town.

The next activity for the day was getting cleaned up and heading to see the Barber of Seville at the Mongolian Opera House. I mistakenly forgot to look up the plot to the opera, so for the first act we were terribly confused and not gleaning much from the Italian songs and Mongolian dialogue. Luckily, at the first intermission, we came across programs in English for sale with plot summaries. I’ll admit, even with the summaries it took me until the second -to-last song to actually figure out who the characters were and what they were doing, but I got there. It wasn’t quite La Scala, but it was worth the experience.

Post-opera dinner brought me back to the Mexican/Indian restaurant, this time to try the Indian food and a margarita. Only in UB.