Winter in Ulaanbaatar: The privilege of clean air

I don't know what it is, but the winter months in Mongolia seem to be the longest I've ever experienced. Not sure if it is the lack of daylight, the merciless cold or the fact that I've been living in winter since mid-October. Sometimes I wonder if there has ever been a life before winter?

Winter time is freezing and air mask time in Ulaanbaatar. Temperatures drop below -30 degrees Celsius and dust concentration climbs on hazardous levels on a lot of days. Like always...you get used to it, but still it is no nice way to live. It feels like you were taken away your freedom to walk outside without this tight, inconvenient thing on your mouth and nose or the freedom to open the window whenever you want to or the freedom to do some sport activities outside or inside.

Yes, air pollution is terrible here in winter. And everyone should be aware of this when coming here at that time. On the other hand, it makes me appreciate the privilege of having access to clean air even more. Every day I see people going to work, children going to school, traffic police officers standing on the street WITHOUT air masks. Not to mention what it's like in the ger districts in the suburbs of UB.

I hope this city will find a way to deal with the harsh winters without polluting the air so massively. I hope that one day people here have the privilege of having access to less polluted air as well.

Ulaanbaatar: Capital of frozen vomit

Sorry, if you don’t want to know or see this, but I decided that this topic is worth an own blog entry. The number of vomit stains on my daily way to work varies between 5 and 10, also the size and colour. It’s a funny (and disgusting) game of guessing what people were having before they drank too much.

What I find funny though is that of course due to the freezingly cold temperatures, the vomit starts freezing right away and will remain there till somebody scrapes it off the pathway (which barely ever happens) or it gets washed away by the snow or rain sometime in March or later. 

I have never seen so much of it in one place. Really quite amazing…

Because I don't wanna scare away my beloved followers, I will limit the pictures for this entry to three only, even though I could have taken a lot more...

Berlin is everywhere, even in UB!

At first I thought, okay, this is coincidence! Then I thought okay…what? And then I said I okay, there is NO NEED to feel homesick in Ulaanbaatar, because Berlin is encountering you everywhere. Well, not really everywhere, but everytime you least expect it.

I found out that Берлин (Berlin) is simply a fast food chain. The shops are spreaded all over town, but still everytime I’m passing it, I smile to myself, because I think, okay…they have to choose a name which attracts people to come have their dinner there. I’m happy that Mongolian people find “Berlin” is fancy enough to do so. What a shame, I never actually ate out there, but I gotta do so soon. I believe, there is nothing that refers to the city except for the name, but I’m curious anyway.

A Gallery of Mongolian Train Stations

I don’t know why I started doing this, but on our way from UB to Sainshand, I started photographing all the different train stations. Okay…I guess it’s simply because you gotta entertain yourself on a 9h ride. But secondly, I thought there might be some people from far abroad who’d be interested in it... So here are some scenes you would come across on your Transmongolian Railway someday. Enjoy!

The Energy of the Gobi: Sainshand

Train from Ulaanbaatar to Sainshand 

So last weekend we went southwards to the World Energy Center in Sainshand. We took the train on Friday morning at 10:10 and had a 9-hour ahead of us. Now that we were going by train for the third time already, we were pretty well experienced about the routines of boarding the train:

• Grab your ticket
• Hand it to the train staff
• Try to keep smiling even if they don’t and refuse your wish to take photo with them
• Try to address them in Mongolian or Russian  
• hurry boarding the train and don’t ask any stupid questions 

This time, we went first class, meaning we had our own compartment of four beds, which was much more relaxed than the previous rides, since we didn’t have to fight for our seat and place ourselves between tons of luggage and people. 

The landscape kept changing the more southern we got. We left the white snowy hills of UB towards much flatter, dryer, brown steppe desert vegetation. The day passed by quite quickly and the sundown in the Gobi Desert was yet another magic moment in this whole Mongolian experience. 

Surprisingly the pick up at Sainshand Station (arranged by the Shan Plaza Hotel that we booked for one night) worked out very well and we were taken straight to our accommodation. After checking in, we were looking for a bite nearby and eventually ended up at possibly the only restaurant in town to be open after 20:00, called the Gallery Pub.

What to do and to see around Sainshand

Next day, we put all our trust in the driver to show us around at all places worth seeing. And it turned out to be a lot at the end of the day. 

First we did the Wish Mountain, then Khamaryn Khiid Monestary, the Great Human Bell and then the Khamar Monastery – the desired place to go. After entering, we realized our preparation was quite poor, since there were a lot of rituals and things to be considered when going there. But luckily, there are always other Mongolians around who will assist you behaving accordingly. This includes:

• Lying on the ground with your hands full of rice and grains to be eaten by hundreds of pigeons to observe the energy from off the ground 
• Singing a Mongolian song in front of a Buddha Statue 
• Picking up a white small stone, telling it your name three times and dropping it again at the entrance 
•  Leaving the place reversely with back to the front  

Next we were taken to some caves where the local monks used to lock themselves up to go on a fast. Then crawl through a small, dark cave symbolizing the rebirth through a birth canal. Next were stoned dinosaur skeletons and tree trunks in the middle of nowhere.

Another sweet highlight were the untouched sand dunes shaped by nothing but the wind. 

Even though all those things were somewhat close by to each other, sunset came very soon and the day was over. Sitting in the car back to Sainshand station and watching the sunlight disappearing, I thought this was a good day. 

At 21:15 we took the night train back to UB.