2022.10.05. In medias res

We left off where we went to bed at around 8pm in hopes of a good night’s sleep.

Which did not happen – the good night’s sleep, I mean. I kept waking up every 45-60 minutes, having a hard time falling back asleep with all the weird noises (like a buzzing sound seeming to have come from the wall itself or people moving around and cars honking), being too warm under the blanket but too cold without it. But at least I did manage to sleep a little bit, in chunks.

At 4am, I woke up to my husband deciding he was hungry and making himself an instant ramen. I didn’t want to eat at first, being really tired, but he mentioned grapes and I suddenly wanted grapes, so I stumbled out to the kitchen with him and snacked on some grapes while he was eating. We also had to (and still have to) drink more than we would at home (even though we do drink a good 2 litres a day at home too) since the air is just so dry here; your mouth feels dry all the time and even your eyes get dry sometimes.

At 5 am-ish, after chatting some with our friends and family back at home (it was only 11pm for them, after all), we went back to bed. Well, I went back to bed to sleep and my husband decided he wasn’t really sleepy after all so he stayed up installing stuff on his new laptop and doing who knows what on there while I slept – and sleep I did, finally, at least 4 more hours, finally getting to a proper 8 or 9 hours of sleep. It still wasn’t a lot considering the incredible lack of sleep we’d had in the previous two days but it had me feeling almost like a human being again – if with a headache.

Having some breakfast and opening the windows for fresh air didn’t help much so I took some painkillers and lo and behold, by the time I got dressed, did my knee warm-up, and did some tidying in the kitchen, my headache was no more. I still felt groggy and out of place, so I convinced my husband to go for a walk, checking out Sukhbaatar square which we’ve only seen on Youtube and Google Maps before.

A breakfast of pizza (from Hungary, made by my parents), iced tea (from Istanbul airport), and grapes (bought here in Ulaanbaatar) - real multicultural

And this is the main entrance of the university with a statue of Choibalsan

In real life, Sukhbaatar square seems smaller than one would expect based on the videos but the parliament building is no less imposing with the giant Chinggis Khan statue lounging forefront.

The parliament building with Chinggis Khan in the middle.

From the square, we walked to the State Department Store where they have different kinds of products on every floor – it’s like a thematic mall. The first few floors had clothes but going up we’ve also found stuff like kitchen equipment, electronic gadgets, a toy store, books, paintings, even musical instruments (including two beautiful Fender guitars). What surprised me a lot was that the ground floor was stuffed with all kinds of beauty and jewellery kiosks and desks – we have these sparsely dotting the corridors in malls, one at a time, but here they have about a dozen of them in one place, pretty crammed, and you simply need to walk through them if you want to get to the escalators or the supermarket they have at the back of the ground floor. It’s lucky I have no interest whatsoever in either beauty products or jewellery because being forced to walk through all these businesses could easily turn into shopping sprees. While we were perusing the various objects and window shopping (although that seems like a weird expression to apply to this situation as there were no actual shop windows but rather open floors with some half-walls), I also got a call from my head of department saying there would be a reception happening for teachers of the university in the evening (on the occasion of the university celebrating its 80^th anniversary) and I was also invited.

The State Department Store - looks much nicer from the inside.

And this is the inside look, right up the middle.

They have golden elevators that could easily fit in a fancy hotel as well.

Found all kinds of literature in translation - Dostoevsky and E.L.James right next to each other

Since we’ve become pretty hungry in all the walking around and exploring, we had lunch in a vegan restaurant near the department store – yes, a vegan restaurant. Here in Mongolia. The fact that it even exists baffled me but when we finished eating and looked at the bill, my surprise just kept growing: it wasn’t even particularly expensive; it was, in fact, cheaper than it would have been back at home. And another surprise we had at this restaurant was when the server told us our options and she said they had goulash – that made us smile, even though it definitely does not taste like actual gulyás, it never does abroad, but the fact that they have it on their menu here, half a planet away from Hungary, that was nice and funny.

Once we stuffed ourselves full (I couldn’t even finish my plate of veggie fried rice, had to ask for a takeaway box for my leftovers), we went back to the department store to check out the supermarket and get some more groceries since yesterday we’d gotten only the essentials we’d absolutely needed. Cue another surprise when we found rows of Tibi chocolate on the supermarket shelves, both ‘milk chocolate’ and ‘dark chocolate’ clearly written in Hungarian on the packaging. The store itself was pretty huge, by the way, two floors of mostly foods but also bathroom products and such. This time we bought more food and also some snacks.

Tibi csokiii

Rice snacks are no surprise - and seaweed flavour being popular shouldn't have surprised us either, but it did

Toilet paper here is often sold by the roll - and this one is actually called 'Urin', isn't that hilarious?

The walk back home (where we’ve also seen a wedding party and the bride and groom getting their pictures taken in front of the Parliament building) was nice – we were expecting really cold weather and unbearable air pollution and bad weather; instead, we’ve had two days of sunshine and crisp weather so far. True, we need our winter clothes already in the beginning of October, but my coat was open and I wasn’t cold at all. The air does smell polluted sometimes, to be fair, but it’s nothing too bad yet (or at least we don’t notice). There are quite a lot of pedestrians out on the streets anyway, even if it’s the cars that are really crazy.

Traffic, in general, seems hellish here. We’d known about it before coming here, of course, as this is probably the first thing you learn about Ulaanbaatar if you look it up online: traffic jams are constant and traffic is just crazy in general. No wonder so many people drive Priuses here; I’ve already started calling it the ‘country of Priuses’. It just makes sense to have a car that’s good for slowly inching ahead in standstill traffic and that’s also pretty good for manoeuvring in super tight spaces – and they do make it tight and insane, the drivers here. Both the parking situation and just the general traffic and the way people drive here makes for very close calls all the time. I’ve seen people making 3 lanes out of 2 on a bridge, squeezing an extra lane in so that more cars could fit onto the bridge and there was less need for merging. It’s not even possible to stay in your lane here as that would mean you hitting others and others hitting you every ten meters. Another problem is that some cars have the wheel on the left side (as they should) but most of them are right-wheel ones because those are apparently cheaper (imported from Japan). I never-ever want to drive in this traffic but it’s kinda fun to watch, to be honest. (And very not fun to sit in, obviously.)

The Mongolian national symbol on the fence of the parliament garden, with their new museum in the background

Not long after getting back to our apartment, I had to leave for this gala evening that I’d been invited to. Luckily, I didn’t have to figure out how to get there as my head of department was driving there from university and he offered to take me as well. The car ride was slightly awkward (there was another woman, also a teacher I presume, who spoke no English whatsoever so it was either them talking in Mongolian about God knows what or Munkh and me talking in English about university stuff, alternating between the two, with the occasional phone call in Mongolian) and very long since traffic was, what a surprise, crazy. We were supposed to get to the venue by 5pm and we left the university parking lot at 4:30; we eventually arrived at 5:45, and there were loads of people only arriving then (or even later than us). I guess that’s Mongolian punctuality to you. (Although I have to admit Munkh has always been very punctual so far, whenever he was meeting me.)

At the venue, Munkh stayed outside for a smoke and the lady who came with us in the car took me along inside the building (UG Palace), where people were queuing for the cloakroom. I use queuing in a vague sense of the word as there was not a single line of people but rather a crowd, people cutting the line all the time – even us, as the woman grabbed my hand and pulled me over to some other teacher ahead of us. Then it was another bout of pushing others’ hands away as you were trying to hand your coat to the staff working the cloakroom – I think it must have been a bit like a horror movie from inside the room, half a dozen hands reaching inside the small window, pushing coats and bags at you as you try to remember which hand gave you which item (so that you can give them the keychain with the correct number on it). Once we were free of our coats, we went upstairs and were promptly seated at one of the dozens (maybe hundreds) of tables with the woman we’d joined by the cloakroom. We introduced ourselves in broken English / Russian, as it turned out she’s a Russian teacher at university (and speaks only very little English), working in the same department I am going to be a part of. She was very nice but quite soon she left the table to join her colleagues and socialise. Munkh – who must have arrived in the meantime but hadn’t come our way yet – was also away chatting to colleagues and researchers and guests, so for some time I was just sitting at the table alone, shooting messages back-and-forth with my husband.

Our table at the 'teachers' reception' aka gala evening

After some time, two definitely not Mongolian people joined my table, and I decided to just stand up and go talk to them, in hopes of being able to talk to someone and actually understand them and be understood in turn. It was two Austrian researchers and they told me that there would be many more people who spoke English, for sure, and that they even knew of a woman who was half-Hungarian and spoke my language. And sure enough, within half an hour a nice couple arrived where the woman indeed spoke Hungarian and her husband also knew some Hungarian, even though he was Dutch. Them sitting on my left side, and a nice teacher (Undraa from English and American Studies at the university) taking her place on my right, I finally had people to talk to; even the Taiwanese people sitting on the other side of Undraa seemed nice. From then on, the evening went on a bit more smoothly and less awkwardly for me, chatting and listening to both sides of the table.

Not to mention the show started soon after that as well, first a symphonic orchestra playing on stage, then it was an opera singer, and there was also a video played starring Choibalsan, and a guy in traditional-looking Mongolian clothes playing a folklore instrument, then several (locally) famous pop stars giving mini-concerts that had all the Mongolian teachers and researchers and guests jumping up from their seats and heading straight to the dancefloor, partying, and having a great time in general. Even us international guests had a blast watching the performers and looking at the excited crowd from the safety of our tables. The food must have been quite good too, I guess, but since it was mostly meat, I only nibbled at the sides (that also totally contained dairy, I am sure) and snacked on some fruits from the fruit basket in the middle of the table. There were also several options for beverages, but I kept to water and Coca Cola, not wanting to drink alcohol. The others, however, enjoyed some beers that they could open courtesy of my multitool that I now carry around; a gift from my friends, and apparently a very useful one at that.

Sometime during the evening, Munkh came up to me to introduce the guy I’ve been emailing with about administrational issues and to tell me that there would be a bus back to the university from the venue at 9:30pm. It was either that Mongolians can’t really be trusted with being on time (I was waiting in front of the building at 9:30 but there was no bus) or that there was some kind of miscommunication, but I ended up having to walk some of the way and getting a taxi once I’d reached a busy road. I was actually very proud of myself for being able to hail a taxi – I’d seen people holding their arms out by the side of the road to signal for a taxi, so I did just that (while I also kept walking, just to cover some distance and not freeze to the pavement while waiting) and within a few minutes a guy stopped for me and said he could give me a lift. It was a nondescript Prius (just like ours back at home, actually, only the wheel was on the right-hand side) and at home (or in other countries, I guess) I would probably not choose to get in a random car driven by a middle-aged stranger by the side of a dark road in the middle of the night, alone. Here, however, knowing that taxis kind of operate like this, and being really cold, and about a 45-minute walk from our apartment, I was like, heck, let’s try and act like a local would. And he took me home in like 10 minutes, no problems (and no talking, thank someone), and it was also pretty cheap, so all’s well that ends well, I guess.

To close this long and exhausting day off, I had some leftovers (the fried rice and a fried dumpling from the vegan place we’d had lunch at) for dinner, spent some time updating my friends and family on the day’s happenings, and writing diary entries and emails. Time flew by, as it is wont to do when one is messaging friends (and getting random stuff done), and we went to bed pretty late and pretty tired.