Some things I already can tell you

Some random facts I’ve noticed in our first week in Mongolia, in no particular order:

• They seem to have instant ramen, fizzy drinks, and sweets everywhere. Every convenience store is full of these 3 product categories and there’s not much room left for actual food.
• Pastries and biscuits are sweet here, never savoury. I have yet to find a salty/savoury pastry or bread. Today, in a kind of desperate attempt to get some savoury snacks (okay the chips are savoury, but I don’t really like chips), I bought something that looked like Korpovit (a whole-grain biscuit back home) – it turned out to have a coconut-y taste and was doused in sugar.
• Buildings usually have at least two doors that people use: one for entrance, one for exit (they even label the doors for ‘entrance’ and ‘exit’, and by now I actually recognise these words in Mongolian, just like ‘pull’). And the surprising thing is that they actually use the doors according to their labelling (back at home, you just pick a random door to use even if there are several).
• Lamp switches work the other way round; at first, I always thought we’d left the lights in the bathroom on but no, switches just point upwards when they are switched off, and downwards when they are switched on.
• I’ve already written about traffic jams and taxis, so read back my first week entries for more on that. But yeah, traffic in general. Also, the parking situation.
• Floors. They number the floors wrong. The ground floor is their 1^st floor and then every single floor gets a higher number than it’s supposed to. Like the swimming pool that is on the 4^th floor but they call it 5^th floor, or my department at university which is on the 3^rd floor (here, 4^th floor for everyone).
• People seem to prefer calling or texting each other on their phones instead of using apps like WhatsApp or Messenger. What a waste of money. They also always ask for my phone number (in Hungary, you would add someone as a friend on FB to message them there, we don’t ask for phone numbers anymore, apart from official situations and such, but even then, you’d probably rather exchange email addresses).
• There are no coins, or at least we haven’t seen any yet. They only have notes, and the biggest bank note is the 20.000 MNT – which is ridiculous, given its value is not that much. We also have 20.000 as our biggest note in Hungary (but that is worth almost 10 times as much). This way we always need to carry thick wads of cash even if we don’t have much money on us.
• It’s really hard to use your card as online payment – they usually want you to use an application instead but that limits our options with no Mongolian IDs and no Mongolian bank accounts. In person, you can pay by card, but as soon as you try to order something, you are screwed.
• Names have meanings. Obviously, names can also have meanings in many other languages too, but with most Hungarian names you need to look up their meanings (in case you are interested) or get into etymology – here, names are actual words with meanings. And people seem to like telling you the meaning of their names.

  

  Cars parked back-to-back at university today