The rest of our trip in Mongolia, a month later.

So I wrote this, after nobody cares anymore. Mongolia? Was I there? Oh yeah, I was. And I rode a camel:


So in Ulan Bataar there was plenty to do. We went to a museum of Buddhist art, which is beautiful and sometimes terrifying, especially when they wanted to depict a wrathful demon, and the whole painting looks like a bad acid trip. We also visited the largest temple in Mongolia, which was amazing, and although I am not a Buddhist a lot of my Japanese relatives are, and it made me want to learn more about it. But here they are Tibetan Buddhists, which is pretty different from the other branches, I think.
It was nice in the hostel to speak English with people who are not Russians. Especially with the brits, I don’t know why, but they are always 100x wittier than Americans are. In the morning we started our tour, which was five days long. Our guide was a very normal Mongol girl Dogie, who spoke english perhaps worse than I speak Russian, although her vocabulary was good. She always said «did you full?» and «we wake up at the nine hour» so I think I could be a Russian guide. Maybe.
I finally got to ride a camel, which is a life-changing experience. Camels are terrifying, no, horrifying creatures. They are kept in check by a wooden plug that is placed in their nose so that the slightest pressure is painful to them so they have to yield, and at first I thought this was inhumane, but later on I was glad, because my camel was pretty angry and probably would have bucked me and bit my face off if he had the chance. But not really. Basically we just sat between their two humps and looked at the gorgeous scenery around us. They are completely unnatural animals: their necks are freakishly long, their legs are all knobbly, and they make dinosaur sounds. But it was an experience.
I think it is known that I hate horses, but now I have to say that I only hate non-Mongolian horses. They are basically ponies, but we're not supposed to call them that, and I had a blast riding them. This time it was for a few hours and we weren't all together, so we had to control our own horses. Our guide scared us when she said: «don't take pictures on the horse, don't take off the coat on the horse, or he will throw you off. And, please don't try to kiss the horse. Last summer, a girl from Ireland kissed her horse and he bit her nose very badly.» So I didn't try to kiss my horse.
I knew from the start that I was going to get the white horse, and I was right. At the beginning he wanted to return to his horse friends, so he constantly went to the right. I thought I was a bad horse-driver, and I was ashamed. He also loved to walk extremely slowly, ignoring my exhulations of «chu!» (that was what we were supposed to say) until he got far enough behind and on his own will decided to trot up to the last horse ahead of us, and then promptly started to walk extremely slowly again. However, after we stopped the first time to look at a waterfall, he was a completely different horse. At this point I had already chose the name Yan-Yan for him, because it was his name, I think. He still liked to be a little separate from the other horses, to the right of course, but now he listened to me and we gaily trotted across the great plains of Central Mongolia. We stopped at a second waterfall, which was much more impressive: an icy river poured down into a crater-shaped depression through an ice-waterfall. It was really neat. But I was excited to get back on Yan-Yan, and prove to everybody that he was the best horse. He might have been the smallest as well, and I was the tallest. Sitting on him, I think my torso was almost taller than he was. But not quite. It was a little uncomfortable when he trotted, but the land around us was golden with little strips of white snow, and the sky was enormous and dark blue, and I thought I could ride a horse across all of Mongolia. But then it got more uncomfortable, because Yan-Yan loved to trot sort of quickly. At the end we went out for a little jaunt to make our horses gallop, and it was fun but a little scary, because you really have to balance right.
We slept all 5 nights in yurts, which have five beds, a little table, and a central stove that either uses cow dung or wood. Yurts are great for nomads, but I didn't really love the eye-burning lightbulb, or the plastic kindergarten seats that Mongolian used. And my least favorite part was the yurt heating system: the local family put about 50 logs into the stove so at bedtime it is 95 degrees, and then we woke up 4 hours later and it was 25.
Another highlight was a visit to an old temple that was pagoda-style, and I really felt that I was in Asia, and while we were visiting a dust storm blew up, which was unpleasant for my eyes but created a beautiful light over the temple walls.
When we got back to Ulan-Ude I went to a huge market and bought a Russian fur hat for $200, which is of course a lot, but it was made out of real mink fur and it will come in handy when it is -30 here. I hope I didn't offend anybody. It's a sweet hat. We also ate… Cuban food! In Mongolia! And the chef was Belorussian. What a strange country.
In general, Mongolia has shed a lot of the Russian influence from the past 70 years. I felt like I was in a dirty Korean town, not Siberia or Kazhakstan. There were some strange things on the streets: people had home telephones that somehow worked without wires, and people could pay for one phone call or one cigarrette, but the strangest thing I saw was a lady sitting on the sidewalk with a scale in front of her. I had to ask the hostel owner, but it turns out that people will pay her to see how much they weigh, even in winter clothing.
In the end, we were a little sad to leave Mongolia, because a) except for the border, the people were more calm and friendlier, b) it was a lot more exotic that Irkutsk, c) there was more things to do in Ulan-Bataar than in Irkutsk, and d) no more speaking English. The second border crossing went swimmingly, the customs agents were not even angry at us! We took a bus to Ulan-Ude, capital of the Buryat' Republic on the other side of lake Baikal, and all trains to Irkutsk were full so we had to stay in the train station hotel, which was surprisingly nice, except for the loudspeakers announcing the arrivals and departures. The next day we had time to see the main attraction of Ulan-Ude: a gigantic head of Lenin. A gigantic Lenin head. It is probably 35 feet tall. It is odd—you are walking along, admiring the Soviet architechture, and then—oh. It's a giant head of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Wow.
Our train home started in Beijing and was headed to Moscow, and so I spent 7 very interesting hours in the company of Pasha, who made me shake hands and hug various young Chinese people who passed through our wagon in the name of Eternal Russko-Sino-American friendship. Then I joined Kevin in his compartment with Pasha and drank beers with four young men that looked exactly like the people that intimidate the heck out of me at the bus stop but they turned out to be good people. Even the one with tattoos all over his hand, which meant that he had been in jail. I even was able to discuss world politics with them, but when they began arguing amongst each other about the price of Hummer-3's, I couldn't follow. And then we got home, back to our beloved Irkutsk.