Day 6 - Ulan Bataar 🥰

First day is a little tough for everyone. Kids get up at around 1130. After more than an hour at the bank to withdraw enough Tugrik and Dollars to last us the next two weeks, we have a rather good lunch of Asian sort-of-fusion where we can choose from Korean, Japanese and Mongolian. Extremely surprisingly for us, the MOST expensive food is the mongol Mutton!!??!! For the ones who know us well, the ONLY food we got tired of during our previous world tour was... Mongolian mutton! Since outside Oulan Bataar, off the beaten paths, mutton noodle soup is just about the only thing you can get, and since mutton is generally genuine old (unchewable) chewy mutton, (or horse meat during winter since mutton gets too chewy even for Mongolians) as opposed to delicious lamb as we know it, we are truly baffled that this is considered the delicacy in town! The Mongolian mutton dishes are double the price of any other dish on the menu!?!?🤣🤣🤣🤣

Ian clearly is tired. Grumpy about the tasty food (he wanted yogurth at 2pm rather than delicious mutton 😅) he manages to fall asleep at the restaurant. Then again back at the house while the kids are overly enthusiastic about doing homework. -I was planning on taking it easy too on the first day 😶‍🌫️-

Later we go for a walk around town, bump into the 'back to school' supplies market. A quaint set of stands with a gigantic quantity of dirt cheap school supplies, but without the one thing we were looking for, A4 sized paper with lines or squares. They only have heaps of small A5 and super thin notebooks which we settle for. The exact same super fancy flexible rulers we normally get in Migros in Geneva is 25 cents here!

We try to fix Lennox's brand new glasses in a hard to find shop. As often in Mongolia, it is difficult to know where shops are since historically during Russian Communist era, there were far fewer shops. So perhaps these are former houses without window fronts, so they are hidden! Thank you Lola, who as always finds it in a whiff of an instant. And the boss speaks perfect German and tells us he has studied and lived/worked for 30 years at the most prestigious shop in Germany! But to no avail. No fix for the glasses! One down, on the first day 🫣 But as if to smoothen our pain (or because all our glasses are just too dirty?!) The guy kindly offers us all cloth wipes for our glasses and apologises profusely. Such kindness behind generally pretty serious Mongolian faces!!!

We go back to our favourite Korean restaurant. It is much more quiet (fallen out of fashion?) and after 1 hour waiting for our order, we are told that all the yummy dishes we got last time and have ordered long ago are not available. Strange! Seems things go in and out of fashion in a flash! The huge supermarket we went to last time to buy our breakfast has also vanished. Go figure...

And last but not least, we enter a house... shop again! Strange mix of run-down passages and the like. A bit of a maze where we are not sure whether we are entering and going through someone's house or a shop. But the sales lady is very enthusiastic and seems totally unaware of the tensions between Europeans and Russians when she announces enthusiastically and with a friendly smile after we tell her we are European that she is Russian!

The rest if the night is the usual chaos, with kids waking up at two. I'll spare you the details!!! 😅😤🥱Read more