You know when you pored over that dog-eared atlas you found in the bookcase after school that day? When you wondered what it must be like to be from such far-flung, remote places, with impossibly exotic or alien names, like Tierra del Fuego, or Windhoek, or Vladivostok? Ulaanbaatar was always that place for me. Any place with double As in the name would have to, by definition, be a very alien place indeed. It was in the middle of a country which looked pretty windswept and barren, even in the atlas. A huge expanse of nothing surrounded on all sides by similarly empty landscapes, of rugged western China and the dauntingly vast bleakness of Siberia. I had always wanted to go, from that first encounter. So, living in Beijing ,I decided that now was the time.
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