Day #73: Graffiti festival

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Ulaanbaatar is currently hosting a graffiti festival, although it would have passed me by had I not been told about it, via a German expat living in the city. Part of the festival was a night hosted by the Goethe Institute at a bar called iLoft (not sure if that was inspired by Apple or not), which a group of us went along to.

The crowd was about a quarter expats and the rest Mongolians, and the night overall was more or less indistinguishable from a night out in a European city, perhaps because it was European-organised (and DJ'd by Frenchmen). The only noticeable difference was that there was a lot of space: clubs in England are always jammed full of people, but away from the dancefloor in iLoft there was a lot of room, and the dancefloor itself was not particularly crowded. Then again, we were there early and there was still a long queue to get in when we left, so perhaps it gets busier later. When we arrived some of the available tables already had a number of bottles of beer or spirits on them. We assumed they were reserved, but it turned out that in order to sit at these particular tables you had to buy all the drinks on them first. It was a good evening and I missed the curfew for the hostel, which was exciting. Fortunately there were still two Korean travellers awake to let me in.

The only apparent connection to the graffiti festival was a wall of the club being temporarily decorated, but I did go to the National Amusement Park to see what was left a few days later (it was hard to tell though, what was part of the festival and what is just part of their permanent decoration).

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