Lazy days in UB

Asia » Mongolia » Ulaanbaatar
October 18th 2007

Published: October 18th 2007

Hey Gang! Life has been nice and easy going since returning from the field. I attended the first half of the taimen conference yesterday and heard a couple members of the science team present to various members of the local community and government officals on the scientific findings of the project over the last ~4 years. After the english presenters were done, I took off with Katya, a nice Russian girl who I met at the research station, to get some grub. We ended up at my fav resturant in UB, The Grand Khan Irish Pub. The food is tasty, the beer is affordable and they play ping pong tournments on big screen TV's so I really don't know what more I could ask for.

After our yummy lunch, we headed off to get Katya's visa extended so she and I can do a little trip to the Gobi desert. We arrived at the office and found a lot of construction going on. Walls torn apart, people putting in new flooring, sheets of dry wall being moved, all while people were trying to conduct buisness as usual. We went to the office were I got my visa extended back in September and they told us that things had changed and that we needed to go to another office, but that it was lunch time at the moment so we should come back at 2pm. So we left and wondered around a bit and came back a little after 2pm to find that the office was locked. We waited until 2:30 when someone came, unlocked the office, went in, shut the door locking us out and then came out 5 minutes later. We asked him if we could extend her visa and he said "we are closed!". Oh wells, guess that's the way it goes around here.

Being defeated by the visa office we decided to head to the Mongolia Museum of Natural History. Now, it's no Natural History museum like the one's in the US but I thought it was a pretty good deal for $2.50. We wondered through the various halls and corridors of the museum looking at stuffed birds, giant moose, dinosaur skeletons and lots of rocks (they had like 3 or four rooms that were just rocks). My favorite room was the one which had a nice display which looked like an african savannah complete with Zebra's, lion's and baboon's. Katya and I felt rather confused cause last time we checked zebras and baboons weren't exactly plentiful or even existant in Mongolia. I looked around for a sign to explain what was going on, but it was the only display in that hall that didn't have a sign to accompany it. Any of you have any explains for me?

Once we'd educated ourselves on the natural history of mongolia, we headed back towards the conference in just enough time to catch the yummy coffee and desserts that were being served at the end, good timing on our part. After coffee, pasteries and visiting with a couple people our group split up. One group went out partying until 5:30 am this morning and the other ate dinner, burned CD's and went to bed. I'm sure this blog entry would be more interesting if I had gone out until 5:30 am but, Mom, you'll be happy to hear that i was in the later group. All in all, it was a good day. Not too exciting but good.

I spent today burning all of my pictures on to CD and stealing a few photos from Zeb so once I can find a computer in an internet cafe that will open up so i can put my disc in, you will all have some pictures to look at. I can't wait to get them up because there are so many good ones! Ok, enough boring stuff for today. I'll find a way to get some pics up tomorrow because plain ol' text is just boring! Love and miss all of you! Thanks for all of the comments! I laugh out loud daily when i read them. Until tomorrow!

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