1. We love the Ger. It’s warm and round and you can tuck your toothbrush into the lattice frame. There’s room for all your homemade yogurt and, if you’re not careful, your yaks. Everyone is welcome – and everyone sleeps right there, on the floor. Living in Mongolia seems like a big slumber party – there’s more of course, but it’s probably why everyone is so completely friendly.
2. Ulaanbataar is something like a cross between Albuquerque and Anchorage. Can one find a great fresh salad in Ulaanbataar? Yes, one can. Can one purchase a gigantic Russian fur hat? Of course. Can one also grab a beer and sit outside eating bratwurst and chips? How about Uzbek horsemeat sausage? Or perhaps watch the latest Mongolian hip-hop music videos on a flat screen TV in a Japanese restaurant? Yes, yes, yes. Are the coal powerplants located within the city limits? Yep. Does the whole thing seem a little bit made up, like something out of a frontier version of Sim-City? Something like that.
3. Two humped camels provide a naturally warm saddle on a cold day. We named our camels Mandelbaum and Bruiser (Mona’s was a little on a crazy side, giving her a pretty substantial headbutt when she tried to hug its hump). When Mandelbaum and Bruiser open their lounge act in Macau it will be called “Between the Humps.”
4. It’s illegal to blowtorch a marmot, not because it’s a weird thing to do but because they carry bubonic plague. Still, this is a favorite dish and we saw a man hunched over a ballooned out critter (they’re stuffed with hot rocks first) illicitly blowtorching his morning marmot in the corner of a children’s playground. At a checkpoint an hour outside Ulaanbatar we encountered two policemen, the only one’s we saw in the whole country. They were on marmot duty.
5. Yak butter is absurdly creamy and good. Fresh goat’s butter is also very good, and the milk from cashmere goats (as if they needed to produce anything else amazing) is delicate and lovely. Fermented mare’s milk tastes a lot like wine, which is not what it looks like it would taste like.
6. Galloping—galloping! Across the huge open steppe on our trusty horses. We were going at full speed, way ahead of our guide all afternoon. Across streams, over hillsides, past lots of yaks (Teo’s horse kept wanting to herd the yaks while Mona was a little scared of them). It was kind of the best thing in the whole world. Mongols – to your horses!
Teo Grossman
Ramona Ausubel
