Eating in UB (and a few between meal sights)

Your impression of some cities depends on the time of year you are there (winter in Chicago).  In others, it’s the time of day (Nairobi after dark? I’d prefer werewolves).  Ulaan Baatar (as with all Mongolian words, the last vowel is silent, despite the Soviet etymology of “Red Hero”) is the kind of place that is defined by where you are coming from.  We’ve now arrived twice: once from Tokyo, and now, after 15 days in Central Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.  At the risk of crassness, it’s a story best told in toilet technology:  Japan had, famously, toilets so technologically advanced that at one point ours froze and had to be rebooted.  They do everything for you, at your personal preference of temperatures and pressures, including several things you didn’t even know you needed done.  Fly to UB, where the plumbing is, as the LP says, “dodgy.”  Then to the Gobi, where another author describes the scene: “The bathroom situation at this hotel is primitive.  By which I mean they don’t have even a hole in the ground out back.”  Returning to indoor plumbing in UB was like traveling a thousand years into the future – Japanese robotic singing toilets feel a mere hundred years ahead.

Approaching for an audience with Chinggis

Maybe it’s just because we’re returning here from 15 days in the culinary (and geographic) desert of central and southern Mongolia, but UB is a gastronomic wonderland.  It doesn’t have enough of its own traditions to be one of the world’s food cities, and there’s a distinct absence of destination restaurants.  But the last 4 days have been the tastiest and most surprising meals I’ve had in a while.

First, the indigenous: for summer, our neighborhood surrounding the State Department Store (a reformed bastion of communist commerce) sprouts a series of tents housing barbecue and beer gardens.  Each has its own slant (one is Uzbek, and features plov, another has grills at the table) but essentially you get a big skewer of meat bracketed by chunks of juicy mutton fat for $3, and a half liter mug of Chinggis beer for $1.50 (repeat as necessary).  Walking by on a summer afternoon or evening, it’s awfully hard to resist stopping in for some mutton on a stick.  Actually, I have no idea how hard it is to resist; I never tried.  As a result, I can say that the place advertising “soft sheep meat” is definitely worth the extra dollar compared to the place with the regular sheep meat, and that the Uzbeks have the best mop sauce.

Each of these places also has a television for the summer sporting events.  Judging by the branding on the tents, that’s usually soccer, but we happen to be here during the Olympics.  If there’s one thing (other than riding horses and eating mutton fat) that Mongolians love, it’s wrestling.  Prime time Olympic coverage on Mongolian TV is devoted to wrestling, and whenever a local was on the mat a huge crowd would materialize for the 6 minute bout.  The country is relatively safe, aside from the ubiquitous drunks and pickpocket warning signs, but the one time I felt uneasy was when the Mongolian wrestler lost a tied match by decision, and I was suddenly aware of the density of angry Mongolians surrounding our table.  [In truth, they were good sports – not a soccer hooligan among them.]

With our mutton needs competently addressed, we branched out and walked a block away to one of the dozens of Korean restaurants in the neighborhood.  For $30, the four of us ate one of my top 10 meals, and could barely fit through the door on the way out.  A tower of braised short ribs, cartoonishly rich, with none of the usual fight-it-off-the-bone tough bits.  A platter of slightly spicy, slightly sweet, just-can’t-stop-eating grilled pork.  A spicy bibimbop; all the usual Korean small dishes of spicy pickled everything.  And the standout: bulgogi in a clay pot.  I was disappointed when it first came to the table; I had wanted bulgogi, but hadn’t realized that the special clay pot version was a soup (and we’re still on a soup strike after the last two weeks).  But that was no ordinary broth.  That was the richest, most intensely flavored liquid ever produced; the distillation of the bones and fat of a thousand head of cattle in each spoonful, and the umami-est experience of a lifetime.

Not every meal has been up to that standard, but everything – the Indian, even the pizza and burgers – has been shockingly good, and surprising in its variety and complexity in a country with a tradition of dietary monotony.  Coffee follows the city-country schism.  Here in UB, proper espresso and cappuccino in on every corner (though one bakery has a sign out front for iced coffee picturing a cups from Starbucks, Macdonald’s, Seattle’s Best, and Tim Hortons).  Out on the road, instant Nescafe is the hard-to-find good stuff; after 5 days of the truly vile local Maccoffee instant powder I stopped one morning, suddenly wondering why I was trying so hard to choke it down.  I was either saved from breaking the addiction (or re-shackeled) at the next mini mart; I understood for the first time the appeal of the instant “crystals” they always made such a big deal about in instant Folgers commercials when I was a kid.

Our dream vehicle

When we haven’t been eating, we’ve been walking (ok, between restaurants).  Outside the big mall, a car dealer has set up shop, showing mostly Chevys (zero of which we have ever seen on the roads), including, for some reason, a Camaro – probably the least likely car to find in Mongolia, a country with choking traffic in the city and no highways outside it.  But the most popular vehicle for window shoppers, by far, is the MAZMAN OVERCOMER.  (A car this big can only be rendered in all caps).  A comic book of a jeep with 5 foot balloon tires, working propeller on the back (8km/h in water), 70 cm ground clearance, and a promo video playing on constant loop on the jumbotron above it.  Now *this* is what we need.  Sticker price is about $85k…  just bit more than our budget for the trip… if we live in it and cook all our own food, we could skip the flights and trains and just drive around the world, even across the seas.  Except for gas, I guess.

And except for the fact that it might not be as real as it looks.  The video is cool, and there was definitely plenty of brush around the axles on the floor model.  But when I looked at the video that night, the confident Australian voiceover is using some peculiarly Russian grammar.  And the only online presence is the vehicle’s appearance at a UAE construction industry trade show, where the point wasn’t the vehicle itself, but rather the vehicle-as-proof that Belarus could actually manufacture something exportable.  So this may be the one and only.  But still…

The UB Apple Store (they sell apples inside)

Otherwise, we spent our time in UB seeing the usual tourist sites: Chinggis Khan square, the national cultural performance featuring khoomi throat singing, the dinosaur museum with the famous stolen dinosaur skeleton returned to the country just a year or two ago by the US court system after an attempted sale by a Dallas auction house.  An afternoon trying to track down the promised thriving local music scene (result: one band, one set, 5 songs – but at least we got to try a couple of mugs of the elusive Chinggis Dark).  Watched a couple of new releases at the fanciest movie theater in the country, subtitled in Mongolian (Ice Age and Jason Bourne I mean, Джейсон Борн).  And the obligatory visit to the national museum, the most interesting part of which was the traditional costumes.  It turns out (maybe this is common knowledge that I just missed somehow) that all of the Star Wars Episode 1 costumes are just direct copies of traditional Mongolian fashion, including hair styles.  I had a flashback to a recent trip to Manhattan to see the traveling exhibit of Star Wars props and costumes: here they were, all of Natalie Portman’s dresses.