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Football and mongols

Welcome to Mongolia, land of Genghis Khan, Nomads, Ger camps and not a lot else!

So, I left Russia at 8pm on a train headed towards Ulan Bator in Mongolia.  I wasn't expecting to have a fun packed time on the train following my past train rides....but lo and behold, when i boarded this train, it turned out it was full of Europeans who all spoke english which was a bonus.  Possibly the wierdest moment of the trip so far was when i got into my compartment and the two German guys I hung about with in Moscow were in the same 4-bed compartment as me!!  We also had 2 pretty fit female doctors from leeds in the compartment next to us, but it turned out they were pretty arsey, so i didn't even bother trying...

We arrived at the Russian border about midday the next day and had to wait a total of 9 hours to get through into Mongolia.  This is mainly due to the police checking every compartment thoroughly because a lot of mongolian traders try and smuggle masses of ciggarettes, etc, accross the border for one reason or another!

The 9 hour stop was however not as bad as it sounds.  Being the absolute genius that i am, I suggested we go to the local market and try to find a cheap footy with whatever russian currency everyone else had.  Result.  We found a footy for about 3 sheets and had a 2 hour game of 5-a-side, with a very continental feel (8 different nationalities),on a local park.  Unfortunately, my team lost as we had less players and the only two girls playing in goal for us.  And one was Scottish...need i say more?

This was when we realised we hadnt got a shower on the train and we still had 24 hours to go.  One Italian bloke went and washed in the local river, which I think actually made him smellier!

We finally crossed into Mongolia and got followed around the platform by a Mongolian kid who had 'love' and 'fuck' tattooed on his fingers.  He was a bit weird, so i got back on the train just to get away from him.

We arrived in Ulan Bator early the next day and eventually found my hostel after getting lost because the road sign was hidden behind a huge skip!  The hostel seemed nice, so i got a few hours kip and went out to meet the Jan and Florian to see the sights of Mongolias capital city.

First stop, we headed to the centre of the city Sukhbaatar Square (named after some famous dude called Sukhbaatar apparently) and then onto the National History museum which was ok....im just very pleased I didnt pay the 5 quid to take pictures cos they probably would have been the worst pictures ever.  From there, we headed to the Ganden Monastery which was quite impressive with its 80ft golden buddha inside.  Although, i expect it is probably not a patch on the forbidden city in Beijing.

One very funny thing you notice while walking around this city is that there are a lot of people sitting on the pavements with telephones on little tables infront of them.  Turns out they are the Mongolian equivalent of public phone boxes!  Being me, i had to use one and get one of the boys to take a picture for me....when in the process, about 6 little street kids tried to nick my bag, the little bastards.  God job that Florian was there to grab it otherwise i would be one camera and an Ipod light now, as well as losing all of my pictures on the trip to date!!

We had more Italian food for dinner (cos it is cheap and you know what you are getting), when a really annoying Irish girl just invited herself to join us and then proceeded to smoke while we ate.  Not only that, everything she said was really annoying cos she was so cocky....then she made us wait for her to finish eating (like a pig) before we could go to a bar for farewell drinks!  One hour later, we made it to a bit of a seedy bar to have a beer.  On our way out, our suspicions were confirmed, we walked down the wrong steps and into a seedy little den where we were ushered out of very quickly...obviously i dont look like the kind of person that would use thisa kind of place...with my dashing good looks and all! ;-)

After all that, i couldnt afford a taxi, so i had to walk alone in the dark through a pretty dodgy area of Ulan Bator back to my hostel, where i kept getting approached by really drunk men wanting money. 

The next day I was off top the Gobi desert for 8 days, so I called it a day and hit the sack.

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