We toured a monastery, visited a Russian war monument and
the Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution when we arrived in UB
again Saturday afternoon. The monastery was interesting, though a fight broke
out between an old man and a forty-something woman in front of it—the man broke
his aluminum walking stick on the woman, and she chucked a couple of dustpans
at him. I’m not sure what it was all about, but the fight seemed particularly
out of place considering where we were. (As a side note, this was actually the
second fight we’d seen in Ulaanbaatar in as many days. The first broke out
among about a dozen young men on the street. They were in a group across the
street from us when all of a sudden several men started running and the others
began running after them, punching, kicking, and kneeing those they caught. Our
guide says it’s a form of entertainment (after alcohol but before sex), but it
didn’t seem like a lot of fun to me.)
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| The museum was night quite what I was expecting. |
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| 20,988 Mongolians is one estimate of the number of political victims. |
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| View from the war monument. It was rather windy up there. |
That evening we went to the opera to watch Madam Butterfly. (I made it to a department store beforehand and bought a replacement suitcase. The woman at the opera coat check was a little surprised when I asked her to watch my suitcase.) Not having much experience with operas, I have to go with my guide’s evaluation of “pretty okay” for the performance, but I did enjoy it. The opera was in Italian with Mongolian subtitles (which are in Cyrillic), so I missed a lot of the storyline.
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| Opera house |
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| Ready for the show! |
The evening ended in The Genghis Pub, an Irish place that advertised live music. We ate dinner and then a few of us waited until 9:30 for the music to begin. It was pretty fun singing along to the Mongolian versions of some old favorites. And then 20 minutes later, the music stopped. We assumed that the band was coming back to play a second set, but after a while the lead singer came out and started disconnecting the instruments. Twenty-minute live music? Really.
J
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| Ready for the music! |
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| Twenty-minute rock out! |
We toured another monastery the following morning and then had free time to explore the city before catching the next train that night.
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| Genghis |
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| Me and the Khan. |
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