After waiting for 15 hours on Sheremetyevo International Airport and a 10-hour flight, my father, my brother and I arrived in the country of Genghis Khan. In the socialist period the gers of the Mongolian nomads were replaced by Soviet-like buildings and even though I had seen pictures of the city, the city was not at all what I expected it to be. Because Mongolia is an Asian country I imagined it to have a certain feeling to it; one that I can't fully explain, but one that I always experience when I am in Asian capitals. Overwhelming, cozy, lively and with a strong smell of Asian spices and nature. We drove towards the center of the city and instead of being stuck in traffic, we hardly saw any cars and it felt like as if we entered Call Of Duty's Nuke Town. We passed multiple power plants and abandoned buildings and with every breath I took I felt my lungs being polluted. The city smelled like chemical waste and later I found out that the smell came from the coal-fired power plants and the heaters that keep the gers of the citizens warm.
We stayed at a guesthouse on a hill with gers on the roof. The rooms were spacy, but not in any way luxurious. The wallpapers were duct taped together, the beds contained bodily fluids and hairs from the previous tourists and there were random holes in the walls of the bathroom. But I came prepared, I didn't at all inspect it to be luxurious and that was actually a reason why I really wanted to go to Mongolia. To be away from Western society, to experience what it would be like to live like a nomad, or even experience a little piece of that lifestyle. So I knew that this was really just a pleasant beginning; I knew that the next coming weeks I was going to sleep on the ground and there sure wasn't going to be a bathroom in the Gobi desert. We were going to travel around in a Russian van without electricity, with a driver and an interpreter. Close to the city there are roads, but once you enter the countryside there are merely paths to show you the way. During the trip there was going to be one possibility to shower (on day 6), what meant that for the rest of the days we were going to have to soak in our own sweat. So I enjoyed the shower and it's holes in the walls and I slept like a baby on the bed that was as clean as it was soft.
The next two days we wandered around Ulaanbataar. The mornings were cold, but during the day it would get really hot and I was able to walk around in tank tops and flipflops. The people seemed nice and humble; not many of them could speak English, but when we were lost a woman walked us all the way to the place where we had to be, just because she was scared we wouldn't be able to find it if she didn't. We visited the monastery, we had some not so tasty food and we went to see the Black Market. The market was crowded and what was interesting was that the vendors weren't pushy at all, something that you experience a lot in other Asian countries. There was sand and dust everywhere and you could buy everything from an army outfit to a horsewhip.
We took the bus to the hotel and I had the chance to have a last look at the city before leaving for the countryside in the morning. As we drove past the lifeless buildings I thought about the people that lived there and about what would be going on behind closed doors. I felt like I didn't really find the soul of the city yet, but it did make a big impression on me. I was excited to see the countryside and I was looking forward to breathing in fresh air. And even though we all felt like that, the next morning we woke up at 9:11, while we were going to be picked up at 9:00. We packed our backpacks in less than 5 minutes and ran outside, but once we arrived there was no one there. We walked around for a little while and then a van came our way. We got in, sat down facing the trunk of the car and closed the door. This was the beginning of an adventure we'd never forget..
