The Global Guy

Well, I’ve been in Mongolia for almost a week now. I’ve met the other "geeks" and they seem to be a great group. We haven’t officially started our projects yet, so we’ve had a bit of time to go out and explore the city. There are a lot more restaurants than I’d have expected. You can get just about any type of food you want. From what I can tell, there is a huge class gap between the lower and upper classes. The lower economic class lives in near poverty, living on less than 10 dollars per day. This is probably 95% of the country’s population. The rest are extremely well off, driving western cars, wearing western clothes, and living the good life. I’m a little surprised to see that this is the population that we’ll be here to help. Hopefully I’m being paranoid and we’ll actually do some good.

Anyway, I’m liking the city itself a lot more than my first impression coming home from the airport. It’s got tons of old Soviet monuments and statues all over the place. For some reason the people in charge of the city decided to buy a bunch of garish fake plastic palm trees and put them all over the place. It’s really quite surreal!

Getting around is easy. Taxis are everywhere and cheap. You can get just about anywhere in the city for less than $2.00. If you don’t see an official taxi within a minute or so, just raise you hand, and someone will pull over and give you a ride for the same price as an official taxi. We did get into a traffic accident on our way to the US embassy for a meeting, but luckily the traffic moves slow enough that no one was hurt..I can’t say the same for the cars. You’ll see everything in the streets. Land cruisers share the same lanes as horses pulling carts. We’ve even seen one guy who’s trunk was open with an entire side of beef stuffed inside!

I was pleasantly surprised about how smooth the flight was to Mongolia. I flew the leg from Seoul to Ulaan Baator on MIAT, the national Mongolian airline. I’d heard awful things about it (for example MIAT standing for "Maybe It Arrives Today"), but it was a normal flight on a 737. The food was decent western beef stew, but for some reason the in flight entertainment was a repeating videotape of the Eagles on their last tour.

I was met at the arrival gate by a representative from the US Embassy and the gentleman who I’d be working with for the next four months. Immediately they decided that we had to go shopping which considering that I had just come from the tropics and didn’t have any cold weather clothing was a good idea!

The ride from the airport was surreal. I’d never seen anything like Ulaan Baator. The city was covered with snow, but it was all a depressing grey color. We drove past old soviet memorials, underneath flaking heat pipes, and past a neighborhood where everyone lived in gers with electric wires running haphazardly through the streets. Finally we arrived at the main downtown area where I’d be living. The apartment blocks were in better shape here, but still based on the soviet concrete block model.

We stopped at the main department store called "Ik Del Guul" which basically means state department store. It has recently been privatized but the name has stuck. It’s got everything you might need there…a grocery store on the bottom floor, electronics on the 2nd, clothing on the third, and tourist stuff on the top. I found a decent coat for about 30 US dollars(expensive I thought!), and then we headed to my apartment. It turns out that it was right across the street from the store in a very central location. I was amazed at the size of the apartment. It might have looked ugly from the outside, but the inside was obviously well cared for. Geekcorps was renting the apartment from a family who was out of town for the summer, and it was furnished with all their stuff. Everything from graduation pictures of children to non perishable food was waiting for me just the way they’d left it. I knew I’d have a roommate in the next couple of days from the program, but it was nice to have a day or so to myself to get used to the area.

By the way, the pictures below are of the places I’ve described, but in much warmer weather. I was too busy trying to absorb everything I was being told by my guides to actually take any photos!