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The chaos theory of Mongolia

I returned to Mongolia 15 years ago after an absence of 13 years, save for the occasional 2-week leave from work, and that time I spent a semester and a half at a local university drinking endless cups of brown, watery 150 Tugrik instant MaCcoffee at the cafĂ© strangely, or perhaps egotistically, named "In my memory", writing the first and so far the only book that got us into trouble with the local intelligence who apparently had little else to do than to pore through the ramblings of teenagers to catch the tell-tale signs of drug dealery. But I digress. When you visit a country for a short period, be it home or not, you hardly have time to immerse yourself in the spirit of the country and the city and feel the nitty gritty and dirty shiny of it all. So after 13 years, it took me a while to readjust and finally understand what the hometown of my childhood had become.  The most striking, ubiquitous, and inescapable feature was and still, unfortunately, is the traffic. In 2008,...

Some photos

Took some photos from Max Tower, a new office block of the Max Group of UB city, on Monday. Winter approaching. This was just before the second snowfall of the winter. And these are from Naran-Tuul open-air market (some call it the Black Market). Freezing cold at this place probably coz it's near a river valley.
And the racks in the photo above is just the shoe section of this huge market. Good place to go shopping for winter clothes right now and everything else you can imagine. Cheap China-made stuff are everywhere, but you can also find some Mongolian-made wool / leather goods. The sizes on the Chinese products are completely nuts (i.e. not indicative of the actual size at all). In some stalls, the smallest size they have for sweaters or coats is XL, which seems to be the equivalent of the normal S or M. Maybe the factory in China ran outta S / M / L size clothes tags and just sewed on XL and XXL's to their clothes at random.

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