Skip to main content

Featured

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 café 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,

Documentary on Ninja Mining in Mongolia

I recently came across this 2007 documentary by the British Channel 4-  Unreported World: Mongolia - Ninja Nation. Interesting and at times hard to imagine this wild west gold rush craze happening right in our backyard. Ninja mining towns have become more or less self-sufficient, with their own economy, rules and social structure, nearly independent of the government thanks to the government choosing to ignore this section of society. Here's a Times Online article on ninja mining.

Popular Posts