Today's been a good day so far. At breakfast, I met our tour guide, Laura, and an Aussie also on the tour, Mike. Mike is retired from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation who likes traveling. I guess you have to a little to come to Mongolia...
Anyway, Mike came along withe me even though he had been to a lot of places already. We started by trying to track down a bank, which wasn't so easy on a Saturday. Eventually, we found one and changed some money into the local currency, the Tögrög. I'm never going to remember that...
Next, was a visit to the National Museum. It was a nice sized museum which summarized the history in a very reasonable amount of time. One tidbit is that Genghis Khan is called Chinggis Khan here.
Next was lunch at a Cuban-American-Mongolian restaurant, Millie's Espresso. The owner was studying in Russia and meet his wife there. The food was good and my macchiato was better than what I could get in California. In fact, he had hot sauce imported from California!
After lunch, we went to the Choijin Lama Temple Museum. As you can see, the temple is in the middle of the city right next to some new modern skyscrapers. All the figures appeared designed to scare, as they were quite graphic. I've included a few pictures as well as one of a Green Tara wall painting. It was a nice temple though somewhat small. Admission was 5000 T, but to use a real camera for photos was 25000 T more! (Exchange rate is 1325 T to 1$.) I didn't spring for that! It seems a common charge ratio based on other museums...
A short trip to the Persecution Museum followed. It wasn't too interesting since most of it wasn't in English. Mongolian uses the Cyrillic alphabet so I can read a little, but it doesn't get me too far.
We picked up some water and beer before returning to the hotel to rest up. Budweiser beer! Though this is the Czech variety and much better.
I'll probably go radio silent soon after this. No Internet once we venture out onto the steppes...
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