Ulaanbaatar

I arrived by train yesterday morning in the capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, or UB, as we unemployed travel bums call it. Tomorrow I'm leaving for a 7-day van trip to the Gobi Desert, so I'll be out of internet contact for at least a week. I've got some photos and stories to post from the rest of the train trip, but I'm experiencing technical difficulties. The adapter I use to upload pix from my memory card seems to have died. So I'm off now to find a replacement.

UB is basically the only city in Mongolia. I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed at how modern and touristy it is here. After struggling with Russian I was not looking forward to trying to communicate in Mongolian, which uses the same alphabet as Russian, but with two additional characters. Great. But even though the sounds are more or less the same, the words are all different.

So imagine my surprise to discover all the signs here are in English. People here understand more English (and smile a lot more!) than Russians.

Hopefully the next post will have pix.