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.
Showing posts with label Ulaanbataar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ulaanbataar. Show all posts
8/11/2008
6/15/2008
The miracles of technology
How did people travel before the internet?
I spent last night in a hostel in Costa Rica which is known for, among other things, having the best internet setup in the country. Long story short, coming here was something of a mistake, considering how little time I have left in Central America, so today I'm cutting my losses and catching a bus to Panama City. 16 hours...
I'll be arriving around 4 a.m. so I went online to find a hostel there with 24-hour reception. I was staying in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, and like most Central American capitals, there's not much to do and it can be more than a little scary. So I decided to take advantage of the internet setup to make some additional travel arrangements.
After about an hour I had reservations for hostels in Marrakech, Morocco; Beijing, China; and Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. The hostel in Mongolia is by all accounts the best in the country, and it's $5 US per night. I booked a budget room in the most sparsely populated country in the world in minutes on the internet. I think that's pretty cool.
I spent last night in a hostel in Costa Rica which is known for, among other things, having the best internet setup in the country. Long story short, coming here was something of a mistake, considering how little time I have left in Central America, so today I'm cutting my losses and catching a bus to Panama City. 16 hours...
I'll be arriving around 4 a.m. so I went online to find a hostel there with 24-hour reception. I was staying in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, and like most Central American capitals, there's not much to do and it can be more than a little scary. So I decided to take advantage of the internet setup to make some additional travel arrangements.
After about an hour I had reservations for hostels in Marrakech, Morocco; Beijing, China; and Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. The hostel in Mongolia is by all accounts the best in the country, and it's $5 US per night. I booked a budget room in the most sparsely populated country in the world in minutes on the internet. I think that's pretty cool.
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