Diversity and Contrasts in Mongolia

When I went to Mongolia, I first thought there was nothing but grassland, but once there I found four fascinating things besides the steppe:

1. Because it was communist for so long, the capital Ulaanbaatar still has the layout of a communist city: a central square, a theater, boxy buildings, and the Russian alphabet used as the main script, even for Mongolian karaoke.

2. But before communist rule, Mongolia had adopted Tibetan culture and become a land of lamas. After the communist era passed, Buddhism flourished again, with many temples and lamas, which is quite a contradiction to the structure above.

3. On top of that, Ulaanbaatar is a newly formed capitalist society with high inequality, because two major things happened ten years ago: 3.1 the export of gold and minerals boomed; 3.2 a great freeze killed eight million head of livestock, leaving many rural nomadic goat and sheep herders penniless and forcing them to move to the capital to work.

So today's Ulaanbaatar is a cluster of modern high-rises surrounded by a ger slum (of migrants from the countryside) stretching along the whole mountainside.

4. The capital that came in to develop Mongolia is Korean, from both South Korea and North Korea. So downtown looks like a South Korean city, and Mongolian teenagers love K-pop culture, yet at the same time a North Korean restaurant has opened, in grand style.

...Such strong contrasts in one place... well worth studying.

And if you leave the city a little way, there is vast open grassland, villagers riding horses to herd sheep, and at night you camp in a tent under a sky full of stars, beautiful beyond description. The meat and cheese here are delicious too, especially the horse meat, which I found I liked more than beef, and it is not very fatty. I found Mongolia full of far more than I expected.

#TWCTravel #TWCMongolia