On a midnight train to Mongolia

A new train awaited us, and apparently there are two trains going from Irkutsk to Mongolia with very differnet standard. We were lucky and got the good train, slightly more room than on the one from Moscow to Irkutsk for the lower bunks, and some boxes where you could store stuff for all beds. For the top beds this meant less room, so for me they were more in the way than helpful, but not really a big deal either. We had a minor change in roommates, which meant Richard moved into our kupé and there was no open space for any locals.

The train left late at night and would arrive in Ulan Baatar early in the morning about 32 hours after leaving Irkutsk. This included a Sovjet-style stop at the border where we first had to leave the train for 2 hours and do absolutely nothing in this border town, then get back on the train for about 2 hours crossing control on the Russian side where they looked through more or less everything mostly to see if we had more people with us than we were supposed to. Meaning all our bags had to be opened, including hand luggage, as well as all seats had to be lifted up etc. Actually sounds worse than it was, but it's a strict regime and we had to stay in our kupé for the hours this went on. A passport control followed before we were allowed to drive 50 meters and then go through a similar control on the Mongolian side.

I spent most of this time reading while we waited, and as we knew what was going to happen, it's not really a big deal.

Next day there heldd (very) early arrival in Ulan Bataar just before 6am. It was cold and dark, and we mostly just drove to the hotel which luckily had our rooms available already. Several opted to sleep for a few hours before we hit the city. There wasn't much of a plan this day, but we all walked towards the main temple complex and had a local soup lunch afterwards. Some wandering about the state driven department store which had everything, including a huge souvenir store that seemed a bit too mass produced for my taste.

For the night we met up for a traditional Mongolian show which included throat singing, weird thing which we really wasn't able to replicate later on. Mongolian BBQ for dinner which I think most of us had too high expectations for. The show when they made the food we'd picked out was a bit fun, but the food itself was medium and the ice cream for desert had been frozen and thawed again and again, and was really too damaged to be any good at all. Massively overpriced compared to what we actually got, especially when thinking of what we got for lunch and the price we paid there.

Suukbataar square with the Genghis Kahn memorial was an impressive square in the middle of the city, both at day and night.