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| Ulaanbaatar From Above 2012 |
On Wednesday, my wife and I arrived in Ulaanbaatar (hereafter UB) where we'll live for the next 1 to 2 years (1 definite, 1 to be determined). My wife is a lawyer here working with a foreign firm (Mongolia is in the midst of a triple pronged resource boom, that started a couple years ago, which makes UB like San Francisco in 1849 or Dawson City in 1898 or Ballarat in the 1850s). I've signed up to teach geography and history at a local elite Mongolian private school for the next year, which will be one the struggles that I will likely be writing about in the future.
The flight from Beijing to UB is always a forgettable 2 to 4 hours, depending on how long Beijing makes your plane wait on the tarmac for no apparent reason. What's more memorable is the trip from Chinggis Khan International to the city center. The "road" from the airport is perhaps the most remarkably shabby and ugly approach to a downtown core that I've ever seen (and I grew up in Edmonton). At one point, the road breaks down into what should be 2 lanes but Mongolian drivers somehow manage to wedge 4 lanes of traffic going both ways, which leads of course to another iteration of the all too familiar UB traffic jam. At one point in this stand still, our driver stopped to have a chat with another taxi driver and that taxi's passenger was Tess' work colleague who was heading back to Hong Kong that afternoon: it's a small town.
By the time, you snake around one of the 4 Soviet era coal burning power plants, you're finally on your way into town and the decaying industrial landscape modulates into decaying Soviet era apartments and random structures built decades ago that no longer have a purpose. The Soviet influence on the city is profound. They built the city's power stations, infrastructure and a vast proportion of the residential dwellings from before the resource boom. Of course, the Wall fell down and the Soviet Union disintegrated over 20 years ago and so did said infrastructure, power plants and housing. Almost all roads in UB are basically impassable due to crater sized potholes, crumbling pavement or combinations there of, which makes driving into an obstacle course where you need to swerve around potholes often into incoming traffic who of course are also swerving to avoid their own apocalyptic potholes.
When you finally arrive in the central district of UB, you find a mix of Soviet era architecture, complete with a pink opera house on the main square which wouldn't be out of place in Eastern Europe, development from the post Soviet era (generally in much worse condition than the Soviet concrete blocks), shiny, new resource driven buildings and the concrete frames of new building projects being hastily thrown up before winter hits.
Sukhbaatar Square serves as the very center of the city, which spreads out mostly on an east to west axis from there due to the mountains that line UB's northerly and southerly outskirts. There you will find the parliament building (another Soviet era structure) with its enormous Chinggis Khan statue (he's everywhere), the Stock Exchange (smallest and fastest growing in the world!), the central statue of Sukhbaatar (bad ass Mongolian dude who took Mongolia back from crazy Csarist von Stenberg in 1921 with help from the communists!), the opera house and art gallery (which seems to be closed), Blue Sky Building (new skyscraper shaped like a blue sail) and Central Tower (the city's best tower for business, and where I'm writing this from).
Explorations beyond the square find yourself hiking through gravel, ruined buildings, half finished new apartments, little shops that sell nothing but terrible Russian chocolates and/or vodka, and so forth. These were the conditions that faced us when looking at apartments. We looked at one in the former apartment complex of the secret police, another in a suspiciously American style suburban complex right next to my school, and final one in what used to be the apartment complex that the communist ministers and other high ranking governmental officials used to live in.
The latter was a great apartment which had retained its 1960s design features (crazy orange cupboards! psychedelic tiles in the foyer! ridiculous 15 feet ceilings!) through a combination of owner neglect and soviet indestructibility. Unfortunately, the toilets didn't work, it didn't have internet set up and it was a bit too far for a comfortable walk in minus 30C winter mornings.
The secret police apartment is tucked in behind the stock exchange, and a mere 5 minute walk to Central Tower and maybe 18 minutes to school. Unfortunately, from the outside, it looks like a block of concrete dropped into place and then eroded for 30+ years (it's only from 1997). Inside is nicely and oddly tastefully renovated with no velvet couches or giant leather Chinggis portraits, which seem to be de rigeur in UB. Its location and generally unassuming nature means it'll probably be the apartment we'll take.
I'll leave it at that for now but will try to write every few days or soon what I'm up to, commentary on important issues and likely, as per previous mid 00s blogging career, emo rants about new music and postinternet culture. OK, maybe not emo anymore. I'm not that earnest anymore.
