A Night at the Movies

One of the most frequent questions we get asked about life in UB when not in UB is "What do you do there?"  It's a strange question to try to answer wherever you live, and it's also a question that I don't think our friends who live in Chicago or Hong Kong or Berlin or NYC or London have to deal with that often.  What I think that the question is really getting at is to just describe life in a spot that they've probably never heard of at all.   (For example, many people in Indonesia thought that Mongolia was in Africa.)

The reality though is that life in Ulaanbaatar can be as banal and inconsequential as life anywhere.  You do your thing.  You go to work.  You hang out at your local spots with your friends. You watch TV and DVDs at home.  You make a life.  The details of that life (the cold, the scrounging, the alternity of it all at times) are different of course, and it's in the margins of these difference that I've been writing about (however infrequently) on this blog.

In any case, if I had to put an answer to the question that I opened with, it would be "we go to the movies."  The cinema experience in UB is one of the true highlights of life here.  We go almost every Saturday and we watch everything that gets here, which are mostly middle grade, low brow action flicks.  The movie distribution system in Mongolia is a mystery, as it seems that the cinemas never seem to know the exact release dates of any forthcoming movies.  Instead, they play whatever they have until a new movie is delivered.  A hasty announcement that they're playing something new goes out on their website and then you go see the new Tom Cruise vehicle that bombed in markets that actually matter.

The thing that really sets the movie going experience here apart from elsewhere is the omnipresence of young kids in the theatre, whatever movie is playing and whatever the time.  Last Saturday night, we saw the terrible new Arnold Schwarzenegger film, The Last Stand.  Saturday was the eve of Tsagan Sar, which is the Mongolian version of Lunar New Year, so the cinema was empty aside from ourselves and perhaps 3 other couples, as well as 2 or 3 toddlers who spent most of the time running up and down the aisle, occasionally pausing to look at the screen as Arnie shoot a bad guy in the face or blow up a building or strike a heroic pose as he's doing either of those acts.  The kids act like kids so they make noise and talk loudly to each other and generally hold free reign over the theatre.

The thing is, once you accept their presence, the kids are actually an integral part of the Mongolian cinema experience, if not the experience of the country as a whole.  Children are everywhere: from the movies to the streets to restaurants.  In the movies though, whether they're running the aisles or getting into the Bond movie with their parents or transfixed by the latest Pixar movie, their presence isn't ever galling but instead just part of the local flavour of the things that we do.

Walking in the City

Without a bike or car and mistrusting public transit, walking is my primary way of getting around town, or at least the 4 km radius that I operate in.  Walking in UB is a peculiar experience.  On my way to school, for example, the quality of the path ranges from pristine (beside the parliament building) to tolerable if sometimes lacking (near the university) to nonexistent (near school).  And, by non existent, I mean just that: the pavement disappears, or it's been covered over by (take your pick) dirt, debris, broken bricks, garbage, ice and snow.  In the spring and fall, workers randomly excavate parts of footpaths for reasons unknown and then just move on or stop their explorations due to winter, so that walking in the city involves a lot of walking over crevices, open sewers filled with garbage and electrical wire and just plain old holes in the ground.

Recently, I've been considering whether UB is in ruins or if was never finished in the first place.  The number of odd, misplaced, useless, and absurd structures you come across in a brisk walk around town is striking and unmissable.  Last week, as I was leaving the supermarket/department store near school, I  spied a bridge across the river (see above) that, since it was more generally in the direction that I was going than my usual route home from that spot, I reasoned was going to be a bit of short cut and that it would surely link up with Peace Avenue, the main street in town.  As I approached the bridge, I noticed it had no railings of any kind, and the usual crumbling concrete that is endemic of Mongolian infrastructure.  When I reached the bridge, I found that to get on the bridge, involved climbing up an icy embankment to reach an improvised "staircase" (i.e. a couple bricks stacked up next to a short concrete wall of the bridge).  The bridge itself was wider than expected, much bigger than a pedestrian bridge, at perhaps 4 metres across.  When I reached the other side, I slid down an icy hill and followed the river to Peace Avenue, passing by a number of unfinished/ruined structures including one circular building with a tiled floor but only half of circle completed, although it had a staircase to its roof which featured a tangle of wires that could be mistaken for either (a) modern sculpture, (b) antennae or (c) a Hill's Hoist.

Back to the bridge though, what was this structure supposed to be?  Due to its width, was it actually meant for cars?  Or was it always a pedestrian bridge?  If either option, why was there a metre high drop off from the bridge itself to the land surrounding it?  If it was for cars, why aren't there any streets it could theoretically connect with?  Is this ruins or was it just never finished, a Soviet era project that languished after the fall of Communism and was repurposed by people who just needed a way to cross the river at that point?  Or did it once serve a purpose and has crumbled into its ruined yet still useful state?

In light of recent news, perhaps this is an apt metaphor for the country as a whole.