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.
