As the ice and snow recedes, the streetscapes of Ulaanbaatar begin to reveal their true selves, unadorned and unconcealed by the cover of extreme weather, or its waste products. The potholes magically return as if newly created (instead of just filled in with ice), the sidewalks' deep crevices open up like the varicose veins of an old man and the inner structure of buildings reveals themselves as usually just poorly laid bricks and mortar slapped up and covered by a thin veneer of concrete to hide the shoddiness of the work.
It's also the time of the year when improvement projects are started (though not always finished). Coming home after a month of travel, the front door of our apartment building had been replaced, the stairway repainted with green and gold racing stripes and the landings were newly tiled. All of these changes were unexpected as our landlord, in his typical mix of neglect and laziness, hadn't told us any of these changes would be happening or what the code was to get into the building. It took the work of our intrepid cleaner to find the code and inform us via other intermediaries.
In any case, after dinner one night, I came home to find 3 dudes wielding gigantic, gas fuelled soldering torches straight out of the Soviet era, blasting something onto the top of the apartment's doorway, which coincidentally was just outside my window. They worked without safety gear (of course) and without care for whatever they were trying to achieve. As the sun set, they finished their soldering job - or whatever the hell they were doing - and turned to painting the entrance way in the dark. The next morning revealed a half done, all shitty job done. They came back and added more layers of paint, and then went to work on laying bricks and concrete down to fix the stoop (it didn't need fixing). Basically, they poured some concrete in front of the existing stairs, placed bricks in a line on top of the concrete and called it a day.
A friend of ours in UB worked in construction as a day job while in university in Australia and often says that Mongolians just don't really know how to do anything. There are no trades, and most men don't have the skills to do the jobs needed to run a country (or just pour concrete properly). This gap in skills may be traced back to either the Soviet era, a Nomadic-herding recent past or just plain incompetence. But, I've recently began to think of it as something else entirely: Mongolia is a nation built as a series of "Fitzy Solutions."
Let me explain a bit here. A "Fitzy Solution" is something that I've become increasingly familiar with over the years as I've become more and more aware of the workings and rhythms of my wife's family. Usually devised by Tess' dad, a Fitzy Solution is born out of a creative mind that desires a frugal yet effective fix for a problem, despite not really knowing how to fix the thing in question for real. Thus, all sorts of implements might be used to find a way for the thing in question to function normally (or as close to normally as possible). I've seen plastic knives, crayons, metal rods, screwdrivers, used gum, old rags and more used to fix mechanical devices, shoes, sink plugs, dishwashers, and more. The Fitzy Solution may work (it usually does) but it's a slapdash, temporary fix that usually entrenches itself as a permanent solution, before needing another Fitzy Solution to take over.
Similarly, Ulaanbaatar's infrastructure, housing, and general joie-de-vivre seems to be built as a series of Fitzy Solutions. Roads are repaired by throwing some asphalt and concrete into the potholes (instead of repaved fully). Paint is splashed on an entrance way in the middle of the night. Bricks are haphazardly slapped into uneven mortar and then covered over by a building's casing not to be seen for a few years until the casing crumbles or the building just falls over. Sidewalks are paved over with a random assortment of building materials which all seem to be liable to becoming extraordinarily slippery in winter (which of course lasts for most of the year). In the end, Fitzy Solutions do the job but only just. They lead to more issues, which are in turn addressed by another Fitzy Solution. The cycle is self replicating and cascading.
Part of this slipshod approach to addressing the problems of the city are from the lack of building materials produced in the country and a lack of local knowledge of how to effectively and purposefully improve a city that was built for 250,000 people but have perhaps 5 or 6 times that number in it. The genius of a Fitzy Solution is that it works but only just. But, if an entire city (or even country) is built on them, the whole thing continually reproduces issues without a true solution in sight. Development is development except when it's not.
