Friday, July 18 - Visiting Erdene and Bolor's Home

During the night, I heard it begin to sprinkle outside, and knew that the roof opening to our ger was partially open. I worried about things getting wet, but almost immediately heard the camp staff pulling the cover over the top of our ger. What service!

We slept in this morning, not waking until almost 8:30. The ger is so cozy, and is so effective at keeping out the light, that we just slept much later than we realized.

When we got up, there had been some excitement in the camp. Last night we had seen someone from the camp staff leading a large black pit bull around, and had commented to Erdene and Bolor how disliked those dogs are in the U.S. We told them they are frequently bred as fighters, and they can be very dangerous dogs.



They learned what we meant this morning. The pit bull attacked a stray dog that wandered into camp, and as they do, would not let go. Spraying the dog with water finally convinced it to let go, and the other dog limped away.



We went up to the restaurant for breakfast, and were in for another surprise. The breakfast menu only contained four items, which we knew. Two were sandwiches, one was sausage and eggs with bread, and the other was a kind of egg roll with sausage. They didn’t have bread and they didn’t have sausage, so they couldn’t make anything on the breakfast menu! We decided it was probably time to move on.



We packed up our things and a young man from the camp staff carried our bags down to the car for us. We headed down the road to find breakfast at another camp. We found a very nice place to eat, but they weren’t ready to serve at that time (10:00 a.m.) because they were cleaning. They invited us to wait outside for a short time, and they would serve us breakfast.
We found a shady spot in the shadow of a statue, and after about half an hour they called us into a very large, very beautiful dining ger. Our breakfast was already prepared and waiting for us on the table.

This is the camp where we ate breakfast.

After breakfast, we headed back into UlaanBaator, and asked Erdene to stop at a cemetery we had seen earlier. It is always interesting to us to see how burial customs vary in different places, and this was an interesting stop.

The people are buried differently here, depending on what tribe they come from. Ethnic Mongolians are buried underground like we were, but one of the tribe buries only above ground. Families provide all the care for the cemetery, and parts of this one were in terrible shape--graves caved in and monuments fallen down.

The cemetery where we visited. These are some of the raised graves we saw.

We then went back to the hotel. We spent some time in the hotel and Daryl did some shopping at the Sky Store, then Erdene picked us up for dinner at their apartment at about 5:30.


We had never been to their apartment before, but we knew from our conversations that most residents of the city live in apartments, and that despite being only about 20 years old, their building was in poor repair. I think we were still a little surprised at how rundown the outside of the building was. Erdene and Bolor had created a nice home inside, though, and we enjoyed a delicious home-cooked meal. We visited and shared pictures from the vacation before Erdene’s brother, his wife, and little daughter brought us back to the hotel.


We will be leaving the hotel at about 9 a.m. tomorrow morning for the last time. We begin the long journey home, and should arrive there very early Sunday morning.