July 10, Back to Ulaanbaatar

Today was mostly a moving day as we headed back to Ulaanbaatar for the opening ceremony of the Naadam Festival tomorrow.

Getting to the airport, waiting for our flight, and then driving from Ulaanbaatar Airport to our hotel actually took longer than the flight itself. The traffic was the worst we have seen anywhere on this trip.

Meanwhile, our tour company, Meanwhile in Mongolia, messaged us saying they had tried to drop off our Naadam tickets at the hotel but couldn't because of the Korean Prime Minister.

Our hotel is nice, and I imagine plenty of party leaders probably stayed there during Soviet times, but today there are much better hotels in town. When we arrived, I asked the front desk whether we could at least see the Prime Minister.

They told us he wasn't actually staying at the hotel. Whut? Kind of suspected that already.

While grumbling about this, we got into our room, grabbed our dirty laundry, and headed back to the laundromat we had used before. No such luck. Locked. So we tried a second place. Locked. Then a third. At one of them, we ended up having a rather entertaining conversation with the owner over WhatsApp—in Russian. We went back and forth for a while until he finally wrote: "Я ступил. Приходите 15-го." ("I messed up. Come back on the 15th.")

Well... That wasn't going to work.

So we returned to the hotel and did laundry ourselves. Everything except the sweaters is now hanging somewhere in the room. A Prime Minister would definitely not stay here.

By this point, we realized we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, which is kind of a record for us.

We decided to try a well-rated Kazakh restaurant. It turned out to be pretty average, and they completely forgot to bring Dan's main dish. Like I said... A hectic day.

After dinner, we stopped by our favorite coffee place near the hotel and kept checking our phones, wondering whether our Naadam tickets would actually show up. Fortunately, around 9:30 p.m., the tour company finally managed to drop them off at the hotel reception. I guess getting anywhere in Ulaanbaatar this week is an adventure in itself.

One thing we noticed today was that there are many more tourists in town now. We even started hearing Russian again for the first time. For a moment, Ulaanbaatar almost felt like a proper tourist destination. Like Italy or France. Just kidding. It was perfectly fine the way it was.

Now we're excited for tomorrow.

P.S. Isabella is going to join us for a week when we end our Mongolia adventure - very excited!