Last few photos from Ulaan-Baatar

We only had one day in Ulaan-Baatar city itself, but really, one day was all we needed - there wasn't much to the city.

The city itself was a strange mis-mash of dodgy-looking rundown houses and gers, all stuffed together.  There wasn't much in the way of green or grass - mostly gravel or dirt.

We went to see Gandan Monastery, which was interesting because of how different it seems to the Western religions that we're used to.  There were monks walking around everywhere, and we even saw a female monk who was wearing exactly the same outfit with the same shaved head!  The funniest part of UB for me was seeing monks walking around talking on mobile phones or using laptops in cafes - I guess I always think that people who dedicate their lives to religions are exempt from things like chatting to their friends or checking Facebook.  One of the really cool things in this Monastery that we couldn't take a photo of was a giant statue of Buddha - it's inside the white building on the left and goes all of the way to the roof.  Pretty cool.

We ran into a wedding party in the main square - I found it interesting that the bride is wearing a Western-style white wedding dress.  If you look at the crowd of family and friends at the bottom of the steps, the older ones are wearing the traditional Mongolian national costume, and the younger ones are all wearing Western-style short dresses.  That's Genghis Khan up there looking down on the proceedings.


From here we took the train to China - we didn't realise that we would be heading behind the Great Firewall and Blogger and Facebook would be totally blocked from within the country.  I'll put up the China posts as soon as I get a chance.