The Birth of Venus in Ulaanbaatar
Ulaanbaatar is like a very large building site. The road from Genghis Khan International Airport passes among Soviet era concrete utility buildings and factory plants in the outskirts of the city that is home to a million people, a third of the Mongolian population.
In the distance is a large power station. Its cooling towers, belching steam in to the morning air, look like giant re-enforced barrels. A shanty town,a collection of poorly built houses and gers - the traditional circular Mongolian tents made from felt - houses the overspill from the areas of more modern housing.
My hotel is surrounded by cranes and half-built apartments. There is a fun fair on one side with a big wheel that looks like something from a Meccano set. The room isn’t ready so I go in to the dining room for a coffee. There are chandeliers and a kind of stage in front of a copy of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. I have seen the real thing and can confirm that this is nothing like the real thing.
I get up to my room which I discover is still not ready but that doesn’t matter. There is no hot water but that doesn’t matter either. There is a bed and after two nights with no more than a cat nap on the flight from Moscow I am ready for some sleep.
They told me there would be no hot water before 5.30 pm so I take a cold shower. I tell myself I’m tough enough to deal with cold showers. I am not. It is cold, cold, cold.
Getting ready for this trip was a rush and I have forgotten a few things such as camera batteries. That’s the problem with modern digital cameras. I go looking for a battery. You would think that a city of a million people would have heard of Nikon. No, it doesn’t wash here.
I’m wearing a warm coat - too warm. All the locals have jeans and the girls have bare midriffs juts as they do everywhere these days. So, they have global warming here too, I’m thinking.
Places like this are difficult to gauge these days. It’s a boom town, but the new building, combined with low taxes, has outstripped the supply of infrastructure.
It’s a modern city that seems to have everything but doesn’t. The architecture is all of a certain style. Generically I would call it: East European Crap mixed with Central Asian Crap.
The bad taste is so ubiquitous it almost qualifies as a style. You have to work hard at getting things so wrong. There are a few essentials; one of these is inadequate utilities, so there must be open man-hole covers in the streets, lots of unburied black electricity cable floating over head and broken flooring tiles of different geometric patterns everywhere. The wallpaper must have brown flowers, there have to be some tacky chandeliers and, in hotels at least, there must be copies of cheap Victorian soft pornography, posing as art.
Bread must be chewy, meat, tough, and fruit just a bit dusty. Bananas must be sliced in their skins. Here is a fruit made for peeling, the handiest fruit in the world, and they slice it in its skin. Unbelievable.
In the distance is a large power station. Its cooling towers, belching steam in to the morning air, look like giant re-enforced barrels. A shanty town,a collection of poorly built houses and gers - the traditional circular Mongolian tents made from felt - houses the overspill from the areas of more modern housing.
My hotel is surrounded by cranes and half-built apartments. There is a fun fair on one side with a big wheel that looks like something from a Meccano set. The room isn’t ready so I go in to the dining room for a coffee. There are chandeliers and a kind of stage in front of a copy of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. I have seen the real thing and can confirm that this is nothing like the real thing.
I get up to my room which I discover is still not ready but that doesn’t matter. There is no hot water but that doesn’t matter either. There is a bed and after two nights with no more than a cat nap on the flight from Moscow I am ready for some sleep.
They told me there would be no hot water before 5.30 pm so I take a cold shower. I tell myself I’m tough enough to deal with cold showers. I am not. It is cold, cold, cold.
Getting ready for this trip was a rush and I have forgotten a few things such as camera batteries. That’s the problem with modern digital cameras. I go looking for a battery. You would think that a city of a million people would have heard of Nikon. No, it doesn’t wash here.
I’m wearing a warm coat - too warm. All the locals have jeans and the girls have bare midriffs juts as they do everywhere these days. So, they have global warming here too, I’m thinking.
Places like this are difficult to gauge these days. It’s a boom town, but the new building, combined with low taxes, has outstripped the supply of infrastructure.
It’s a modern city that seems to have everything but doesn’t. The architecture is all of a certain style. Generically I would call it: East European Crap mixed with Central Asian Crap.
The bad taste is so ubiquitous it almost qualifies as a style. You have to work hard at getting things so wrong. There are a few essentials; one of these is inadequate utilities, so there must be open man-hole covers in the streets, lots of unburied black electricity cable floating over head and broken flooring tiles of different geometric patterns everywhere. The wallpaper must have brown flowers, there have to be some tacky chandeliers and, in hotels at least, there must be copies of cheap Victorian soft pornography, posing as art.
Bread must be chewy, meat, tough, and fruit just a bit dusty. Bananas must be sliced in their skins. Here is a fruit made for peeling, the handiest fruit in the world, and they slice it in its skin. Unbelievable.
Labels: bananas, Birth of Venus, Botticelli, Genghis Khan, gers, Meccano, Mongolia, Mongolian, Moscow, Nikon, Ulaanbaatar
posted by Richard Donkin at
3:25 PM
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