Kind of a quiet day today before the next phase of the trip starts. Spent the morning getting the last post with all the images up and then bringing The Journal up to date.
Spent part of the afternoon getting rained on while I hunted down an art gallery I wanted to visit.
Ulaanbaatar doesn’t use western style street numbers and addresses, so finding a place can be challenging. For instance, the directions in the What’s Up guide for the Xanadu Art Gallery are “on Juulchin Street, north of the State Department Store, beside the TEDY center.”
I knew the first two parts and had a vague recollection of the third part, but still wandered around some. In the end, I spotted the gallery’s sign around the corner off Juulchin Street proper. Not a lot of work on the walls, but most of it quite good. The space doubles as a coffee lounge with free wireless, which is worth remembering. They used to be in the same building as Millie’s, but that space has been taken over by the Valiant Art Gallery, owned by the wife of the president of Khan Bank, I believe. She buys the work outright from the artists and then re-sells it. I checked it out yesterday after lunch. Lots of good to excellent work. No wildlife art at either place, though.
Of course it had pretty much stopped raining by the time I got back to the hotel. I kicked back with a book until it was time to go to dinner, which was back to BD’s Mongolian BBQ. Went to a grocery store and finally scored a bag of Coffee King, which are three in one coffee packets. Peet’s it’s not, but I’ve acquired a taste for it, at least when I’m in Mongolia because it was all that was available for coffee when I was on the Earthwatch project in spring of 2005.
Most of the stores only have what is clearly the big, dominant brand, which is called MaxCoffee, which might be as good as or better, but I’ve developed a perverse loyalty to Coffee King, partly because it seems so much harder to find.
Susan Fox, American Artist 