Sunday adventure

 This past weekend K and I decided to do some adventuring. We woke up early on Sunday, ate a breakfast of yeven (giant, hard-ish cookies) dunked in coffee, packed a picnic snack of sausage, cucumber and cheese (at my insistence--all proper adventures include food) and headed out. We caught a bus headed out of town, but got off only two stops later, as our chosen destination of Zaisan is not really that far. But what Zaisan lacks in distance from the city it more than makes up for in height.

A Soviet-era monument to the friendship between the Soviet Union and Mongolia, Zaisan perches upon the peak of a hill located just south of the city. You get there by hiking up a series of steep staircases circling the hill to the top. Along the way you pass the statue of the Mongolian tank that traveled all the way to Berlin during World War II, several ice-cream and fast food vendors (there is a branch of the restaurant chain "Coca Cola and Kebab" at the hill's base) and a few sellers of Mongolian landscape paintings, postcards, old Soviet metals and metal coins.

After a long, hot, tiring (but adventurous!) climb we reached the top. From the overlook pavilion there you have wonderful vistas of the city sprawling out below. Just a few steps above this patio sits the great round monument itself. The outside of the elevated ring is carved with Soviet symbols, while a colorful mosaic portraying Soviet/Mongolian harmony and achievements (including the Mongolian astronaut and victory over Japan and Germany) covers the inner face of the ring.

The peak that Zaisan sits on is actually a ridge that tapers back into a valley, so that on either side of Zaisan there rise hilly ridges framing the valley/canyon. This valley surrounding Zaisan to the east, south and west was (to my memory) almost completely undeveloped in 2002. Now the city has expanded into it, with expanses of new construction (apartments, mostly) and ger dwellings within fences filling the valley floor. K and I walked back along this ridge to continue our adventure. It was covered with wildflowers and interesting rocks, which made me very happy. We found the perfect picnic rock for sitting on while we ate our picnic, then headed back up to the monument. As we headed to the stairs for the long (but infintely less arduous) trek down we overhead a Mongolian man ask an African-American tourist if his son could pose with him for a photograph: "Like Barack Obama!"