Food in Mostar: Sadrvan & Hindin Han

​Our first stop and only city visited in Mongolia (also the only city in Mongolia, from what I saw of the rest of the country), Ulaan Baatar improved upon the food in the eastern-Asia part of our trip, continued the sad tradition of incredibly polluted air, and worsened the car traffic situation so far. It’s hard to say no to this city since it has so many Loving Huts and even better other vegan restaurants (I know! In Mongolia! So many!), but I think the annoying parts of it outweigh my ability to have good food. Luckily, we were there for Naadam, the national annual festival of the Three Sports of Men, dedicated to Genghis (pronounced Chingis here, and ya know what, I’m gonna call him Chingis because that’s the real Mongolian way) Khan. Naadam (for a separate post) was interesting and something big and fun to do. Without it, Ulaan Baatar is a dilapidated city with some temples and monasteries and museums but I quickly got tired of it. Exhausted, really. Maybe because I couldn’t breathe.

​After we landed in Ulaan Baatar at 6:30am, we DIDN’T walk with all our bags to our hostel! A first! We had a car waiting for us, thanks to the tour company we booked our countryside trip with. More on that shitshow in a later post too, but at least they drove us to our hostel. Of course the driver asked when he dropped us off if we had money to pay, even though he was from the tour company who offered the ride a perk of the package. We said no and he just shrugged and said goodbye, so yeah. That’s annoying. 

He dropped us at the Modern Mongol hostel, which had a sign on the door saying check-in was from 2pm to 6pm, and reception opens at 9am-11am, some time in there. Um. You cannot have a SIGN ON THE ACTUAL DOOR be the only way you communicate to guests that there will be no one to OPEN THE DOOR. I was so mad I was ready it burn it down. Like they didn’t send an email or say on their pages on booking.com or hostelworld that this was the case. You need to make sure your guests know this information BEFORE they arrive. It was freaking 7am! We had to wait at least 2 hours for a person to let us in? Bullshit. Luckily, another guest let us in, and there was a big lobby sitting area so we set up camp, got out our toiletries and camping towels, plugged in our devices, and showered in the pretty big shared bathroom, all before checking in. (This place had many more showers than toilets. Not the right ratio, guys.) We didn’t even care about how we were making a mess with all our shit all over the place. You don’t tell us the details about checking in (not even checking in to the room! Coming in to the place just to leave our bags!) before we arrive, we don’t care about making the lobby our own. We showered so good. It was lovely. I mean it was a shitty hostel and none of the showers had functioning drains (always bring shower shoes) but still. 

​Unfortunately, our beloved friend (and fellow lawyer/travel blogger) Sivani at Ever the Wayfarer was unable to join us for this Mongolia portion of our trip as planned, and we were very sad to not have her around to show us how to fashion a sink out of a twig and some fabric as we knew she could have once we were sinkless in the countryside. However, sorry Sivani but it’s for the best that you weren’t in Ulaan Baatar with us because our ‘triple’ room barely fit one person. We had to put all of our stuff on the bunkbeds because there was no floor space! You would have been sleeping with all my peanut butter and accidentally vegan cookie finds! (Actually that sounds amazing.) Also, we learned that despite appearances (of the lobby), this hostel was not great. It attracted all the crowds I despise: young teenage blonde girls who facetimed their boyfriends all night every night without regard for how much bandwidth they were using OR how loud they were being (so loud, heard them always); dirty older European backpackers who do their laundry in the sinks (despite their being a machine) as a GROUP ACTIVITY so people who actually need to use the sinks for regular usages are forced to stand behind them and give ‘are you kidding me with this?’ looks at them in the mirror as they take over all 4 sinks; older white female Americans who praise themselves for how liberal they are (while praising Bernie) while repeating the same story over and over about the one time they told a white man not to be racist (it was barely a story; do more, white women); and generic other yoots who have no consideration for how loud they are throughout the night. Oh and old Chinese men who shout at each other in the hallway in the middle of the night. Oh and people who play music in the common areas without headphones like they’re doing the rest of us a service. So, everybody I hate. Also, the wifi at Modern Mongol was so bad it was pretty much nonexistent (which is why we are now two weeks behind ughh I hate it I’m sorry). Hard no on a recommendation. 

​Out in the city, I was immediately struck by how bad the air was. It was like how Siberia was very polluted, but the car and traffic situation here is more like Bangkok – long, long lights, exhaust blown right in your face by substandard unregulated engines no matter where you stand, and dangerous drivers. At least in Bangkok there are a lot of overpasses for pedestrians to use on busy streets. This was a bad situation. And despite UB being the coldest capital city in the world (true fact, though we haven’t gotten a clear answer about whether that’s due to extremely low winter temperatures or a low overall yearly average of temperatures), it was hot and dry and burningly sunny most of the time. I felt asthmatic the whole time I was there, like my lungs were screaming and I couldn’t get a deep breath. That’s so awful! It also meant pretty much every time I stepped outside, I was exhausted, not being able to get enough oxygen. I must get a mask for China. I hope all you republicans enjoy when your part of the world has air like this too. 

​It’s hard to ignore the air when we need that to live, but the city apart from that was okay, I guess. It’s really nothing special, and the best part of it is the various vegan restaurants which we will talk about separately (because there are so many!) It looks clearly third world, and so many city buildings (aside from the skyscrapers) are very dilapidated – and almost every single building in the countryside is decaying or straight up falling apart. Literally half of the country’s 3 million residents live in this city, with the rest spread over the vast open spaces of the countryside. With UB representing so much of the country’s citizenry and most of its wealth, it’s clear that governmental corruption and mismanagement has done all of Mongolia a disservice, to say the least. 

​There are some nice tourist attractions though. We first went to the Chojin Lama Temple Museum, which survived the communist purge of all things religious by being a ‘museum’ of religion. It was really close to the hostel, so an easy first site. That also means it’s right in the middle of the city, adjacent to modern buildings and skyscraper-types. The juxtaposition of this super old temple with the sleek new office buildings was interesting, like how in London the Tower Bridge is like next to the Gherkin. I think I mean the Gherkin; it’s been too long already. 

-​OH OK – you know how in the Ulan-Ude post I talked about the lama in the monastery outside of town we went to and his body was embalmed for like centuries (or it was a ‘miracle’) but his head was papier-mache and I was like hey where’s your head? OKAY I WAS MISTAKEN. The Ulan-Ude shiny lama corpse was NOT papier-mache (you gotta say it the French way it’s funner) headed; he was fully intact just all head and body that’s been dead forever but still shiny. The papier-mache headed lama was HERE! At the Chogin Lama Temple. I KNOW, we are seeing SO MANY F-ING EMBALMED CORPSES that I’m mixing them up! It’s like I’m back in my internship at the D.A.’s office! JFC if you are mixing up your embalmed mummies you are seeing TOO MANY. And we have more to come in China! Sorry, I will try to keep them straighter but seriously how do you tell mummified lamas apart? (That sounds like the beginning of a joke.) Anyway, guess who has two thumbs and took a PICTUREEEEE? (imagine me pointing to myself with my two thumbs)

​The Chogin Lama temple was very pretty, and I enjoyed it because it was our first Buddhist monastery in Mongolia. I was not yet very sick of seeing the same faded colorful fabrics and dingy Buddha statues and crazy scary demon sculptures. I would indeed get sick of all this very, very quickly. 

​Husband made me do a face hole in the temple grounds, as he always does, so here is my reluctant agreement. 

​We lucked out with the bright sunny weather for these pictures, but we quickly realized that UB, and Mongolia in general, heat and sun are not playing. They are serious, and they are intense. Coupled with the terrible air quality, the immobilizing burn of the sun was pretty miserable. It rained one day and it felt sooo amazing afterwards. There was actual humidity and I could breathe! It lasted an hour. Whoever talks about how dry heat is so great is making shit up. 
 
After the Chogin Lama temple, we went to the National Museum of Mongolian History, even though I was so f-ing tired and crankpotting and oh yeah, I think I kind of hate museums. It was interesting though. They had good stuff documenting the country’s long, interesting history, from the Stone Age to the modern change from communism to democracy. It’s very centrally located by Sukhbaatar Square, which I’m going to spell differently every time I type it I think, not on purpose just by default. I decided that I deserved to listen to music while museuming because I was still not in a bed and thus super sad about that so I put my headphones in and shuffled some showtunes. It took me until an old Mongolian woman glared at me to realize that I hadn’t pushed the headphone jack into the phone far enough and the current song playing, “My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada”, was audible to all in the room. I hope no one understood some of those lines. Actually no I hope they did. 

​I liked this big statue of Chingis Khan (at least I think it’s Chingis…I mean it’s a statue and it’s in a museum in Mongolia, odds are that it’s Chingis) and a few ink drawings about his time, (1162-1227). The ink drawings were like recent, not from then, but still they were cool. Or I saw them in a brief moment of lucidity and that’s why they stuck. 

​Later in our stay, we visited the Gandan Khiid monastery complex, which was kind of far from everything cool (like 45 minute walk from wherever you were, literally, no matter where, like everything in this city actually but worse) and actually not cool itself. It was whatever. Maybe I’m down on it because the bathrooms were locked and the one staff member on the huge grounds was the living embodiment of the shruggie emoji when I said hey the bathrooms are locked. Maybe I’m down on it because the name translates to “The Great Place of Complete Joy” and like no, if you’re not going to let me pee this is nowhere near even partial joy. Anyway, it’s home to the spiritual head of Mongolia, the Khamba Lama. So many lamas! It’s the most important monastery in the country, which I would not have believed looking at it. Originally, the monastery was built on the site in 1785, and newer buildings and temples have been built up since, though we couldn’t go in most of them. The ground is filled with stupas and little temples and shacks that were locked. I couldn’t really get a handle on the place. (I can’t get pictures to load because Weebly is awful and the internet here is too so imagine another temple/monastery.)

Over 800 monks live there, which is crazy because I didn’t see any. 

We also visited the Bogd Khan Palace, which is down in the south of the city close to the Naadam stadium. Bogd Khan means ‘holy king’, and the palace is where the last holy king of Mongolia lived. The guidebook says it’s ‘full of ghosts’. The various small pavilions house statues of Buddhas of all sorts (who knew there wasn’t just a Buddha? Apparently anyone can become a Buddha, so we were told. Didn’t know!), lots of paintings of insane scenes of Buddha and friends and demons and all sorts of religious and wacky imagery, and random objects like musical instruments and, like, dishware. 

​There’s also a winter palace (like the Hermitage!) on the site that is a museum of the bog man’s personal possessions, like a lot of his furs and crowns and like, more dishware. Be warned, as I was not, that many rooms are full of bog stomper’s stuffed animals. I do not mean the cute fluffy kind that we all still sleep with. I mean real animals that were taxidermied. Rooms and rooms of them. All sorts. Big, small, birds, lions, polar bears, it was gross and unnecessary. Skip the winter palace. 

Our last museum in UB was the unique Intellectual Museum, a private man’s shrine to puzzles. So there’s this genius but probably kookoopants man who the staff refers to as ‘the founder’ which doesn’t sound culty at all who has been making puzzles since he was a child, so he was like why not put all this in a museum along with all my weird baby dolls? A guide takes you around and shows you how to do a lot of them, and gives them to you to try. It will successfully make you feel like an idiot. They are impossible to do without knowing the tricks and stuff, but the guide will do them all in like 4 seconds and it’s hard to remember that it was her job to learn how. Anyway, there are all sorts, from secret boxes that open their compartments if you pull the right pieces apart, to those silver keys that slide apart if you twist them a certain way but your brain does NOT want to ever remember how to twist them, to strings of metal balls that when aligned properly make a sturdy pyramid (this one I can now do! so proud), to wooden rubix cube type things that will just drive you crazy. In addition, there is an entire floor of all the elaborate, and I mean elaborate, chess boards that The Master made. He either made or designed everything in this museum himself, btw. He is an impressive, prolific, probably socially awkward guy. The chess boards range from tiny marble boards with coral figures to gigantic (like 15 foot) wooden boards that are puzzles to make the table and board, and then each of the figures is its own intricate puzzle. I mean. Crazy. The museum offers visitors a few of these puzzles and chess players to try to put together for cash prizes. They range from $1,000 to $100,000, and I don’t think anyone has ever won, they are so difficult. I bet Sydney Bristow could do it but I am just not a spacial puzzle genius person. 

The museum doesn’t let you take pictures, but if you have extra time in UB it’s a decent place to visit. You could get the same idea from buying a few of those wooden puzzle type jawns and trying to solve it for years and years until you go crazy because you just can’t, but it was cool to see all the different kinds and all the beautiful chess boards Our Great Leader made. I would have called it just a puzzle museum though, because calling it the Intellectual Museum makes it seem like the ability to solve this puzzles is what makes someone smart when that isn’t the case you just need to learn the trick to it I’m not upset about it at all. 

​On one of our UB days, we took a day trip (with Sunpath, the company doing our longer trip to the countryside) to see Terelj National Park, which I refer to as the Taraji P. Henson National Park, obviously. I think this was by far our best day in Mongolia – the best natural beauty in the country, fun sites, and none of the whole living-in-the-desert-and-not-showering bullshit. Taraji was beautiful (she is, girl) but the drive was a little hard. Haha, I would have killed for a drive that hard during our week in the desert. Coming soon.  

​With our teenage guide (they all are!), we hiked a nice hike to a meditation center slash temple that was pretty cool. On the walk, there are all these numbered signs with different sayings (of the Buddha I guess?), and at one point you are supposed to spin a wheel to see which saying you need to focus on. I got #41 (my favorite Dave Matthews song!), and this is apparently what I need to think about for the next year:

​Do all the parentheses mean you can replace words with new words? like Mad Libs?

​Taraji also included Turtle Rock, a natural rock formation that looks like a turtle. Cute! Our guide said we could climb up it so we did, which was a bad idea. It is a frightening climb up very steep staggering rocks. We didn’t expect such a challenging climb to be the result of the guide’s casual suggestion. At one point, you have to go through this hole. We watched a few people and then said hell. no. 

​The best part of the day trip to Terelj was seeing the GIGANTIC CHINGIS KHAN STATUE! It is 40 meters tall, but seems bigger, with Chingis just freaking enormous and depicted riding a horse so the whole thing is just so flipping big and fun and hilarious.

​Inside the complex (very nice complex!), there’s a museum that not-so-accurately charts Mongolia’s ‘illustrious’ history, and there’s a boot. The biggest Mongolian boot in the world. 

I highly recommend doing the day trip to Terelj and Chingis statue if you find yourself in this country for some reason. 

As has been the case all over Asia, we saw some amazing signs, like this club dedicated to our favorite Nicholas Cage movie.

​And of course we both immediately realized what our legal professions hold once we return to work:

​So, overall UB was okay. We had some good times, but mostly we were glad to be there for Naadam (next post) and some good vegan restaurants (actual next post). Really, we were excited to end our city time and go out for our week in the countryside and the desert, because we heard that that is where Mongolia really shines. Hoo boy. Next next next post. Stay tuned for that carnival of atrocities. 

       As soon as we stepped off the airport bus near our hotel in Bilbao, the pouring rain turned to hail. It was hailing on us. Serious, scary balls of hail pounding on us like we’ve never before experienced. What a lovely welcome, Bilbao! 
      Luckily, the hail stopped that night, but the rain continued for almost our entire visit. That sucks, but although Bilbao isn’t as pretty in the rain as Paris is, it was still a solid trip in a nice city. Now, those adjectives might seem decidedly underwhelming, but I mean them with all my heart without going overboard with praise. Also, Gabrielle Union was wrong and you cannot just be whelmed in Europe.

     Landing in Bilbao, Spain, I thought I was sooo clever calling it Bilbao Baggins, like The Hobbit. Of course, five minutes later, we see on the road signs that, in the Basque language, Bilbao is ‘Bilbo’. So, not as clever as I thought. By the way, that Basque language is quite something. It’s a language isolate – meaning it has no discernible relationship to any other language. ON EARTH. That’s freaking wild. When you’re in Europe, you’re like, hey man, hit me with the romance languages, I’ll figure it out, they’re all close enough. But then in this region between Spain and France, all rules and prior knowledge go out the window and you are left staring at some hybrid of Japanese and Klingon where every 4th letter is a ‘k’ and every 6th letter is an ‘x’. It is CRAZY and crazy interesting. Where did they come from! How is the language not related to any other spoken on the planet? (That Klingon thing doesn’t seem too far-fetched now, does it? (Husband has me watching too much Star Trek.)) Everyone speaks regular Spanish though, but not many people we encountered in restaurants, shops, and train stations spoke English. So prepare some Spanish! I’ll get you started with some necessary phrases: “Donde esta la biblioteca? Me llamo T-bone la araña discoteca!”
     OH LOOK IT’S THE ACTUAL ARAÑA DISCOTECA!

    If you know “Community“, or me at all, then you know that when I saw this giant spider outside the famous Bilbao Guggenheim (more on that below), I exclaimed “Ahh! It’s the araña discoteca!” (“What. It’s 2009.”) Now, this is where my talents of persuasion? lying? convincing myself that things are real? paid off. Husband is finding out only right now, as he reads this upon publishing, that I was making up my Bilbao history: When we walked up to this, he said “What??? It’s a giant spider! What the heck!” or something like that. And iiiiii said, “It’s called the araña discoteca. I read about it. Important in Spanish history.” Oh my god I’m awful. But good. So there we have it.
    The disco spider stands (dances?) near Bilbao’s spectacular Guggenheim museum. Designed by Frank Gehry, it evokes the feeling of the water it’s on, with its wave-like sides and its shimmering fish-like scales. The building is gorgeous and larger than you can imagine, and although the atrium is splendid as well, the best part is the exterior view. Paying to get into this modern art museum seems almost silly when the best art is free to see outside. 

    Right?? It’s beautiful! Now, there isn’t much to do in Bilbao after you see this lovely building, so you might think, hey I guess I have to go inside. But…um…you don’t? The aforementioned atrium is gorgeous but the actual art hanging on these lovely walls? Balls. It’s all balls. I’m not the biggest modern art aficionado (could you guess?), but I can appreciate it, most of the time. Most of this stuff, however, was ridonkulous. Like if a toddler threw a bottle of paint at a wall. (Or his poop.) Or if a psychopath took a knife to some leather chairs. (There were actual destroyed leather seat cushions hanging on the wall.) One exhibit was just an old car’s motor. Unaltered. A car motor. How is this art! Someone tell me! The only item in the entire cavernous museo that I thought wow this is nice was a log by Ai Weiwei that somehow had a tiny picture of China drilled through it. That was awesome. The 2-D primary color blocked walls? Not so much. 

  Luckily, there’s more fun external art to behold at this site. My very favorite thing about Bilbao was how dog-friendly it is. Everywhere we went, people had their dogs with them. (Rarely on leashes, which makes me absolutely nuts because I always frantically try to figure out who belongs to unleashed dogs in case someone is lost and I need to take care of them. So stressful. Just use leashes!) People who have seen me around dogs know that I go kind of nuts talking to them in my special dog voice (a high-pitched squeak that I cannot control), so all weekend in Bilbao was like me on helium. Doggies everywhere! It was amazing! I like to think that the very famous Flower Dog by Jeff Koons, standing proudly and beautifully outside the main entrance to the Guggenheim, is a symbol of how dog-friendly this city is. It’s possibly the most dog-friendly city I’ve ever been to. (And therefore the biggest point in its favor.)

     Once you see the Gugs, you’ve done what you’re supposed to do in Bilbao! So now what? Well, stroll along the river in the rain and smile at how pleasant the little city is. It will be raining, I promise you. Oh it was on the trip that I was like ‘Ohhhhh the rain in Spain is mainly on THIS plain, that’s what they were talking bouttttt!’ Revelation. It made me okay with raining all weekend to feel like a part of a musical. 
    Then what? Well stroll some more. See some dogs and, if you’re like me, try to pet them and play with them but then realize that these dogs freaking speak Spanish so they don’t know what you are saying when you say “HI PUPPY YOU ARE SO CUTE! YES YOU ARE SO CUTE!” and their humans really have no idea probably what you are saying either or what the heck is wrong with you talking that high-pitched so you can try to adjust your language mid-freak-out and say “Hola….perro?? Tu es…um….HII PUPPYYYYY!” That’s pretty much how it went. 100x per day. 
    Walk over to the old town, as every good European city has, and wonder as your wander about the tiny streets and are lucky enough to catch adorable sights like this:

   How cute is this! Does the building management make sure all the tenants have colorful  umbrellas or like do Spanish people just know how to be adorable?
    Another great treat was the stained glass in one of the train stations. Okay, this is where the language barrier got really rough. We needed to go to a nearby town for a fancy dinner (check back tomorrow!) and wanted to take the train. Well, we didn’t. We couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone (also, like, no one worked in the stations?? because Spain in the afternoon = sleepytime?) as to which was the correct station and which was the correct train and where to go and just f it, we took a taxi. Anyway, one of the stations – whichever it was – had this nice glass. 

    A really fun part of Bilbao is the funicular ride to the top of the hill. It’s a three-minute ride and costs like 70 cents or something crazy. It’s a scary steep climb, but so worth it for the views, although it will likely be foggy, and for one of my favorite sights, the fingerprint statue. 

     There were many lovely views around Bilbao. Near our hotel was a park with lots of fountains, which was nice but seemed redundant in the rain. 

     There were also some hilarious things we came across. Down the street from our hotel, we found a weird mall. It was one of the only things in the city open on Sunday afternoon — but every single store in the mall was closed! So why was the actual building open to the public if every store was closed? Because one of the entryways had a few crappy kids’ rides, and every. single. child. in Bilbao was there with its family playing with the crappy toys. It was so so random. In this scary ghost mall was also this restaurant:

     Yes, this restaurant was called La Mafia, and every single seat in the place had a name written over it – a name of a character from “The Godfather” movies. I mean. That’s ballsy. And hilarious. And it’s inside a mall. It doesn’t get better. 

   Oh wait, YES IT DOES! Of course it gets better because Bilbao sells The Thermomix! If you aren’t familiar with The Katering Show, you must must must watch this right very now before continuing with your life, even your breathing. It’s the best thing out there. So, being a huge fan of the show, when I saw this gigantic ad for the actual real-life breathing (probably) machine that does it all but unnecessarily, well I freaked out! It’s real! It’s alive (probably)! And it’s beeyoootiful! No, it’s not, it’s frightening, but oh man how I adore it, if only for the jokes. 

    Can you believe it’s real? 
    So, Bilbao may not have a lot of activities to do, but it’s a nice town to walk around in for a few days. If you go, you’ll have a nice, pleasant time, as long as you aren’t out very late when all the yoots come out of the woodwork and take over the city and all the streets like awful drunk ants. Ugh yoots. Anyway, during the day it’s nice. I wouldn’t go out of my way to go if you have limited time in Europe, but like if you live on the continent then why not. (Ringing endorsement!)
    We’ll talk about the food for the next two days. See yaaa.