A Train Journey to Beat Them All: Ulan-Ude to Ulaan Baatar, Mongoliaby Randi / July 19, 2017
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.
Chingissssss what’s up mannnn
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.
The day we arrived was Inauguration Day for Mongolia’s new President! We didn’t really see any of it besides this group of army doers in Sukhbatar Square, the main square in UB. With Naadam starting the very next day, it was a super exciting time for the country and capital!
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.
obviously a picture of the train station should be higher up the post but weebly just does notttt like the wifi here and it’s easier to type this caption than move a picture
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.
Chojin Lama Temple
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)
forgive me buddha!
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.
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.
lol right and left wise wangs
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.
Taraji P. Park
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:
girl you don’t have to tell ME people aren’t clean after the month I’ve had
Do all the parentheses mean you can replace words with new words? like Mad Libs?
view from the meditation center
on our hike
Ger camp in Terelj, like the ones we lived in the folowing week
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.
see the turtle?
nahhhh
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.
took this from the horse’s head, which you climb up!
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:
na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na BAT LAWWWW
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.
that’s wonderful dear!
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Eating Vegan in Mongolia: Ulaan Baatar is Surprisingly Veg-Friendly
Against all odds, Mongolia’s capital city is well-nigh a wonderland for vegans. Ulaan Baatar, despite being in a country that literally eats mutton at every meal and in every dish and frowns upon vegetables, has more all-vegan restaurants than London, and some better ones too (or at least some that I would love to have in London…or at least I’ve been traveling so long that I thought they were better than what we have in London). From Buddhist temple centers to veggie-friendly chains to nearly a dozen outposts of our beloved cult Loving Hut, UB (as everyone calls it) will let you eat extremely well – as long as the restaurants decide to be open when you go.
We arrived via (awful, smoky) overnight train to Ulaan Baatar (train here; UB city here) super early in the morning, and we were hungry. Armed with a long list of HappyCow and other finds, I was excited to get out into the city and find some amazing vegan food that wasn’t cabbage or kasha (I love cabbage and kasha but a month of it was enough).
Turns out we would have to wait.
Remember we arrived at like 7am, and spent just a few hours at the hostel before setting out? Despite researching what would be open early for us, everything was closed! We walked the 20 minutes or so in the pollutiony heat to an area that had one of the six or so Loving Huts and the famous Luna Blanca, the buddhist temple restaurant that is all vegan and yet is in all the not-so-veg-aware guide books. Luna Blanca didn’t open until noon, which we knew, but the Loving Hut was supposed to open at 8am. It said so on their own site. But there was a huge chain across the door! Ughh! So we trekked to another Loving Hut, and another, and they were all closed. Then we tried to find other HappyCow places – first, a place called Love Each Other, which was closed! Then a place called Agnista, which NO LONGER EXISTS. We learned this after walking around a neighborhood forever trying to find it by the very helpful (eyeroll) HappyCow directions that it was ‘near a primary school’. A shopkeeper on its supposed block pointed to a big ramen place and communicated that it was now that place. COOL. What were you doing to me, universe?! By now, we’d gone through my whole list (and on foot no less). We even chanced upon another vegan-friendly cafe (green juice posters in the window!) that was ALSO closed. I was crushed! Ulaan Baatar was my beacon of hope during the first part of this trip, my surprising vegan city on a hill. But, we soon learned, restaurants and shops are often closed during and around Naadam – which seems SUPER stupid considering that’s when the city is flooded with tourists and people from the countryside! Why would you close during the busiest time of the year?! People need to eat! But I guess all the waitstaff and cooks are also going to Naadam and learning about ankle-bone beer pong, so they have to close. There are only so many Mongolians.
Remember we arrived at like 7am, and spent just a few hours at the hostel before setting out? Despite researching what would be open early for us, everything was closed! We walked the 20 minutes or so in the pollutiony heat to an area that had one of the six or so Loving Huts and the famous Luna Blanca, the buddhist temple restaurant that is all vegan and yet is in all the not-so-veg-aware guide books. Luna Blanca didn’t open until noon, which we knew, but the Loving Hut was supposed to open at 8am. It said so on their own site. But there was a huge chain across the door! Ughh! So we trekked to another Loving Hut, and another, and they were all closed. Then we tried to find other HappyCow places – first, a place called Love Each Other, which was closed! Then a place called Agnista, which NO LONGER EXISTS. We learned this after walking around a neighborhood forever trying to find it by the very helpful (eyeroll) HappyCow directions that it was ‘near a primary school’. A shopkeeper on its supposed block pointed to a big ramen place and communicated that it was now that place. COOL. What were you doing to me, universe?! By now, we’d gone through my whole list (and on foot no less). We even chanced upon another vegan-friendly cafe (green juice posters in the window!) that was ALSO closed. I was crushed! Ulaan Baatar was my beacon of hope during the first part of this trip, my surprising vegan city on a hill. But, we soon learned, restaurants and shops are often closed during and around Naadam – which seems SUPER stupid considering that’s when the city is flooded with tourists and people from the countryside! Why would you close during the busiest time of the year?! People need to eat! But I guess all the waitstaff and cooks are also going to Naadam and learning about ankle-bone beer pong, so they have to close. There are only so many Mongolians.
So guess what. We trekked around the city, famished, for so long that by the time we checked all the above stupid closed stupid places, Luna Blanca was open.
I mean.
What a day.
Luckily, Luna Blanca was fantastic! We loved it so much we went back twice for food and another time just for dessert – and we were always two of many, many tourists – soo many white people in there. It made me happy that so many tourists were clearly sick of mutton and wanted to enjoy good vegan food even if they weren’t vegan. Luna Blanca has a simple menu of salads (yay), soups (yay), and hot entrees of traditional Mongolian foods made vegan. It would have been perfect if they had a fun menu of sides instead of just bread, rice, and other kinds of bread and rice, but as it is it’s a great find. Even though they didn’t have ice cream any time I was there (and the menu says they have vegan ice cream I’m cursed to never find ice cream this whole summer), I still loved it.
yes I DO love spinach!
I needed some greens so I started with the sesame spinach under the salad section. I was slightly disappointed to learn that it was cooked spinach and not raw, but hey it’s still spinach, and that probably means I got 10x the amount of actual spinach because when it cooks it shrinks to nothingness. It was really good but mostly perfunctory, and purposefully so. A real star was the Mongolian sampler platter of traditional foods like khuushuur, the fried mutton-filled empanada looking thing, and buuzy (I think that’s what it’s called), the softer mutton-filled dumpling. Getting to try these traditional dishes in vegan form was a must-do, and I think Luna Blanca is the only place that does it. You only need to try them once – I still can’t get over how much khuushuur Mongolians eat during Naadam (like 10 patties per meal every day; trust me you only need or want one). But they were yummy and fun. And, the platter is so big and you can only eat so much of it that we took some of each kind home for the next day! Yay leftovers!
sorry I couldn’t wait to take a picture before trying some 😛
We also tried two fantastic salads at a later visit – my favorite which was just a plain green lettuce salad with a great dressing (I love lettuce), and Z’s favorite, a pasta salad with tofu. I don’t count pasta salads as salad (helloooo it’s just cold pasta) but since it had tofu I’ll let it slide. And it was really good!
yes I see that there’s tomato and cucumber in there because OF COURSE THERE IS but at least it’s mostly lettuce
you’re not salad but you’re yummy
We also tried a shittonne of mains during our visits. We had to get another vegan version of a Mongolian classic, the stir-fried noodle dish called ‘tsuivan’, while we could, and it was pretty good! So much better than the traditional mutton-filled dish, Luna Blanca’s version had soy protein (hooray for you!), cabbage, carrot, and pepper. I mean it’s a big heap of noodles and they tasted good.
dayyum that’s a lot of noodles
this is the ariun zoog (zoog means food! I don’t think ariun means what it sounds like). also here’s our guide book! we used almost every page!
We also tried the Ariun Zoog, which was like a soft meatball of mushrooms and soy nugget in a sauce of tamarind, tomato, and chili, served with two enormous scoops of white rice and – you know it! – cucumber and tomato and pickled cabbage. This was very good, although lacking in other vegetable matter for me. Equally as good, if not better actually, and equally lacking in vegetable matter was the balaton, which was Hungarian porkolt and goulash, the latter of which we saw a surprising amount of in Mongolia and Russia.
it’s like a Hungarian muppet happy face!
But my favorite dish at Luna Blanca was this soup, simply called the Luna Blanca Special. I know, it’s soup. And it was so simple and I guess boring. But it was just perfect. I needed a good, big bowl of soup (despite the heat) after being without for so long – remember that most of what I cook at home is soup. (Z asked early on in cohabitation if one day we could graduate to solid food.) This soup was in a mild vegetable broth and was full of tofu dumplings and some spinach. PERFECT, sort-of-bland-but-bland-how-I-love-it-not-in-a-bad-way soup.
mmm soup
The only low points of Luna Blanca (besides how they never had ice cream) were the desserts. Well, just the cakes. We got the chocolate mud cake and the chocolate cream pie over our visits. The mud cake, though it sounds amazing, was the driest, most tasteless cake I’ve ever tasted, bested only by the time early in my baking experience when I forgot to add all manner of sugar to a cake. It was bread, and gross, and this was pretty close sadly. The cream cake was better, because at least the cream made it moist (SORRY I KNOW BUT WHAT OTHER WORD CAN I USE), but it was still in serious need of a sufficient amount of sugar. And I don’t like when desserts are too sweet! But these were like, sugarless.
GO DRINK SOME WATER YOU ARE SO DRY
meh cake
You might be thinking ‘wait, didn’t you say you returned to Luna Blanca JUST for dessert one time? um, why?’ Why?? BECAUSE THEIR HOT CHOCOLATE WAS THE BEST I’VE HAD IN MY LIFE. Guys, I’m serious. We both were silent and then said, f-ing hell this is incredible. I cannot even deal with the fact that Mongolia is home to the best hot chocolate you can imagine. It wasn’t just chocolatey and it wasn’t just sweet; it was like…also vanilla-y? and caramelly? I DON’T KNOW.
YOU’RE AMAZING
I also got a little oatmeal cookie bag to go one night, and they were great, so just don’t get the cakes, and you’ll have a wonderful meal at Luna Blanca.
When the various Loving Huts finally decided to be open when they were supposed to, we went there multiple times too. I can’t stay mad at you, LH. If you aren’t familiar with the pervasive vegan restaurant chain, it’s a usually-small restaurant with a big menu of sandwiches, salads, and fun but always recognizable entrees that vary a little by region. They are all over Asia, all over Europe, and all over the USA too. Oh, and the best/most notable part? They are run by the veritable religious cult of the Supreme Master a Vietnamese lady who bills herself as an entrepreneur and not a cult leader, and every location plays videos from their cult thingies on TVs. I don’t care if you are trying to indoctrinate me as long as you are giving me good food. Oh, and the UB location we went to? The first time we went, it was playing a video of a concert they gave in honor of the Supreme Master, FEATURING BETTY BUCKLEY. GUYS. I was FREAKING OUT and all these Mongolian people were looking at me.
As usual, we ordered way too much and got to try a whole lot of stuff over a few visits. One of my favorite things was a huge surprise – the Victory salad, a cute molded (not moldy, molded like into the cylinder shape) mix of chickpeas, celery, seaweed, pickles, red onions, vegan mayo, and topped with a tomato mix. I don’t usually like mayonnaise-y things, but this was delicious, like a scoop of a perfect chickpea-based version of chicken salad, or tuna salad, whatever people keep going for with their recipes using exactly these ingredients.
As usual, we ordered way too much and got to try a whole lot of stuff over a few visits. One of my favorite things was a huge surprise – the Victory salad, a cute molded (not moldy, molded like into the cylinder shape) mix of chickpeas, celery, seaweed, pickles, red onions, vegan mayo, and topped with a tomato mix. I don’t usually like mayonnaise-y things, but this was delicious, like a scoop of a perfect chickpea-based version of chicken salad, or tuna salad, whatever people keep going for with their recipes using exactly these ingredients.
chickpea salad wins
We also of course got another perfunctory hot spinach salad, which was good as spinach usually is. I don’t remember much to distinguish this from the Luna Blanca version, but I enjoyed it. We needed to stock up on vegetables (is that how it works?) before our week in the countryside.
this was probably like 500 kilos of raw spinach first, right
I loved the dumpling plate we got, filled with an indeterminate but delicious mix of the usual dumpling veg and tofu. I was so eager to get to China for dumplings that I jumped the gun and got them in Mongolia! Dumplings are just so good!
As for mains, we tried this soy nugget platter (it came with green salad! amazing!), which we loved (probably because I mean it was chicken nuggets and french fries and it had been a month since we had such truly Western food). I liked the soy protein club sandwich (pickle, lettuce, onion) which I packed up and had the next day at Naadam, which was a genius idea and it kept beautifully in the tiny hostel fridge (didn’t get stolen!!!).
the pickle-y mayo with the nugget platter was so good I put it on my sandwich
all sandwiches should be pressed in a little grill pan
We went back to Loving Hut after our week in the Mongolian countryside and desert (next post I promise!) when we had one final night in UB before catching a sleeper train to Beijing. We were so eager for fun foods after a week of mutton (for Z) and rice, peas, and carrots (me). We got the Romanian salad, which was spinach and arugula supposedly but looked like mostly spinach (that’s ok) with orange pieces and a lovely orange and mint dressing. Perfect return to sort-of civilization! We also got a plate of tortilla chips and salsa, which said they came with hummus (HUMMUS!!) but that was a lot to expect in these parts and it was like a hummus-inspired runny sauce (I don’t even care).
We also got a Mexican burrito wrap that was very decent, and a hot mix of like pumpkin-based vegetable patties in a tomato sauce that I’m not really sure about but I liked it! And we got a side of fries. We needed them.
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Loving Hut, as usual, had a very nice smoothie menu, and we tried a green smoothie with spinach and orange and pear and stuff, plus a chocolate date drink. The chocolate one was delicious, and the green one was fine, but they come with the SMALLEST STRAWS IN THE WORLD. It was about 3.5 inches long, so after a few sips you had to give up and drink straight from the cup strawless. Hilarious and inexplicable.
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The only bad thing about the Loving Hut experience, besides how inconsistent and unreliable their hours were, is that the menu says they have ice cream AND ice cream cake. I think you’ve already guessed that they had neither, any time we were there. To tempt me with ice cream cake and not deliver is an unforgivable offense. But I still love you LH.
One night, when Naadam had claimed the lives/opening hours of vegan places, we decided to go to a Mongolian BBQ place called BD’s. I didn’t care, I figured I’d be able to find SOMETHING here, right? And I was being a good wife and letting Z go to a kind of must-go place here. It was expensive though – it was an all-you-can-eat buffet – so we looked at the setup before committing.
GUYS.
It was the best for vegans, to my absolute amazement.
They had a salad bar! With more vegetables than I’d seen in weeks! They had a make-your-own stir fry station with tofu and soy protein balls! They had a huge array of hot dishes including braised cabbage and carrots and stuff! And rice and kasha! It was so much food for me when I expected literally a potato.
my first enormous salad plate
I know that picture of my stir-fry after it was stir-fried is not pretty but I don’t care. I stuffed my bowl with bean sprouts, lots of tofu, and literally ALL the soy protein balls in the container (#sorrynotsorry). Then you put your bowl down on a numbered spot by the giant cooking station (wok?) and two guys put on a show with their sword-like cooking utensils (like Hibachi lol) while cooking like 10 people’s bowls at a time. Because they are more concerned with catching their sword-spatulas after tossing them in the air than they are with keeping the diners’ food strictly separated, a few pieces of #3’s shrimp got into my mix (spot #2). Luckily that’s easy to pick out, but if you have an allergy, note that there is some commingling of assets. Aside from the messy cooking of the showmen, BD’s was such a surprisingly treat! They even had good wifi and I did one of my Siberia blogs from there! For dessert, the only vegan thing was tiny spoons of watermelon pieces. And I mean tiny, like one cube of watermelon per spoon. I took 19 spoons.
Lastly, I think my favorite restaurant in UB was the all-vegan Italian restaurant Bosco Verde. I know – UB has an all-vegan Italian restaurant! Where even is there another one of those besides NYC! (Is there one in NYC or just ones with separate vegan menus?) Bosco Verde had decent food, and I’m not sure if the actual food was better than Luna Blanca’s, but the menu was my perfect menu – sooo many leafy salads, delicious veggie-packed soups, fun cutlet-y things as usual, pizza, pasta, and BEANS! SO MANY BEANS! Beans are hard to find so far on this trip, so I’m obsessed with Bosco Verde and I would have loved to have returned but they fell victim to the curse of Naadam closures.
so pretty inside!
We started with bruschetta, which we were super excited about, but we would have skipped it despite its deliciousness if we knew that every dish would come with almost of LOAF of bread, each! It was so funny but such a waste! Our guide in the country/desert gave us sooo much bread every meal, too – is it because we are westerners and they think we need bread or do Mongolians just eat a shittonne of bread?
I had a just perfect vegetable bean soup (mm soup!!) and a giant white bean, tomato, and fresh herb salad (the white beans were giant, not the salad, it was perfect sized). The salad dressing was so delicious it made me love the tomatoes even! I know you are like wait you just said the menu was long and incredible, but you got soup and salad? Guys soup and salad are my favorite foods. and beans. The soup came with good garlic bread and the salad came with lots of toast. Lol.
SO GOOD
ALSO SO GOOD
Z got a delicious cutlet thing (so many random cutlet things at vegan restaurants!) that came with fries and weirdly cooked veggie slices.
As for dessert, you guessed it – the menu said they had ice cream, and – you guessed it! – they didn’t. Instead, we got a chocolate cream cake – the same exact cake we would end up trying at Luna Blanca later on in our visit. This meh, sugar-lacking cake is clearly baked by the same outsourced company, one that needs to work on their craft. If any of my amazing vegan baker friends feel like living in Ulaan Baatar (bitch you crazy), there’s a job waiting.
I got this cake to-go hence the top icing layer got stuck to the plastic
As for UB food finds, there was an INCREDIBLE grocery store close to the Naadam stadium, super fancy in a sort-of mall and it had amazing random vegan finds. I just got super deja vu – did I already write about this? I don’t care I’ll share again. This shop had clearly marked vegan tofu and seitan mixes in the fridge! And the first good produce section we saw! And Bob’s Red Mill products! We stocked up on the vacuum-packed tofu and seitan, and I will be carting them around until Kyrgyzstan, where I imagine I will really need them. We also found these strawberry Oreos. They were gross. We still ate them all.
we see this flavor everywhere why does no one have the peanut butter? or mint?
IWe also spent a lot of time chilling at our favorite Mongolian coffee shop chain, Tom & Toms’ Coffee. We liked them too much to tell them that just using “Toms'” is sufficient. The wifi here was strong so we went frequently since the wifi at Modern Mongol hostel was pretty much nonexistent. I don’t drink coffee but they had this amaaaazing grapefruit ‘ade’ made with fresh grapefruit and soda water. It had pulp in it! It was sooo good. I would share a picture of it but trying to upload one literally crashed the computer twice so use your imagination.
So, as you can see, eating in Ulaan Baatar was better than doing pretty much anything else in Ulaan Baatar. I don’t know how it became such a hotspot for all-vegan restaurants – I guess Buddhism? But I’m a fan of it being one! Hooray for Buddha! Or whatever the reason is!
Ireland’s Beautiful Countryside: County Cork (and Ballymaloe)
You know why Ireland is so green? Because it is ALWAYS RAINING. That’s what we learned anyway on our trip through the Irish countryside, on our journey from Cork to Dublin. We spent most of this time exploring County Cork after flying into and enjoying the city of Cork, because the region is home to two of the very special places we had to see: Blarney Castle and Ballymaloe. Also, as Husbo says to everyone going to Ireland, you don’t go for the cities; you go for the countryside, the gorgeous, green-as-heck, rainy-to-make-it-all-so-green countryside. And if I can so enjoy myself when it’s so cold and rainy and my shoulders shoot up so high that I get bodybuilder neck (i.e. no neck) then it must be a special place.
After leaving the city limits, Ireland was almost hilarious in how green it was. I felt like I was on set in a young adult novel from the 1800s. All dem rolling hills! There are tonnes of castles and forts of note to see in the vicinity, but there’s one at the top of every list: Blarney Castle. Drawing tourists by the busfull, Blarney Castle dates back to about 1200AD. It was destroyed and rebuilt in the 15th century but it still counts to say it’s from the 1200s. Over all this time, the castle was besieged and captured and attacked and regained and bewitched and bothered and bewildered and everything that castles should expect to experience, over and over, so now it’s mostly a ruin. But some parts of it are still accessible to tourists, including the thing everyone is coming to see – the Blarney Stone.
This is not the Blarney Stone this is a sign with spelling that I enjoyed
The Blarney Stone, I’ve since learned, is part of a machicolation, which means it’s a floor opening in battlements through which shit like boiling oil (yikes) or stones could be dropped down on attackers. But that’s a much darker context than we’ve all accepted. The acceptable history of the Stone is that this limestone block above the floor opening of a particularly high battlement will give those who kiss it the gift of eloquence. And that’s why strangers for centuries have shared germs on an old piece of rock. The real legend says that the 15th century rebuilder of the castle, Cormac McCarthy (fork I thought he looked old for the earth but I guess he’s aging remarkably well), was involved in a lawsuit and sought assistance from the goddess Cliodhna. (Pretty.) The goddess told the beloved author to kiss the first stone he saw on his way to court, and lo and behold he was supes eloquent and he won his case, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Stone was then built into the castle walls.
Another story has to do with Robert the Bruce, apparently gifting the stone to Cormac for his help in a battle that occurred like way before the latter was born at a time when neither of them would have been alive so we’re going to table that one for now.
Obviously all the stories are a load of bullshirt; the real reason we share stranger germs on a stone is because it’s The Thing To Do. So we did it. And this is not just some stone you can walk by and kiss as you tour the castle. Remember I said before, it’s part of a floor opening in the battlements. The Blarney Stone is across the open bit from where you stand, and it’s not on the ground floor. So to kiss it, you sit down on the edge, an assistant holds your torso, and you lean backwards and down so you Spider-Man kiss it while like in a wheel pose. It is super awkward to get into the right position and understand what you’re supposed to do with your body. And it is VERY scary. I am not scared of heights (not more than is necessary) but I was very shaky when I performed this yoga of the insane.
See it was pretty high! and so pretty!
“Oh okay this isn’t so bad!”
“wait WHAT am I supposed to do?!”
I’m glad I did The Thing but damn if I ever want to relive that.
To let you get your breath back afterwards, the castle features a beautiful garden on its grounds, perfect for strolling around in the rain.
And to remind you of the crazy thing you just did beforehand, all the plants are deadly.
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So fun! Don’t eat poison!
We carried on our way through County Cork (I love saying that like the cast of The Ferryman) to another so fun and so Irish Must Do Thing – a stay at Ballymaloe.
Ballymaloe House is a hotel and restaurant, and nearby they have a cookery school (that’s how we say it in the Isles) and a grain store and the most incredible garden I’ve ever seen. Like every single vegetable you could want, they have growing out there. Meanwhile my windowsill basil died. Ballymaloe is a beloved historical treasure, which Myrtle and Ivan Allen opened in 1964 to show off to the world Irish Country cuisine and hospitality. It’s the best place to stay when you’re out in the countryside because it’s like The Place, historic and beloved. Our room was so sweet and cozy and it felt so appropriate to stay there while in Ireland.
peep those bottles of water tho!
Ballymaloe is renowned for its five-course dinners and its roster of high caliber chefs and cooking students, so dinner was pretty nice. When we went, they weren’t super used to vegan accommodations but said that they of course could feed me. They started me off with a vegetable soup that was lovely (as really any vegetable soup is) and a salad with pomegranates, so even if it ended here I would have been happy.
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There was also great bread (more on that later!) so like, reals happy. As for my main course, it was a nonexciting but nonthreatening rice pilaf with spinach and roasted squash and a cranberry chutney jawn that did not really go. It was fine (I’m fiiine), but I think going back now they would be able to whip up something much more exciting.
And I did get a good dessert! Oh first up I got a palate cleanser of fruit sorbet, which is fun. You don’t get that all that often.
My real dessert though was a chocolate carrageenan pudding! Carrageenan is a seaweed that is used as a thickener. For the pudding, an Irish classic as we were told, they cook the seaweed quickly and then let it soak until it exudes lots of jelly-like substance (fun! not gross!) and then you take the jelly and mix it with milk and sugar and stuff. Mine was chocolate yay and topped with strawberries and dark chocolate ribbons.
Overall it wasn’t the most interesting meal, but considering it was an accommodation at an institution, I was fine with it. It’s the whole experience you go there for, not just the food. At dinner that night, Myrtle Allen was seated right next to our table. She has recently passed away, so it was really special to get to meet her.
I was so excited about the carrageenan pudding being a real thing that I bought little bags of carrageenan in the Ballymaloe gift shop! We also bought a signed copy of Myrtle Allen’s cookbook (which I included a picture of because I had one). The best part of the gift shop was obviously the best part of anything on earth: the shop doggie. I pet the doggie for a while, along with two children that I did not talk to.
We also made a visit to the cooking school a few kilometers away. The grounds are lovely but pretty vast, and it wasn’t so lovely when we had to retrace all of our many steps to find our lost keys! The gardens there and on the main Ballymaloe property are real goals. I almost snatched some of the chard because it’s hard to find in London but I didn’t.
i snatch you!
My favorite thing we did at Ballymaloe was take a cooking class! They have a few on offer and we decided to do the bread making class because we love bread so g-d much. It was so much fun. We made a few loaves of Irish soda bread to be served at that day’s breakfast, so now I know how to make that up right good. I should make that today. The recipe they use wasn’t vegan though, so they also had us made a really great brown bread so that there was bread I could eat at breakfast too. It was a suuuuper liquidy bread batter and they had me mix it by hand so it was hilarious but also like I was wearing long sleeves. I guess that was my bad though. Anyway bread is great. I was sad that we weren’t making loaves for our own taking but we still had several days of travel left so I guess it’s okay.
more like Edward GROSShands AM I RIGHT
“What do you mean we have to share our bread with other guests??”
FACE MAN’S BACK!
So our time in County Cork was loverly, a great opportunity to disconnect from our day-to-day and enjoy nature. And rain. If you’re going to Ireland, you’re going to Blarney Castle probably, and if so, you should pay Ballymaloe a visit.
This tree is TOO TINY FOR TWO BIRDS!!!!
