Wouldn't Italy be nice this time of year?

I visited the Bodg Khan Palace Museum today with Ena and Aagi. The museum charges Mongolians $1.00 for admission, $4.50 for foreigners, and an additional $10 to take pictures anywhere on the grounds (what?). I decided to skip paying the $10, but took a few pictures anyway. (Before you start judging, I didn't use my flash. And paying $10 would have been ridiculous).

There were two sections of the museum: the summer palace (a series of uninsulated buildings connected to each other) and the winter palace (a two-level winter home). I assure you that visiting the 'summer palace' in January was not the best of plans. After a painful 10 minutes outside (all three of us pretending we weren't going into shock), I started to develop a growing fear of losing my nose and chin to frostbite and we decided to give up on that part of the tour. Inside the warmer, insulated Winter Palace, we spied maps of Ulan Bator in 1910, traditional dels (traditional Mongolian dress) adorned with coral, pearls, silver, and gold, and a room full of taxidermied animals from South America, Central Asia, and Africa. I'm sure several of the exotic-looking birds I saw (but didn't photograph) are now extinct.

I was thankful to be with my Mongolian tour guides; while there was posted information along the walls in English, Ena and Aagi were able to narrate and explain so much more about the underlying importance of all we saw. For example: one case contained three bowls (all about the size of large salad bowls). The English enscription read, "Punishment Bowls." I scratched my head. Ena explained. If a person of the court did something worthy of punishment, he would have to drink a bowl full of airag (fermented mare's milk). Now how would I have known that without Ena?

Afterward I nearly gave myself hypothermia waiting for Sara in front of the Chinngis Khan statue in Sukhbaatar Square. Sara arrived yesterday from Denver, and she'll be teaching here at the National University of Mongolia for the next 6 months. She's a geographer, about to start her Ph.D. For her dissertation, she's studying the spread of English throughout the developing world, focusing on Mongolia. She seems to be in a degree of shock that, of all the developing countries on the earth, she decided to come to here... now. She was wondering why she couldn't have instead ventured to Laos or Vietnam, where it surely wasn't -10 today?

After she arrived (I really almost had to stand her up, the pain of the cold was so intense today), we walked along the icy sidewalks to the Grand Khan Irish Pub, a landmark in these parts...

But one can't really complain about the cold here. It's Mongolia in January: what do you expect? I have found myself wondering, sometimes with amusement and sometimes befuddlement, if I could have journeyed to a more difficult place if I tried.