What’s Ulaanbaatar Really Like? Capital City of Mongolia 🇲🇳 Улаанбаатар

hello and welcome back to Ulan Batar the capital city of Mongolia and I'm starting here in no better place than sukh Batar Square where Mongolia first declared its independence is on his horse full of activity here on a Friday late afternoon in this video I'm going to be showing you a few interesting sites you can visit here in mongolia's capital sort of as a warm-up before you head out further onto the step and to the Gobi desert on a trip to see the countryside which is really what Mongolia is about but I hopefully can show you in this video that there are a few things to do here in the capital city and it's worth a day or two of wandering around [Music] I hope in this video to show a slightly different side of the capital city to the one I shared in my first impressions video the previous one on my channel that was just walking around the area of my hotel flower hotel which had lots of old Soviet buildings and the atmosphere was quite different to what you're gonna see here lots of skyscrapers modern buildings and here sukpatar square is kind of the main meeting point if you meet a local Mongolian they're likely to tell you see you at the square and just here is of course a statue of chengis Khan at the North End you couldn't really have the main focal point of the city without some sort of Nod to the most famous Mongolian of all time let's wander around a little bit thank you [Music] an area of artificial grass lots of young people playing volleyball in their school uniforms after just finishing for the day [Music] [Music] interestingly enough there is a flag of the Vatican City hoisted up high in the Square the pope is here and it's his first ever visit to Mongolia so quite a significant moment even though Mongolia traditionally embraced Tibetan Buddhism it is a sign of The Changing Times the Democratic nature of Mongolia that the pope is here [Music] thank you [Music] walking on a little bit further here and I've just passed a statue of Marco Polo and funnily enough I am reading Marco Polo's the travels at the moment he is one of the most famous Travelers of all time whether he reached China is still a debate he claims to have worked and served in the court of Kublai Khan when the Mongol Empire was at its Zenith and he documents those 20 or so years 26 years I think it is where he traveled on behalf of Kublai Khan across China and to many different places in Asia how much of it is fictional exaggerated reality we will not know however his story is fascinating and one of the earliest people to put pen to paper on their discoveries and understandings of the other side of the world as a European it is fascinating to read as a traveler even more so I remember visiting Marco Polo's home in Venice and it was quite an interesting moment now being here in ulambatar and seeing his statute feels like I've come full circle although I'm not quite in shandu where the capital under Cuba like Khan was which is now in present-day China TV so there are two museums you should probably consider visiting while here in ulambatar one old and one new the first one being the older one which is the national museum of Mongolia here and it takes you from the Neolithic age to the present day this one is twenty thousand to enter and in my opinion I actually prefer it even though it doesn't have the glitz and the glamor of the one I'm going to show you in just a second the reason why is because this one has really good English signposted everywhere and you can get the full information without any great deal of effort and not only that the things that are on display are historic especially the traditional Mongolian outfits which I loved seeing they remind me a lot of Star Wars I mentioned this in the previous video there's almost no doubt that George Lucas took inspiration from especially the women's dress looking very much like Queen Amidala in The Phantom Menace so while this one is a little bit more dated it for me was a better experience to visit so just walking about one minute down the road you will reach the chingis car museum which is brand new opened in 2019 except it's not dedicated to just chingas Khan it's the same as the national museum a full story of the history of Mongolia pretty much you can tell there's been a lot of money spent on it and there are many beautiful displays and modern pieces of artwork to demonstrate in history my only gripe with it was that it was frustrating to sorry I'm by the road here because it's on the other side and I want to get the full shot in the background my only gripe with it was that there's two texts as you go around the museum both are in Mongolian one is in Cyrillic and the other one in traditional Mongolian characters so obviously they want to promote the Mongolian language I get that so there's QR codes for English except for every single individual point you have to get out your phone and load the English on your phone using the QR code and it probably wouldn't be so bad except it takes a while to load then you end up with hundreds of tabs on your phone and so I found it a little bit frustrating in many ways because there were also sections with no QR codes so I didn't know what was going on there were various pieces in there that I had no context for again here a very impressive piece of art documenting a period of History during the U1 period of the Mongol Empire and yet there is no information explaining the context of what's happening here where is it there is just one little piece over here which I'll show you so I can't translate what this says I'm just assuming it's made in 2014 which is pretty recently and maybe there's a description there but I have no way of knowing I feel like this museum has a really beautiful look to it and it's certainly Pleasant to walk around and it's probably worth going in however I think for a lot of international visitors it might be a little bit of a struggle to keep on scanning on your phone and so taking it in with your eyes and getting the feel of the museum seems like more of the experience that you should expect to have [Music] so be honest are you surprised by some of the things that you're seeing here bright advertising boards and modern buildings in the center of ulanbatar because maybe some of you have a stereotype of what you think Mongolia might look like it's capital city but I think there's actually a little bit more development than even I expected being totally honest and I don't mean that in a negative sense it's just some countries I think we don't have enough of an idea of I think on YouTube in general there isn't a lot of videos about Mongolia but now they've relaxed the visa rules I'm sure there's going to be a flood and a lot more one thing I am noticing in this area is how many young people there are the majority of the locals I'm passing on the street here are beneath the age of 30. probably Mongolia has a very youthful population but I have not checked the statistics but it's quite something not many businessmen in suits that you might see in the center of other cities most of them are high school age and University age [Music] [Music] um so my walk around the city here is culminating in the state department store which as you can see on the top says from 1921 of course to 2023 the present day it is a historic place in the capital here and it has a bit of everything that you might need I actually went in yesterday because I needed to get a warmer jacket for my nine Day Tour which is coming up after this video I'm going around the country to the grasslands and step into the Gobi desert into some main sites and staying with nomadic families every night but I will talk all about that and show it in the coming videos and they have in their supermarket they have clothes shops on the top floor you can get an amazing selection of souvenirs to choose from and it's very impressive in there so if you need anything then make this your stop-off point before heading to the vast open lands of Mongolia when it'll just be you and your girl this is where you can come to pick up any supplies that you may need in preparation for your trip anyway I am pretty hungry so I think some food is in order it needs to be Mongolian of course I'm not going to settle for anything else although as I've been walking around I've seen lots of Japanese and Korean restaurants and Indian too so you'll find lots of Cuisines here but I'm in Mongolia I need to eat Mongolian food I don't want for sure or booze because I showed that in the previous video so let's see if we can find another dish to try [Music] so this looks like an interesting Mongolian chain called Khan booze pay attention you see the dishes up here plenty of choice and it looks like a fast food Mongolian chain that caught my eye and I have for sixteen thousand one hundred two grick picked up this dish which is a mix of these noodles with meat the meatballs are so good and Mongolian food is starting to for me look a bit like very good winter food I mean it's large meatballs Gravy Sauce and then kind of warm comfort food for during the colder months of the year also in rather typical Mongolian fashion you can help yourself to the milk tea here which is a little bit salty and very milky in fact it's so milky that it even just looks like pure milk but I'm pretty sure it's tea but if I'm wrong please correct me in the comments below hello good morning and welcome back to Ulan Batar I am making my way a half an hour walk or so from the center of the city on this Saturday morning to Ugandan keyed which is one of the few surviving monasteries in the capital city here um [Music] so I've just arrived here and I'm seeing a lot of monks in their red robes walking around the complex it's actually really quite large there were more than a hundred some temples or kid monasteries in ulambatar at the beginning of the 19th century however the religious purges of the 1930s the stalinist Communist purges saw a lot of the monastery shutdown monks jailed or killed or attempted to be integrated into society this was one of the few surviving places and only because well The Story Goes that the U.S vice president Henry Wallace during his visit to Mongolia asked the Mongolian president Troy Balsan in 1944 whether he could see a monastery with nothing really to show they scrambled together this one opened the gates for him to pretend that they didn't actually destroy most of the religion in the country and so this one kind of half remained as a showpiece during those years of Communism until the 90s Mongolia became a democratic country and they reopened the doors to religion across the country and people in Mongolia were allowed to start practicing their religion again so I did get to see the Monks chanting in a number of different buildings across the monastery here and it was incredible I've never seen anything like it the colors red gold and the whole General atmosphere was something unique I've never seen Monks chanting in any Buddhist temple let alone Tibetan Buddhism so while I'm talking about it I will just overlay shots of this main building right here which is the one you can generally take pictures and videos inside and the huge Buddha standing in the middle there is impressive it has an authentic old feeling to it as do all of the temples around here so if you want to have the best chance of seeing the Monks chanting with your own eyes then come between 9 and 11 A.M in the morning [Music] foreign I have just called a taxi to take me here to the complete other side of the city in the far South to narandul Market calling a taxi was honestly quite a nightmare I will talk about it a little bit more as I wander around the market [Music] a rather different experience to the state department store haggling is the norm here in this market so if you like that sort of thing then you should probably do some of your shopping here and by the looks of things they sell just about everything I'm seeing clothes belts Fabrics in the distance sunglasses all right very beautiful countryside very good yeah it is it is I agree my friend how old are you 28 28 yes you are small I am 33 33. Okay milk very delicious yeah yeah which part of Mongolia are you from you are from Gobi Gobi Portugal Lake Hope School Lake okay now something I've said in my videos before when visiting local markets around the world I'll repeat it again my favorite aspect is the people watching it's a good way to see the locals about their daily shopping and business especially when you visit a humble Market lots of warm jackets and jumpers you can pick up here to stay warm on your trip to the countryside now I don't know how much truth there is to this but from what I've read online you should watch your pockets at this particular Market or in general anyway you should always be watching your pockets I've heard this one has a bit of a reputation for pickboxing that might have changed in the last few years if you're Mongolian if you're a local please do write a comment below and inform us let us know but just something I've read in various blogs and I think in the Mongolia Lonely Planet guide they also mentioned this so just something to be aware of but likely nothing will happen okay [Music] as I wander around let me tell you a little bit about the taxi app and my experience with it it's called UB taxis I think there's more than one but this is the one I used I think it's the main one it's a yellow icon if you want to download it and you need a Mongolian SIM card a number to register an account with the apps you can call a driver to your location or to your pickup points we're in the shoe department so when you mark your location to be picked up your driver will often call you except it's likely they will not speak English I think every single time I've used it I've received a phone call and they don't speak English which is fine except I don't speak Mongolian and so usually there's a bit of a miscommunication there they want to know where to pick you up because they don't necessarily follow where you've marked they want you to tell them exactly where you want to be picked up so it's more of a conversational thing so it's not very suitable for foreigners if you ignore their call they might cancel your ride so you kind of have to answer and then let them know that you don't understand and that you are a foreigner and so if you can get past that they might be able to come and get you and you'll work out how to be picked up by them except leaving the monastery and trying to get a driver my driver drove past me a couple of times from my location and then I had a guy call me from the office of UB taxi saying that my taxi driver wanted to know where I wanted to be picked up and I said the exact location that I marked please and it was a Korean guy on the phone he said I'm Korean sorry a lot of Mongolian taxi drivers they don't know how to read the maps so you need to tell them exactly where you want to be picked up like a main landmark or something so in the end I canceled a couple of rides because many of these drivers and miscommunication meant that they couldn't find me even though I tried to Mark a place that would be easier for them to pick me up eventually I found a driver but it wasn't the easiest service to use and if you do want to use a taxi app here there's no grab there's no Uber so this is going to be what you use to get around the city bear that in mind and probably only use it when you want to go to far away places like the market here or the monastery in the north for everything in the center of the city it's pretty walkable within 30 minutes of each other another thing with UB taxis is that you cannot put in your destination so when you get in the car you need to let your driver know where you're going so it's best to have the Cyrillic of the address that you're heading to otherwise you will not be able to communicate with your driver where you want to be dropped off unless it's somewhere well known like supatar square or something like that which can translate into Mongolian because it's the same in Mongolian as it is in English and my journey for that taxi ride cost 9500 to Grit you can see just how far it stretches all the way to those buildings in the distance I'm gonna end this video here I hope it gave you an idea of a few things that you can do in ulanbatar while you're in the city before heading out further to see the real Mongolia on the set and in the desert see you on the next video where I start my tour where the trip really begins where things start to get exciting I cannot wait it's going to be very immersive nine days eight nights staying with local families seeing the open landscape it's what Mongolia is all about see on the next one peace foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jason Billam Travel

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Id: Vb0uaRbBlCs

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2023