Leaving Mongolia/Searching for Lost Youth in Istanbul

Friday, June 28, 2019

Friday the 21st was a very long day. It started at 4.30 am in Ulaanbaatar with a knock on the door of the guesthouse where I was staying. Juje, the guy who had driven me down to the Gobi desert twelve days earlier, was back--through an arrangement I'd made with the guesthouse to drive me to the airport. 

I'd come back to Ulaanbaatar after having spent ten days in the Gobi and central Mongolia. While I'd been somewhat dismissive of Ulaanbaatar's charms upon my first arrival there, by the time the desert tour was over I had become much more enthusiastic about the city's advantages. I spent my last two days in Mongolia there, visiting some of the sites that I hadn't managed to see the first time around--like the Dinosaur Museum and the Black Market, where I bought some pretty cool Mongolian duds. I had a really great last dinner, and event went to a small music festival that was taking place close to my hotel. 

Now, however, it was time to leave. I was heading back to the land of my youth. I was flying back to Istanbul.

10 Days in the Gobi and Central Mongolia

Friday, June 21, 2019

I'm baack in Ulaanbaatar after a thrilling--but quite physically taxing--ten-day trip through the Gobi desert and central Mongolia. 

Rough route that we took through
Gobi desert and central Mongolia
I'm frankly still processing the trip, which in many ways passed in a blur. Nevertheless, I took careful notes, and will make an attempt to piece things together once I'm back in Montana later in the summer. At that point, I plan to write things out here in more detail. For now, however, I can add just a few telegraphic points, as I am still in Ulaanbaatar at present. 

Ulaanbaatar

Friday, June 14, 2019

It's been a busy week. On my last day in Moscow, I got up early and headed to the archive to work on my last set of documents. Then I headed back home, had a quick lunch, then set off for the airport. My destination? Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. 

Central State Department Store, Ulaanbaatar
Why Mongolia? Good question. I had originally been thinking about taking the Trans-Siberian Express out from Moscow, because I'm really interested in seeing Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, and Ulan-Ude. The idea had been to drop down into Mongolia for 2-3 weeks after Ulan-Ude. For a variety of reasons, though, such a trip wasn't really possible for me this year. So, I'd pretty much resigned myself to forgetting about Mongolia, and trying to get here some other time. 

But then I remembered Lebanon. Several years ago I was invited to give a talk at the American University of Beirut. For reasons I won't get into now I declined--and I've regretted it ever since. I'm turning 50 this summer and, while I seem to be in pretty good health, nothing is certain at any age, let alone now. Even though spending just two weeks in Mongolia strikes me in some ways as a bit silly and self-indulgent--how much of such an enormous country can one expect to see in such a short time?--I decided to do it. So here I am in Ulaanbaatar. 

Moving on from Moscow

Friday, June 7, 2019

This is my last full week in Moscow. Given that I love to dish out banalities on this blog, I'll provide one more: the time here has really flown by. I've been busy--most of my time in Moscow was spent at the archive, but I also tried to catch up on other work. I finished a couple of articles that I'd been working on for a while and sent them off to journals, and I had about a million photographs on my computer--rare books that I'd found in Amsterdam, Moscow, and Istanbul, as well as archival materials from Amsterdam and Istanbul--so I've been spending a lot of time sifting through these. I'm not really in a position right now to do a lot of writing on my book, so I've been trying to take care of what I can in the meantime.