Only in Mongolia could you get in a taxi decked out with stickers of the Nazi flag…
When it is minus 25 in the morning you jump in the first car going your way. Fortunately almost anyone in UB will stop for you if they are driving alone and it’s fairly safe to jump in as long as you check no-one is in the back and you don’t mind being chauffeured by someone whose only driving skill was probably learnt on the back of a horse. The number of bumpers held together with ‘scotch’ (the Mongolian generic term for sticky-tape) and the number of cracked windshields tell the story all too well.
Anyway, this was the first time I considered waving a car on despite the cold. Maybe it was the blacked out windows, a dodgy eagle hood-ornament, a CB aerial sticking out aggressively from the bottom of the windshield at forty-five degrees or possibly the four or five swastikas stuck on the door panels. As one of my friends later reminded me the swastika was taken from an ancient Asian symbol but there was no mistaking the red, white and black stickers on this car. The driver, a forty-something man in leather trousers and jacket seemed a reasonable guy. He actually drove the distance to work without giving me too many scares, tuned the radio in to a Russian station and tried to start up a conversation. My Russian being a tad worse than my Bulgarian (well, they are almost the same aren’t they?) the poor chap didn’t get too far and I couldn’t find out where his fondness for the Third Reich stemmed from. In all likelihood he wouldn’t have even known the relevance of the flag…
----------------
A few late nights this last week. Not for the normal reasons I hope you understand, finally the web-site has been coming together as I get my head around some basic java-script behaviours for swapping images (yeah, I know, sad isn’t it). Anyway the stubbed toe is still a nice shade of purple and the start of a cold has put paid to any hope of getting to the gym so there is not much else to do.
The website (follow the link at the top of this page) now has three portfolios up and running. One features the Naadam festival, a Mongolian summer event of the ‘three manly sports’. The second gallery has selected images of a trip I made through SE Asia at the start of 2004. The final gallery is probably a ‘like it or loath it’ collection of some abstract city shots – I’ll let you decide for yourselves which way you want to lean.
