Mongolia

Next day we left our bags in the hotel and headed out sight seeing. We stopped in a cafe with free wifi for breakfast and found an open tourist office. There we asked what there was to do and the guy there just pointed out a few sites on the map. Ulaan Baatar is quite a small city. We headed to the temple which was a bit of a walk so we got to see the full length of the city. When we got to the temple we were yelled at and then charged for tickets. We paid and headed around the temple. They feed pigeons in the temple so the whole place was filled with them. There were quite a few buildings in the temple grounds. Finally we got to the main temple. A man appeared at the temple door and took our tickets. We were the only white people there and the only people who were asked for tickets. The man then disappeared and no one else was asked for tickets even though people freely entered and left the temple. When we got inside we say a 26.5 metre high Buddha. It was really impressive. All around the bottom were these cylinders that people seemed to be spinning. They would walk around the bottom of the statue with their hands out and just spin every cylinder they passed. The statue was amazing but we were told pictures would cost a bunch more money so we didn't bother as it had been quite expensive to get in at the start. After wards we sat in the courtyard at the front of the temple and found that the ticket guy didn't ask one other person to buy tickets to get into the temple. There were even other Asian tourists there that didn't seem to get hassled. We were pretty annoyed at this so we decided we had enough tourist stuff and just sat around enjoying the sun. Then we headed back to the hotel and grabbed our bags. At this point they were quite heavy with food and stuff so about three quarters of the way to the train station we stopped on a bench. An Irish guy named Niall came up to us to ask if we were lost. We told him we were heading to the station and just tired. Turns out he is married to a Mongolian girl and spent a lot of the last seven years in Mongolia but he still went home for a few months every now and then. He was also going home when his kids start school because the Mongolians were really racist. His wife was already getting hassled the whole time about being married to a white person and they found it really hard to go out in public together. His kids seeming looked half Mongolian and half Irish and would have been picked on a lot in school, especially with no adult bothering to stop them. Finally we headed tot he train station. Brian was given out to by a woman who was just wandering around with cleaning equipment but not cleaning, for having his feet on the wall. After this Brian was pretty angry. He really disliked Mongolian and just wanted to get out of there. He hated the people's attitude to all foreigners and being stared at in the train station for half an hour by a guy who wouldn't look away even when stared back at angrily was they last straw. We were soon on the train for two nights.