Trip to Bayan-Olgii : Olgii

Olgii is the biggest city of Bayan Olgii. Most of habitants of this state are Kazakh.
Often people have blue or green eyes and even sometime blond hair! with Asian shape face. It makes strong impression of "central" Asia.
This city is 360゜surrounded by mountains. When you turn your head to see all those mountains, you will feel strange dizziness.

It was the peak of election campaign. This candidate made a election ger just in front of the name board of this city.
He was a precious muslim background candidate. So, he was so proud to be an ambassador of this city.

"Black market" : here, metal boxes are more popular than containers used in Khovd

And sometime funny old advertisements.

Japanesse - Swiss - Kazakh... in which direction??

Snow

Last Friday was intense snow storm. Already 3rd time since we arrived !
It takes usually about 1 day to disappear completely. Just enough time to take some pictures.

The red building is the theater, recently repainted ! And our flat is in the first grey building, on the right of the theater: a typical soviet building but quiet ok !

Cow on town

We often see cows wandering in Khovd city...

Konichiwa !

70 students are learning japanese in Khovd. We didn't expect so much ! The japanese teacher is living in Mongolia for 15 years and is pretty actice. When we met her for the first time, she was just organising a japanese festival...in Khovd !

With sumo (or something like that):

Tea ceremony, speach contest and the funniest: song contest !
As Kozy was a precious real japanese in town, he became one of the judge. 30 kinds (mostly in between 5 and 7), dressed like japanese, sang with all their heart in japanese. Big laugh !

The dusty city

After many days too busy to settle down or bad Internet connecion, we could finally update our blog.
First, welcome to Khovd City, dusty city from West of Mongolia !



Khovd is a small and pretty dusty city but still the biggest city of the region.
Much more space than in UB, less cars (but still out of control) and beautiful mountains and rivers all around us !




And somewhere, the police...

Ikea in UB

When i saw the indication, i couldn't believe it. Yes, there's IKEA in UB!
Well...still small but it seems that they are building a bigger space behind.
One thing wich is pretty funny here is to see how famous trademarks, brought by capitalism, look like here...

UB, in between temples and high buildings

Before flying to Khovd, our main destination in the deep west countryside of Mongolia, we are in Ulan Bator (UB for everybody here) for a week, enough time to visit the city and feel its atmosphere.
Like a lot of ex-sovietic cities, the dusty UB seems to fight in between its sovietic heritage, its tradition and new capitalism. Its architecture become then pretty strange...but still living and colorfull, like mongolia people.
Some images of the city: