I woke up at 630 AM to pack up my electronics and laundry. Surprisingly, Altai’s mother and stepfather were already awake! I started to gather my laundry which had been drying for about 7-8 hours. I noticed that my jeans were not there….I was worried about whether or not they would be dry by morning.
Altai’s stepfather had somehow dried the jeans. He handed them back to me and I felt they were warm. I am guessing he ironed them by hand because I couldn’t see how else he could have warmed them up!
My early rising also caused Joseph to wake up. I learned he had arranged with
Amma, Altai’s brother and our driver, to go sightseeing around Ulan Bator that day. I wished I could have arranged the same! So Joseph was sharing a ride again with me to the airport and then off with Amma afterward.
Altai’s parents had prepared a nice
breakfast for us that morning which I wasn’t expecting. I continued to be impressed by the gracious hospitality!
Amma arrived and we left promptly. There was bad traffic as I had anticipated. Amma is an aggressive driver and changed his route a couple of times to avoid traffic. We arrived at the airport a little over 1 hour later ( in what is a 20 min ride without traffic). I was relieved to get to the airport on time with about 1 hour are before boarding time. I thanked and said goodbye to Amma and gave him a 10000 Turgik tip which is only about $4.00.
I checked in to my flight on Turkish airlines and walked around the very small airport a bit. I reflected on not being able to see much of Ulan Bator. There is a famous tourist site with a huge statue of Genghis Khan that we drove past. A lot of tourist like to take their picture there, but I settled for this smaller one in the airport 😛
Well I bought a cup of coffee.Being paranoid the whole time about losing my boarding pass, I sat down and started working on my blog in the airport coffee shop. Now you can loop back to that post !!!
The route to Pakistan was through Bishkek, Kyrgzstan, then Istanbul, Turkey. I met another Californian in line in Istanbul (we are all over the place) and passed along my blog address.
Well this is my last post for Mongolia. I arrived at 400AM in Pakistan eventually to visit Synergy MMA as a guest coach.
I would like to make some general posts about Mongolia on subjects like “nomad economics” and there is actually quite a bit of material that I haven;t shared (photos and videos) so I will make some short sporadic posts about those.
As always thanks for reading. Please subscribe and share with friends! Your comments encourage me so feel free to do that as well 🙂
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