Traffic

in UB is horrendous, particularly when you /really/ need to get somewhere.  But I think these pictures make UB look at least like a part-way decent city.

Bringing the Farm into Town

I posted a picture that looks almost exactly like this one last month.  If you shifted just a couple of degrees to the South, it might actually be the same picture.  In fact, I may have even been standing in roughly the same spot on Peace Bridge when I took the other picture.  What I was trying to capture here (and what I think I failed to capture) was the fact that someone had brought their cows to graze in this big open space (yep, those specks that you can just barely make out are cattle).  Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me and I can't zoom with my iPhone, so this was the best I could do.  Another time, I saw some cattle grazing on a very small triangular patch of grass that was in between the two lanes of the highway, but that time, I didn't even have my iPhone with me.  The only other place I've ever seen farm animals roam freely around a town was in a very small and remote village on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

Peace Bridge

Ugh.  This is another one of those pictures which I chose a long time ago, and, looking at it now, I can't understand why I chose it because today it just looks boring to me.  Maybe it will look much cooler with the black backdrop I've chosen for my blog, but still...

Anyway, I suppose I chose this picture to give you a better idea of what Ulaanbaatar looks like (because Lonely Planet didn't give me any clues-- just a bunch of landscape pictures, remember?).  This is Peace Bridge, which is South of the city centre.  I walk over Peace Bridge every time I go into the city centre, and you might read about it when you read about Ulaanbaatar (I know I had read about it before I got here), although, now that I look really closely at my map in my Lonely Planet, it's not actually marked on the map.  Oh well, it's not like the bridge really goes over any kind of body of water, the way bridges normally do.  To me, it's more of an overpass, although "Peace Overpass" does not have the same ring to it as "Peace Bridge" does.