Leaving UB

I woke up this morning surprised that it was past nine AM. I had an eye mask on and the light hit me when I took it off. I usually wake up earlier and snooze for awhile, but I guess I earned a solid night's sleep.

The day before Adam and I got to the train station at quarter past seven in the morning to try and get at the front of the line for new ticket openings. The office opened at eight, and there were already at least 200 people waiting in the bitter cold.

We'd been hoping to just get on a train Thursday sometime, but it turned out that you can't just leave Ulaanbaatar anytime you damn well please. Wednesday evening we found out that there were no trains to Beijing, Zamin Uud, or Erleen until Sunday. We got our hopes up when Bob at the hostel said he could get us tickets to the Erleen, the Chinese side of the border for Friday evening, but the tickets got snatched up before we could buy them.

Adam and I waited in the line while police let people in every few minutes once the ticket office actually opened. There we waited for another hour or so to get near the front. At the front, the smashed lines that existed farther back devolved into a mass of 7 or 8 people nearest to the window shoving their hands full of cash and passports through the window and yelling.

It was a fucking zoo.

We were hoping to get tickets for the afternoon train to the Mongolian side of the border, Zamin Uud, from where we could get a bus to Beijing. We were out of luck, but we did get tickets for Saturday night. All in all, it was almost a three-hour affair, split between waiting outside in a cloud of frozen exhaust fumes, and inside squished in lines like folds in an accordion.

If that wasn't productive enough to last the rest of the day, after a much deserved rest and breakfast, I spent a few hours online trying to figure out what graduate school program I wanted to apply to in Norway. I settled on a master's of philosophy of English language in Oslo.

Then I realized I would have to get notarized copies of my passport. I hurried to the American embassy. When I finally got there, I didn't even get past the Mongolian guard. "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. 1 to 3 o'clock."

My own country couldn't even make a fucking copy for me outside of six designated hours per week. I'm glad I didn't pay any taxes the last two years. Fuckers.

I ran around the city, looking in banks and random doors marked "Notary" in Cyrillic, of which there were many. None actually had a notary though. Every place told me to go to another place which in turn pointed me back to the last place.

At the central post office I asked at the help desk. Counter 2, they said. Counter 2 had no idea what I was talking about, even with notary written on a piece of paper in Cyrillic to help them out. She pointed me to another woman, and a guy who overheard me said I could do it at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I got there 10 minutes before closing time. The lady said I had to get it notarized in Mongolian, then she could do it in English for me. She said to come back Monday, I said I couldn't. I was leaving for China the next day, Saturday, and they wouldn't be open.

I sprinted across the street and up to the 4th floor of a building where she told me I could find a notary. It was closed. I went to the 3rd floor where I saw a sign for a notary on the way up, but it was just pointing up to the place I had just come from.

I went back for the hell of it, and it was open. I got the notarizations, sprinted back across the street, got a guard to unlock the closed door, and had the woman give me the English notariazations.

And if that wasn't enough, I spent most of the evening making phone calls on Skype to various concerned parties: my mom, transcript offices, etc. Arranging shit for bureaucratic hoops is not easy from across the world.

And though you may not believe it, it's not even easy to send a fax in Mongolia at half past midnight. I spent the wee hours of the morning risking my health and safety on the dark streets of UB trying to find a fax machine. Hotels, 24-hour banks, Internet cafes, all worthless.

I finally scanned the papers, found online fax sites and sent them. A great way to spend my last night in a country when everyone else at the hostel was drinking vodka and going out to clubs. I think I earned my sleep that night.