Ulaanbaatar

Home to about 40% of Mongolia's population, this capital definitely still bears the scars (at least in my mind they are scars) of heavy Soviet influence, in some ways quite similar to Almaty in Kazakhstan (although in Almaty the Soviet influence seemed to be much more naturally integrated). Still, this city that until relatively recently was only a massive sprawl of yurts has plenty of unique and distinctively Mongolian characteristics that not even Stalin's most hideous minority policies could fully erase. Most noticeable and interesting in my mind were the yurts that people still kept in their fenced off back yards, while some families didn't even bother building houses on their properties and lived exclusively in yurts on the outskirts of the city... but still marked off their property with large wooden fences. A bit of an oxymoron, considering the yurt is the penultimate symbol of the nomadic life, and a permanent fence is the last thing you would expect to find enclosing it. At any rate, I was only able to spend a little over 24 hours in Ulaanbaatar, and most of that time was spent watching the festivities of the Naadam Festival, Mongolia's biggest festival of the year (with Ulaanbaatar's version of it being the largest in the country).