We had noticed that our ticket indicated that our flight Ulaanbaatar was going to take over four hours, which seemed rather excessive for a three hour flight between airports with minimal air traffic. We boarded our flight with boarding passes that only had our first name handwritten on them and were unlucky in getting the one row that didn’t recline.

About thirty minutes into the flight we were told we were going to land. We landed at Ulaangom and were told everyone had to get off the plane, so we went to the departure gate instead of the arrival. After about thirty minutes we reboarded the plane and took off. I then looked at the schedule of all their flights, which was easy because they only fly to six cities a day and determined that only two cities had flights that arrived back in UB at the same time so we weren’t going to have any more unknown stops.

The taxi driver we got at the UB airport was honest and charged us $8 for the ride to our hostel, Danista. The $23 room was closer to downtown than our last place in UB.

We got to Danista around 3pm, and our driver was picking us up at 9am the next day, and we had a list of things we wanted to get done: buy towels, get allergy meds at pharmacy, buy a hair clip and tweezers, buy bug spray, get snacks for the car, get Katy’s gel nail polish (from the wedding) removed, get another headlight to replace the one stolen from Katy’s pack, and get more cash from the ATM.

Luckily for us there was a mall a four minute walk from our place, and we were able to everything taken care of there. In the US you can get most of these things taken care of in one store, but it took buying things at seven stores to get everything on the list. We quickly realized that things are cheap in UB, and Katy set out to buy assorted other “treasures”. Luckily her neck pillow and five face sheet masks purchased at three stores (don’t ask me) were easily covered by her $8 treasure budget. She was able to walk in and convey to the women in a salon what she wanted done with her nails, $4 and 20 minutes later her nails were free from the gel polish from the wedding.

We then decided to have Korean for dinner since we were in the mood for food with a little more spice than we have had in the past ten days.

We went back to the hostel to regroup, and it started to downpour, coupled with a very impressive lightening show. Then the power went out for about two hours, but it came back in right when we were ready to call it a night.