Chinggis Monument, continued

After seeing the sights from the horse's neck, we got back into the car and drove to a restaurant nearby where we got out of the car and TOOK OUR PIZZAS INTO THE RESTAURANT!! Unbelievable! This, of course, was about 3 hours after we picked them up, but they were still good. I have no problem eating cold leftover pizza so there was no problem eating cold untouched pizza, either. The pizza here is strictly un-Italian (carrots, corn, cheddar cheese and I have no idea what the meat was and don't want to ask), but if you give up your expectations and just take it for itself it is pretty good.

Yesterday I went with Altansukh and a new Japanese friend of his to the Intellectual/Puzzle Museum. It was wonderful. They have 4000 3d wooden puzzles, the biggest of which has 673 pieces and requires 56,831 moves to disassemble. (No, I didn't try it). It is a privately owned museum and the founder joined us and did some magic tricks for those of us in the tour. The museum also includes his collection of chess sets from around the world, including some ancient ones that had boards that are 10x10 and 11x11 squares instead of the 8x8 boards in use now. I wonder what kinds of moves the extra pieces made and why they dropped out of use.

I had had some plans for the day yesterday which went completely changed as the day progressed. Altansukh had texted me about the museum on Tuesday and I replied that, yes, I wanted to go and could we go in the morning? He always texts because he doesn't trust being able to understand me over the phone, I think. Anyway, it turns out that he left his phone in his car and didn't get back to me until late Wednesday am suggesting a 3pm meeting.. OK, so I took off for the central city, deciding to walk and do an errand and then head over to Cafe Amsterdam, a favorite place for ex-pats that has WiFi, thinking I'd get up-to-date with my email and this blog. Last week two of the teachers took me to a jeweler because I had the idea to have a necklace made with my name in the ancient vertical Mongolian script, not the Cyrillic script in use since 1940. He had indicated the necklace would be ready on Monday, so I thought everything would be copacetic by Wednesday. Hah! I got there at 1:30 pm and he showed me the piece of brass with the name on it....but absolutely no progress had been made on it. Not having any way to communicate with him, I decided to sit and wait. He took out his jeweler's saw and proceeded to begin
sawing. He finished cutting out the figure at 2:30 when his shop was visited by two guys carrying some sort of tripod with a strange object attached on top. He turned his attention to them and started working on a bolt that apparently had had its head broken off. About that time Altansukh called and put off our meeting until 4. At 3 the jeweler finished with the 2 guys and began polishing my name. He was done by 3:30, so that's when I started walking to meet Altansukh. So, there went my plans for lunch, emailing and blogging. Luckily I really love the necklace and it was incredibly cheap, so I guess I paid for it with time and inconvenience as much as with anything else.

When the teachers took me to the jeweler and we were negotiating the style and price, etc., the fees were itemized for me. One of the items listed was "human salary".

I saw a man yesterday wearing a bright red t-shirt that read "I'm a Gleek.".

A billboard on the street for a new gym advertised "Diet Dance".