Having arrived in Ulaanbaatar I must say: this city does not match its exotically spelled name. Big, non-descriptive buildings, huge cars with tinted windows, loads of neon signs. Could be any city in post-Soviet Russia.
It’s a big city: half of Mongolia’s 4’000’000 people live in the capital. It did not take long before I started wondering whether the second half would lead a more interesting life than the evident misery of poor Mongols in and around Ulaanbaatar. 
Let me tell you already now: YES! They do. But here is the story about how I found out. 
The first evening I spent in no-one’s company sitting in a bistro-style Mongolian restaurant. The Mongolians in Ulaanbaatar are rough folks – they have not yet adopted the concept of moving aside if somebody comes along their way. Neither are they quiet or in any way polite. Finally, and to my disappointment, I must say that the best-looking Mongolian girls I have seen in a doubtful bar in Shanghai when travelling with Adrian. Therefore, I chose a table in a corner of the restaurant – not looking for too much exposure towards neither the ugly girls smiling at me nor the aggressively gleaming men.

I was reading the Lonely Planet I had lent from a guest in the formidable UB Guesthouse when suddenly I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I rose immediately sensing that a confrontation was under way; I did not want to remain in a sitting position. And then I immediately realized that I was wrong: the hand belonged to a friendly smiling Brit with red cheeks and not too much hair left on this head. He asked me where I was from and then started to tell me over a beer or two about his business with cashmere goats. The discussion was quite interesting and led me to a new business idea (which is a good thing, since in less than two months I will have to look for ways of getting rich in order to compete with my fellow Swiss salary-men for house, wife and double-garage).
The evening was interesting and got rounded up nicely when arriving back in the hotel and seeing a multinational crowd opening a bottle of Tschingis Khan Vodka. I spare you the details but on the next day I did not do too much.
I had still not seen anything of Mongolia other than its capital. Therefore I rose to my feet on day three and engaged a translator for 15 $ and booked a tour with Bobby and Mr. Kim, the owners of the UB Guesthouse (go there if you find yourself in UB – really a good place to stay!).

To my surprise, I and Urnaa, my translator, got picked up by a hybrid Toyota – a strange thing for a country where cleanliness seems not to rank very high up in the list of priorities. We then drove towards the North, passed camels, praying monuments like in Tibet and I registered the now beautiful landscape with gentle hills and snow mountains with relief after the moloch UB!

Some 100km North of UB, we followed smaller and smaller roads until we finally drove on the dry grass – no more roads to bee seen. Now I could see the famous “Ger”, the tent-like white houses of the Nomad families. We stopped in front of one of them – directly under a red rock. What a beautiful spot! The Nomad family living here welcomed us with few words and we were guided into the smaller of the two gers which seemed to be the “guest house”.

What followed was a shock: even though the gers are built out of fabric and wood only, it was about 60 degrees warmer inside than outside (and outside it was about minus 20 degrees Celsius). The little iron stove was extracting such a heat, that I immediately had to strip down three layers.
Inside, the ger was decorated beautifully with carpets and woven goods. There were 6 beds arranged in a circle along the walls and a top light were the bright sun shone in.
Urnaa told me a lot about how Nomad families live, how the gers are built (it takes only about 30 minutes for a family to set up or store away a ger!) and introduced me to real Mongolian food and the salty butter-tea I hated so much since my Tibet trip. After lunch, we napped a bit and then were summoned to attend a football game played by all the kids of the valley. Before long, the chief waved at me, and Urnaa explained that he and his brother-in-law would set off to count the family’s horses, which were wide-spread in the hills around the ger. They invited me to come with them.
Of course I accepted and mounted a small horse, typical for Mongolia. We then quickly gained height and I enjoyed riding in the snow and under the bright blue sky. The Nomads spoke to me and I understood that it was mostly about horses and vodka. About the later I knew a bit for experience and about the earlier I said, that Mongolian horses seemed to be the best in the world. They could follow my sign language and were happy enough. We rode 3 or 4 hours, counted horses, had tea with a very loudly speaking female shepard and galloped through the powder snow.
Later in the afternoon we came back to a jealous Urnaa – as the grand-daughter of a horseman, she had wanted to ride out, too, but there had only three horses been ready and since I was the “Guest from Sweden”, I was the lucky one. Urnaa told me, that many of the family’s horses had the cough. They had been vaccinated twice already, but it had not helped. Therefore, the family decided to use the old-fashioned method of blood-letting as a last resort (horses can die from the cough). I was invited to attend the spectacle as an observer.
One of the nomads brought along a stick with a lasso mounted at one end. He then caught one horse after the other and his sidekick hammered a long nail through the nose of the horses. The horses freaked out, rose to their back legs and got very nervous. It became more and more difficult to catch a horse and the men were breathing hard.
The whole family was involved in this spectacle – even the 3 years old son was sitting on the fence observing the actions.
After all the horses had been tortured or blessed with an old-fashioned treatment, the sun was almost down. It was time to light a new fire in our ger and to prepare for another hot and ice-cold night. However, before I could enter the ger, another neighbour/relative arrived on his horse – with an eagle on his arm! I was petrified! A true eagle on a man’s arm? Incredible.
I found out that this man was a hunter and that the eagle was tamed and helped hunting down animals. After the principles of an eagle-hunt had been explained to me with sign-language and the help of Urnaa’s translation, I was invited to hold the big bird on my hand. This was great, this was a true highlight! Children, let me tell you: holding an eagle on your arm is much cooler than swimming with the boring dolphins!