On day 11 of this trip, I managed to wash my hair using a sachet of shampoo already in the bathroom and just about got it all out of the sachet while having very wet hands; I got down to breakfast at 8:15am, J (who I was in a room with) had gone down about 10 minutes earlier, and there she was sat with the muscly bloke called G and the German girl [I hadn’t written up my name sheet and was on a new notepad at this point]. The bloke was saying f*** or f****** around once to twice per sentence, CNN was on the TV on the wall –and news included Japan being hit by Typhoon Trami and something about Macedonia’s name change. By 8:30, J had gone back to the room; I noticed the bloke was looking at boxing news on his phone, I had my breakfast by 8:40 (and nicked some biscuits), and then went back upstairs, wrote up my name sheet, then stuffed everything into my bag, brushed my teeth and then went back down.
Then I got very confused over what to do with my luggage, causing some annoyance from our group leader (which wasn’t very nice). We all got on the bus, paid 25,000 [now in 2022, 1 Mongolian Tugrik = 0.0003 British Pound]. for the show last night, I saw a building that said ‘Dublin – Mongolia’s first Irish pub’ on it when there was a brief stop for laundry, and the roads through the city were very bumpy; I saw an ‘Autodip Pub’, the Olympic rings on poles outside a building, and there was a Harman Dulux village. Some bumps/holes were shooting me up several inches from my seat and the bumpiness continued on a wiggly road following the river (and several cows were grouped together having a drink).

At 10:00am there was a supermarket stop and in there I counted 17 different brands of toothpaste – including Himalayan herbal toothpaste, 1.5 kg jars of pickled cucumbers, jars of salad, jars of pickled mushrooms, pickled raspberries, and pickled peach slices, Nescafe coffee, Korea Cafe coffee mix, Whiskers and Felix cat food, Heinz tomato ketchup, hot dogs in tins, bottles of tapar (which from the pictures I would assume is yoghurt),frozen ready made pizzas, root ginger, small tubs of sugary multi coloured sweets, and in the fruit and veg area just above apples and pineapples were huge cabbages (about 0.75ft in diameter). Then, with 25KG sacks of all-purpose flour, were what appeared to be small slices of already toasted bread, croissants with strawberry jam in the middle, bun like things that said ‘Pooh Bakery’ and had a picture of Winnie the Pooh on the packet, Mr Chips crisp packets (though the main brand was Lays), bags of Taffel snacks, pots of popcorn, various Nestle cake kits, bags of Japan Niigata rice, and lots and lots of packets of Haribo sweets, including the usual starmix and marshmallows, as well as Haribo apple sour spaghetti and Haribo Primavera Erdbeerer (supposed to look like strawberries), Nutella, sachets of what I think was long life milk, 1KG sacks of nuts, raisins and apricots, and ‘Rubber Duck Gummys’, which had a bright yellow cartoon duck on the package and said ‘three-dimensional – so cool! – soft and tasty’, and at that point the group leader came and grabbed me…

…and suddenly at 11:00am, we stopped, as there were several enormous birds of prey, a couple of camels and a donkey – next to a small souvenir stall. The owners were charging for photos with them, I went for it, had a large very thick leather glove, and then this enormous bird put on my arm, and was told by a man who barely spoke any English to wave my arm around a bit – which I did, it flapped, someone I forgot from the group took some photos and I filmed a short video of the place before we got back on the bus and on to the horrendously bumpy road…