Underground

Walking in Ulaanbaatar is difficult. The pavements are treacherous at the best of times, with innumerable cracks, missing bricks and large holes. These are all now hidden beneath a layer of white. Plus there is the fake marble that some genius decided to build UB pavements out of, which turns into a hellish slip'n'slide once a layer of snow has been dumped on it and trodden to mush by a few hundred people. The snow's mostly not shown in these pictures as some lucky people have the job of breaking it up with crowbars. This helps in the long term, as the snow soon freezes into rock hard and deadly-slippery ice. But in the short term, the snow at least provides some grip while once it's been broken up and swept off the footpath, only a thin sheen of icy water remains and you have to shuffle along without lifting your feet to avoid landing on your butt (coined "the UB shuffle").

Then there are the open manhole covers like the ones pictured (pictures are crap, it's hard to make holes in the ground look pretty). These ones are easy to spot (though not necessarily easy to avoid for the maniac drivers - I've seen a car stuck with its wheel in the first manhole pictured but alas, had no camera. The driver might not have appreciated me snapping photos of that though, so maybe not-alas). Most of them are on footpaths however, and much less easy to spot. Some look safe and solid and aren't either. Some of the covers have been removed altogether and replaced with flimsy pieces of plastic, now converted into tiger-traps by the snow. It's a bit of a tricky business.

These manholes are basically doorways to the underground plumbing and sewerage systems of UB that serve as home to the city's thousands of homeless people. Houses in UB are heated by a network of hot water pipes that run throughout the entire city, including through these underground spaces. As the temperature continues to fall (it's around -20 now but will fall below -40 overnight in January), huddling around these pipes under the ground is the only way for some entire families to survive. Pretty grim. 

UB is not a cheap city. The mining boom, the small number of very wealthy Mongolians and the growing number of expats on US dollar salaries able to afford expensive houses and luxury clothes means prices are high. A trip to the supermarket for milk, bread, cheese, tea, butter, and eggs will cost around 15000 tugrug, around $12. A warm winter coat will cost around $100, and an average 1 bedroom apartment outside of the city centre costs $275 per month. The average monthly salary is only around $200, so really the wonder is that more people aren't living underground.

Vodka on the other hand, is about the cheapest thing you can buy, with a litre bottle setting you back only around $5; and the easiest thing as well, with the ratio of people to bottle shops being about 270:1 - the highest in the world. Given the lives of desperation the city's poorest people lead, and the price and ease at which temporary warmth and oblivion can be bought, the 25% rate of alcoholism among Mongolian men is depressingly unsurprising. Obviously the follow-on effects of this are horrible and innumerable, the most awful of which (to my mind anyway) is the sky-high rate of domestic violence, but this post contains enough awfulness so I'll leave it here.