Where is the camel?

My dear friends 

As you are reading this, you probably heard that I am living in Mongolia for the next half of a year. To bring a little bit of Mongolia to wherever you are right now, I created this Blog where I am going to post pictures and stories of what I experience in the land of Dschinghis Khan. 

The reason why I’m here is to take a small break after I finished my bachelor degree, to think of what to do next and last but not least having some adventures. I am currently doing an internship for the GIZ in the field of development work and cooperation in a project called Integrated Mineral Resources Initiative. You can find more information about it here (GIZ IMRI)

In the following you will find some pictures from the first 3 weeks. To sum up first: I am absolutely sure that it was the right choice to go Mongolia. To be honest I was a bit sceptical in the beginning, because Ulaanbaatar (UB) is not the city which you have heard of for being THE city where to spend the winter working. Luckily on my first working day the German embassy invited for the Day of German Unity, where I met a bunch of cool people + I have great colleagues. As it is most important to have some good friends I’m absolutely happy about that situation. Beside that, UB is quite a worth living city where you can do more things than I looks at first sight.

I cannot complain about too little work and if I’m not working or writing a blog I am always around doing interesting stuff! So please be understanding that I will just update the blog just here and there and this is also the reason why I am able to start this Blog only now. But here are finally some first impressions of Mongolia :-)

Here is my apartment, click on the pictures to enlarge them.

This is the living room of my lovely apartment, where I could move in just after I was picked up at the airport. It is perfect for my purposes, because it is 3 min footwalk away from work and has adjustable heaters, so I can set the temperature myself (which is not the standard!).

The view from my apartment after the first snowfall. Right now the snow is gone, but i am pretty sure that it will come back. Winter is coming!

The view from another windows during sunrise. Sunrises and sunsets are often brightly red and orange which is incredible to see but are a sign of strong airpollution, because the light is diffracted at suspended particles

I am happy that I met some more enthusiastic outdoor freaks, which went climbing on the weekend and I was able to come with them. They were perfectly equipped and really knew what they were doing, so we had a great day climbing on a deserted rock in a nearby national park. The weather was perfect for this time of the year and the landscape was just incredible.

No words necessary

Horse riding in Mongolia is what is skiing in Switzerland. Most people here, especially from the countryside, learn it in their early childhood. So I had to become friends with horses again after my relationship to these animals was disturbed caused by an incident in Oman, where I had my first riding experience which ended up with me crashing into a tree. Now I gave it a second try and I’m pretty sure it was not the last time!

gleich gehts los!

my calm new friend

beautiful landscape even without sun

Horses as icebreakers

The horse was having fun

A Ger (In Germany called Jurte) where we could warm up, after reaching the camp again

One more highlight of which I was not able to take a picture of was an earthquake – A sensation to every surviving geologist! It was not very strong but clearly recognisable. Interestingly it is not listed on any relevant earthquake information websites. But here is a short newspaper article about it: Klick

Thats it, I hope you enjoyed the first entry, there will be more coming. Please excuse any language mistakes, English not my mother tongue, but I hope there will be less complains about the language than I had on my Blog about Oman ;-)

I am always happy to get any suggestions for topics to write about! Constructive criticism is allowed and also if you find any bad language mistakes: Please write me!

I hope you are all doing well out there :-) See u soon

Malte 







P.S. Where is the camel?