Mongolian hot spots
A CHINESE proverb says that when Mongolians party Asia locks its doors. That's hardly surprising considering that Mongolia's golden age was Genghis Khan's reign of terror, a time when Mongolians happily cultivated a reputation for excessive rape and pillage.
In more recent times Ulan Bator vied with East Berlin for the dubious distinction of being the world's most hopeless entertainment centre. Now things have moved on again. The winter nights in the world's coldest capital may still be as long and as dark, but they are no longer as boring. Seventy years of strict Stalinism, preceded by three centuries of orthodox Lamaism, and now the Mongolians cannot get enough nightlife.
Every few weeks there is a new sensation. One week heralded the opening of a new French restaurant, La Renaissance; the week before a midnight striptease began at the Emon nightclub; and before that a Hong Kong entrepreneur dreaming of a Las Vegas on the steppes opened his Mongolian casino.
Ulan Bator now has something to cater to every taste from heavy rock to Mongolian rap and even a chanteuse crooning in French. In half a dozen nightclubs the dancing goes on until 6 am and the only measure served seems to be a triple.
Six years ago when Mongolia finally threw off its Soviet yoke, Ulan Bator's streets emptied of both people and cars after 7 pm. Only two bars existed in the whole city of 600,000 people, both serving slack-jawed Russian conscripts and resigned Eastern European tourists. These were in the Ulan Bator and the Bayangol Hotels, in whose entrances secret policemen in leather jackets could be seen trussling with hopeful Mongolians trying to sneak in.
Only the British Embassy provided an alternative venue for the tiny community of Westerners when, on Friday nights, the Steppe Inn opened. In those days the food supply in Ulan Bator was so bad that British diplomats invested part of their spare time trying to grow their own fresh vegetables, a feat which so impressed the Mongolian Ministry of Agriculture that locals were urged to study their example.
After the democrats swept the ex-communist People's Revolutionary Party from power last July, things have changed. La Chaumiere Restaurant offers such delicacies as patisserie aux crevettes served by waiters sporting bow-ties and you can even order a decent bottle of Italian Friruli wine to wash it down. Such is the wide range of foreign cuisine now available that the Tourism Ministry boasts how visitors 'can eat in a different restaurant every night'. In addition to Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Russian, Czech and Indian eateries, there is the Countryside, with its Wild West decor and waitresses dressed as cowgirls.