DAY 301: Ulan Baatar (pronounced Ulan BAAT'r), which means "Red Hero," has been the capital of Mongolia since its "independence" from the Manchu Dynasty by help of the Russian Bolsheviks ("Independence" is in quotes because Mongolia eventually fell under the strong political and cultural influence of the Soviets.) The man responsible for the defeat of the Manchus and the eventual formation of the People's Government of Mongolia was Sükhbaatar (literally "Axe Hero") who had formed the army that teamed up with the Bolsheviks. A statue of this national hero stands in the middle of Ulan Baatar's Sükhbaatar Square, where a mausoleum that once held his remains stands at the northern side, flanked by the Parliament House.

This was just one of the sights I saw my first day in Ulan Baatar. I had arrived on a rainy morning via train and was picked up by Tatiana of Legend Tours, who had faith that I would arrive on the 7:33 a.m. train (which I did) even though she had been informed I would arrive at 6 a.m., when she originally showed up at the train platform. I hopped in her big SUV and she drove me through the city on a sort of mini city tour, showing me the central State Department Store, Sükhbaatar Square and the Chinese embassy, where I'd attempt to get my Chinese visa the following day.

The friendliness found in Tatiana continued when she introduced me to my host family, an elderly Mongolian couple, Vera and Gotov. Despite the fact that the neighborhood they lived in looked like a heavy-littered housing project in New York City, their humble apartment was very welcoming, with a big living room with satellite TV, a kitchen and a master bedroom.

After a nap, Vera served me breakfast and afterwards Gotov helped me find a laundromat in town. The two of them didn't speak any English -- I had to communicate with basic Russian (da, nyet, spasiba) but mostly body language. The two were patient with my inability to speak their language, and I was grateful for it after my homestay in Irkutsk with Nina.

My Mongolian surrogate parents took me to the city center in their SUV and brought me to a money exchange bureau to exchange my remaining rubles and some US dollars to local tögrögs and then dropped me off at the mall like I was their teenage American son. Before my surrogate parents left me, they told me which bus to take to get back home and even volunteered to pick up my laundry for me.

Actually the "mall" they dropped me off at wasn't a big one in the Western sense; it was the State Department Store, the big store no longer run by the state, but by private entrepreneurs that sold everything from groceries to DVD players and HiDef TVs. There I bought an English-Mongolian phrasebook which wasn't as helpful as I thought since the Mongolian half was in cyrillic letters, not in phonetic syllables in Roman characters.

I walked around Ulan Baatar -- known by ex-pats as "UB" -- pretty much hassle free with my Asian-looking face. Just like in South American (where my face was South-American-looking), most touts assumed I was a local, only giving flyers for tours and guesthouses to Caucasian folk. The only time my cover was blown was when I took a photo of the State Department Store like an obvious tourist, which prompted begging children to come out of nowhere to hound me for the ice cream bar I was eating.

DOWNTOWN U.B. WAS FAIRLY MODERN, although not as crazy as a bigger city. Buses, cars and trams polluted the air, but it was bearable to walk around in moment at a time -- phone call vendors on the streets wore dust masks. I didn't have enough time to see the museums by that time in the day, so I just wandered around, passed Sükhbaatar Square, the State Opera and Ballet Theater, the Tumen Ekh Ensemble Palace (closed) and the city circus building (also closed). I wandered outside the central business area to discover an old train museum and finally to something unlike the list mentioned above -- if you hadn't noticed, all those things mentioned were similar to those found in Russian cities due to the Soviet influence.

The Gandategchinlen Khiid monastery is the "largest and most important in Mongolia" (says Lonely Planet), both superlatives probably due to the fact that it actually survived the religious purges of the Soviets in the 1930s when they wiped out all establishments of religion in their territories in accordance with their atheist mandate. Gandategchilen Khiid, which means "great place of complete joy," was built in the mid 19th century for monks of the Lamaist faith, when Lamaism (Tibetan Buddhism, the one Richard Gere practices) became widespread throughout Mongolia. Today, over 150 monks pray there with prayer wheels and a huge 25-meter tall golden statue of the Buddha inside the Migjid Janraisig S&uulm;m temple, which was reconstructed in the 1990s to replace the damaged original.

I BOUGHT SOME PROVISIONS at the grocery for dinner and walked back home instead of taking the bus (it was only 20-minutes walking), only to find out that Vera had made dinner for me: spaghetti with meat sauce, Mongolian milk tea and baitsaan zuush, a sort of Mongolian cole slaw. I showed her the dictionary/phrasebook I bought that afternoon and the rest of the night my Mongolian surrogate parents and I (picture above) communicated simply by pointing to phrases in our respective language so the other could see the translation.

Later that night I realized that I was actually sleeping in the master bedroom -- the only bedroom in the house. Vera and Gorat had given it up for me. If there was a phrase for "mi casa es su casa" in my phrasebook, they might have pointed to it, but translating Mongolian to Spanish may have been too far a stretch, even for nice surrogate parents like them.