Big lake, big Lenin

If you like animals at all, don't ever go to a Siberian zoo. Aside from learning that particular life lesson the hard way, though, today was a good day. Ulan Ude is as close as we'll get to Mongolia. It's kind of dumb to say that the people here are mostly Asian, our being in Asia and all, but you know what I mean. East Asian, I guess. Near Ulan Ude is a Buddhist monastery and on our way there an English-speaking Russian guy named Yegor (not Igor) made friends with us. Holy crap, that almost never happens here. The monastery was full of brightly-colored pagoda-style buildings, which were a welcome change from the many, many Orthodox churches I've seen over the past few months. In particular, it was nice to see pictures of the Dalai Lama instead of huge-foreheaded, demented-looking baby Jesuses. We made it to the monastery in time to watch the 9am prayers; a carful of monks on cell phones squealed in around 8.58, and some others straggled in after the prayers had started. Still, the best part of the monastery for me was the resident puppy who tried to eat my hair. The stray animal situation here is unfortunate, but it does sometimes mean puppies. Anyway, after the monastery, we made our way to our 'hotel,' aka spare room in the apartment of Olga, a French-speaking Mongolian woman, with Yegor in tow. He tried very hard and entirely unsuccessfully to bargain down the cost of our room; in the process he and Olga became friends and hung out talking politics for several hours while Shane and I napped and showered.

The depressing zoo was part of an otherwise interesting ethnography museum; there are a lot of these open-air museums here that show traditional Siberian villages: huts, houses, schools, churches, etc. An exhibit about the native people of this region made me wonder if there's not some perfect storm of genetics (the native people here must (?) be related to the ones who crossed the Bering Strait to become native Americans, who do seem to have some genetic predisposition to alcoholism) plus Russian culture that explains why there are so many drunk people here, even by Russian standards.

Speaking of Russian culture, kind of, Ulan Ude has the world's biggest Lenin head statue. (Maybe the world's biggest head, period, but no one's bothered to do a full census of head statues to confirm that.) It's huge, and a little creepy, and people have wedding photos taken in front of it. Which is also kind of creepy.