27/05/2026
📍🇲🇳 Mongolia D4, Karakorum
We had breakfast at the guesthouse this morning. At the next table, a group of French travelers kept drifting back into French after trying to speak English. An older man was passionately talking about the importance of travel, which was funny, considering everyone there was already a backpacker traveling through Mongolia. I joked with Luke that this was exactly what Chinese people mean by “Lao Deng” — once people get older, they suddenly love giving life lessons.
After breakfast, we walked to Erdene Zuu Monastery. Even without knowing much about its historical background, I was immediately drawn to it. The architecture felt unlike anything I had seen before. Chinese-style roofs standing in the middle of the grasslands, but the longer I walked around, the more it reminded me a little of Vietnamese architecture too, though not quite Chinese.
“You mean the imperial city in Huế?”
“Yes, exactly — Huế.”
Later I looked it up and found out that Erdene Zuu was built in the 16th–17th century, during a period when the Mongolian steppe world had already fragmented politically. Mongolian nobles were beginning to search for a new spiritual foundation, which perhaps also explains why a vast and rugged nomadic culture embraced Tibetan Buddhism so deeply.
What struck me most was how different the space felt from many Chinese temples or imperial religious complexes, which often feel more formal, enclosed, and hierarchical. Erdene Zuu, by contrast, feels open to the landscape around it. In a subtle way, the architecture reflects a different relationship between humans and nature.
After visiting the main sights, we headed back to the bus station to buy tickets for the return journey. In a tiny room, a woman was selling bus tickets while also casually running a little snack shop at the same time. Then came another long six-hour ride the next day.
It was my last day in Mongolia. I had wanted to see a local performance the whole trip, but somehow never managed to make it work because of online work. When we arrived back in Ulaanbaatar around 4pm, I told Luke: “No matter how tired I am tonight, I’m going to see this show.”
Right before getting off the bus, the guesthouse owner mentioned that there was also a Korean woman staying with us on the same bus. We looked around and realized she was sitting right behind us. When she heard we were planning to see a performance, she immediately said she wanted to join too. She had also been trying to find a theater earlier in the week, but without internet access she could never figure out where to go.
The Korean woman lives in the US now. Her husband passed away two years ago. When she was younger, she studied French literature and cinema, so she could also speak French. After the performance, we ended up having dinner together at a Korean restaurant. Spending the last night of Mongolia in a Korean restaurant, talking about German and French literature and films with a Korean woman and an American somehow felt like one of those strange little moments that only travel can create.
