Beijing, but first more on Mongolia

The combination of blogger and other google crap (like docs) being unavailable and Beijing being blindingly awesome has really set me back on the blogging. I have so much to say about China-so-far. And I'm going to, but there are a couple more Mongolian gems that I want to offer to the universe before I do so.

As totally radical as the Mongolian landscape is, its museums are that lame. The score between indoors and outdoors in Mongolia is, like, zero to 1 million. So when visiting a museum (whether voluntarily or during some sort of tour company death march), I'd set the bar super low. Or maybe just don't set a bar. Just pretend you've never been to
a museum before, and your expectations may be exceeded.

Nowhere was the lameness more on display than at the Natural History Museum in UB. In 1920, Roy Andrew Chapman (an American explorer) went on expedition to the Gobi to dig up dinosaurs. He discovered, like, 8 kinds of dinosaurs there, and tons of fossils and other archeological goodies. He and his crew dug it all up, trekked the loot through the
desert on camel back, and shipped it home.

Now, one has to give the Mongolians credit for co-opting this story and kind of making it their own. Because the story goes that the Mongolians knew the bones were kicking around but thought they were dragons. And, since dragons are nasty mythical things, they just left them there in the rock. A less generous people might therefore have been kind of pissy that some foreigner came and rediscovered the artifacts and stole them and got crazy famous. But the Mongolians seem, at least on the surface, pretty pleased that the excavation was from their very own Flaming Cliffs and proudly show a documentary
about the expedition at meal time. 

Chapman eventually gave Mongolia 1 of the dinosaur skeletons he had found there and this formed the entire business case for creating the Natural History Museum.  Besides that one specimen, the rest of the dinosaur room is a hodgepodge of leftover scraps; a pelvis here, a left forearm there.  There is a donation box in front of one incomplete skeleton asking visitors for a contribution so more of the remains can be restored.  Sadly, the most complete and prized skeletons that were taken from the cliffs were shipped to New York.  There they can be seen in a much larger dinosaur room in a much
grander Natural History Museum.