Gandan Khiid

---Updated with Pictures---

I put the picture up on this blog before I got here, and it is so far a completely inaccurate depiction of my life in Mongolia. Hopefully I will go out into the countryside tomorrow, but so far I have only been in the city. Ulaanbaatar is dirty and busy. It feels very much like a Russian provincial city, due to the 70 years of Soviet influence. The architecture is all Soviet, and Mongolian uses the Cyrillic alphabet which enforces that feeling.

But the city is very cool. I wandered around today, up to the Gandan Khiid monastery, which is the largest remaining in the city. Nearly all the Buddhist monasteries were destroyed in the 30's by the communists, and tens of thousands of monks were murdered. Which is very sad, and as a result the country today has few of its Buddhist roots remaining. But this monastery was saved as a showpiece for foreign dignitaries, and became active again once democracy took over. 

The monastery is a complex of temples, and there were monks in many of them singing, praying, or texting on their cell phones. The largest temple is about 5 stories tall and is filled from ceiling to floor with a giant standing Buddha statue surrounded by prayer wheels. It was really an impressive sight. The faithful were doing the prayer wheel circuit, so I followed along, and definitely felt something special and magical.