Again the week has been a bit uneventful but I've enjoyed it.
I've spent my time in the museums and cafes; the cafes I frequent are tourist cafes, foreigners just seem to gravitate towards them so they've been great for chance encounters, just chatting to strangers and swapping stories.
I've picked up a lot of fantastic travel tips and I've now established good travel contacts mostly in Ulaanbaatar, but in several different countries as well.
But its definitely been a motivation to return to Mongolia at a later date where I can be certain of traveling widely and cheaply in the country with reliable people, just as a tourist instead of a volunteer.

There are always hawkers around Peace Avenue, mostly selling art, or offering to scrub your shoes, use their rickety set of scales or selling sweets and tobacco or use their ancient, beaten up telephones. I usually ignore them but the other day, I gave in to the pestering to stop and talk to one fellow who had some lovely watercolors and decent English and it turned out that he had studied at Number 18 School (though this just may have been a selling tactic). It was a bit of a mistake as two other hawkers instantly homed in on the weak willed foreigner. It ended up as a loud money waving scene at the tourist information desk in the big posh post office.

Its encounters like that which really make the travel experience rather then seeing the sights or going to a place. I have a bizarre episode with an Irish man which ended up with him shouting angrily down my phone to an English friend of his in a busy shopping mall, he promptly handed me my phone back 'nice meeting you' and disappeared leaving me with a sense of surreality.

And some good news; my trip is tomorrow! Leaving at 11am to go somewhere far away. If the weather stays good I'll be away 5 days and come back on thursday, if it goes bad it will only be 2 or 3 days. So I have a car and a driver and an interpreter and I'll be staying with a nomadic family and explore the area of where ever it is I'm going, do some horse riding and some camel riding. So it should be good but I'm really nervous! I'll be the only foreigner there and well I just hope I don't screw up and insult someone.