Choibalsan has trash cans?

Supposedly, the fall of communism dealt a bad blow to Choibalsan’s standard of living. “Choibalsan is a poor city with the highest unemployment rate in Mongolia,” says the Lonely Planet. Since I have a nice job, I wonder how much I see of the real Choibalsan. I’m neither a ger dweller nor an underpaid hallway scrubber.

 But the Mongolian government is also busting its butt to build up Choibalsan. The government wants to keep people in the eastern and western corridors of the country — far away from the capital, Ulaanbaatar.

 Every year thousands of migrants stream into Ulaanbaatar. Unfortunately, UB can’t handle the stress. Crime in the ger districts abounds. Young people beg or pickpocket. Some say that one winter in UB damages your lungs as much as smoking for six years.

So, Choibalsan gets a good amount of attention. It’s the biggest city in Mongolia’s east. Here, the state has built a huge hospital (500 jobs) and an electric plant that employs another couple hundred. Choibalsan has a university, at least two colleges, a shiny library, a funky-ass history museum, and the Dornod Aimag archives. We have college internet centers donated by Japan and Korea. I’m typing on computers donated by the the goverment of India(!) And e very few years, it seems, the government builds new schools.

Finally: We have trash cans. This is intense. None of my friends has noticed public garbage cans anywhere else in the country. You’d be more likely to see a mango tree than a trash can in Mongolia. Or so I thought. Here in Choibalsan, each downtown street has a cute receptacle shaped like a mushroom or soccerball.

Stupid broken camera! Photos will come…