Mongolian round-up

Well, I've finally got around to summarising the last bit of my Mongolian experience. First a bit of general. The buildings vacated by the Hungarian Embassy staff is now occupied by the French ambassador and underlings. Apparently the interior was quite ramshackle when the French government first acquired it. The French, like the Hungarians, fly the EU flag alongside their national one. The Hungarians have a historic link to rub it in the nose of the neighbouring Turkish Embassy about who and who is not in the EU, but the French don't like the Turks either and this is, I guess, why the EU flag stays fluttering. Also, I saw the construction of a South Korean hotel in the space of a few months on my regular bus route - Hotel Richfield it goes by the name of, with a little see-through pyramid of iron bars on top, much like the Louvre but without the glass. Unfortunately, all the windows were put in upside down. Possibly this was a design flaw (and if so quite a grievous one), but it does smack of Mongolian building and business practices - that of organised incompetence - they know what to do, but they don't how to do it or do it badly. How did I know the windows were upside down? Well, the laws of convection state that hot air rises. If you're room is a bit hot or stuffy, you open a window to let the hot air rise out and high rise places tend to not have the main section of the window open right out, so you open the window at the top. The windows on Hotel Richfield opened at the bottom, to let all the cold air out I guess in the height of summer. This is not to mention the issues of child safety where a careless child could quite easily fall out or open it themselves causing danger, while bending over to open or close, even if you are short, is bad for your back whereas stretching upwards is good for it. And not just one window was like this; they all were installed the same way. Furthermore, lest one think I'm being unfair, I learnt that at the airport, the regional planes would not even be flying were it nor for Western expertise; one turboprop aircraft, i.e. a more basic propeller-driven one than one powered by jet engine, was being repaired by Mongolian 'engineers' until a company brought in some Western mechanics to speed it up. The Western crew looked at the duration of the contract and found that the work was 4600 hours over, roughly 193 days late and it still wasn't finished! Not the fault of the Mongolians - they just hadn't been taught how to fix it and were working it out as they went along. It's better than feeling the heat of the boss and signing off on an unfinished contract as has happened. It just makes you shake your head. High literacy and numeracy are fine and good, but they only take you so far. Mongolia needs to massively upgrade its knowledge base. But I don't want to be too down on it because there are many great things about the country. Anyway, like with a certain movie about a green ogre, they've got the beating of the UK again, Transformers appearing a whole week before its British release. Spiderman 3 being beaten to the Mongolian box office by Transformers? I really don't understand Mongolian film distribution.