During our train journey to Mongolia we were approached by the train attendents and after some pointing and guessing we realised that they were asking to borrow a knife so kurt, one of the guys from our group gave them his multi tool. We decided to walk to their cabin to see what they were doing and discovered them cutting up a sheeps head with it. On reaching the border leaving russia we had officials come aboard to check our paper work we had filled in and to search the cabins of the train which they did using sniffer dogs as well. The crossing of the boarder took about 8 hours which involved a lot of sitting around and no toilets open on the train so we had to use the platform toilets. The same process was carried out again as soon as we reached the border into Mongolia. Eventually we arrived in Ulaanbaatar very early in the morning and our group was met by our honchos MJ and Bartar. We drove to the hostel, had showers and went for breakfast. After breakfast we walked to a collection of Buddhist monastries where we were able to go in to some of them. The interiors were very impressive and very colourful. Even more interesting were the monks sitting round chanting and praying to the sound of drums and symbols. After seeing this we then all walked up a very large hill with a soviet monument at the top of it to get a full view of the city. The view was good but the heart of the city wasn't very impressive, it was more the surrounding mountains that were. We then went for lunch to a really good mongolian restaurant where unfortunately the guy in our group with a nut allergy had an attack and had to go to hospital. We were all very worried about him but he made a speedy recovery and was able to join us in the evening to go to a cultural show about Mongolia. After this we all went to an irish bar and spent the evening drinking and socialising to live music.