Super-Sized Batman and Robin to the rescue in UB

UB, Mongolia

There's a lot of construction:



There are many colors:


There's a lot of good, inexpensive food


There are a lot of homeless children living in the street.
(In fact, there's a lot of homelessness in general. Apparently 38% of the population is unemployed.)

There's a lot of trash on the streets - years of Soviet control insisted that monies not be used for decoration.

And there's a lot of crime - according to our apartment manager 50% of her guests experience some kind of crime during their stay in UB.

But back to food, I'm on day three of antibiodics and feeling OK. It was a rough 8 or 9 days, but I'm doing much better now. The picture above was my first meal in several days. We spent our first day in UB napping, showering, unpacking, celebrating the fact that we weren't on the train again, and then just walking around - it's that travel lost - wandering until something feels familiar.

Anyway, after I took my second antibiodic, I felt that it was time to be reintroduced to food. We went to Chez Bernards - a European-style restaurant recommended in Lonely Planet. It's located on Peace Avenue, the main street in UB. I had just taken my first bite of dinner when a guy approached the next table. He was mumbling something in Mongolian (like I would be able to understand it if he would have been speaking clearly!!) Anyway, as Ben and I were trying to tell the guy it was cool he sat there (assuming that's what he asked) Amanda screamed that someone had taken her purse. The thief, the mumbler's friend, was trying to escape behind me.

Apparently, he had no idea how quick and agile the chunky can be. I didn't even get out of my chair - I just tackled him to the ground. Amanda grabbed her purse out of his hands as he was going down (she says that happened before I tackled him, but really, that seems like an irrelevent detail). In the process I ended up falling over backwards, ripping off his sunglasses and jacket, and clinging to his belt. I hit the ground hard, a lot harder then I expected. I landed on a large cement block, used to secure an umbrella during the sunny afternoons. I actually remember thinking, as I was tugging on his pants, it certainly would be entertaining if I ripped them down, de-pantsing him in the middle of the restaurant, in the view of many people walking down Peace street.

This didn't happen.

Because sometime when I was on the ground clinging to this thief's trousors, my chunky brother Ben (chunky powers activate) jumped out of his seat and grabbed this dude's arms and had him in some kind of wrestling hold - arms pinned behind his back. Once again, I could not see all of this, as I was on the ground clinging to his pants.

These two thieves had no idea what they were getting into when they messed with the chunky brother and sister.

No cops showed up.
No one from the restaurant tried to assist.

Ben continued to hold the dude for a few more seconds while he tried to wiggle his way out. I picked myself up off the cement block. I had scratched up my hand, ripped off a few fingernails, and once I stopped shaking, cleaning the blood off my fingers, we spent the rest of the evening fantasizing how we were single-handedly going to stop crime in Mongolia.