New Podcast — Mongolia: Under the Eternal Blue Sky + Endnotes

Our new show and Mel's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week

Our new episode Mongolia: Under the Eternal Blue Sky is in your podcast player right now! Visit our show notes for awe-inspiring photos and videos, links to our recommended books, and everything else we discuss in the show. Spoiler: We (especially Mel) fell madly in love with the vast open spaces and majestic scenery of Mongolia.

If we say 'Mongolia,' and you imagine an eagle hunter on horseback, silhouetted against an endless blue sky and vast open plains, you are not wrong. Ditto for thinking of Chingiss Khan, frigid winters, and resilient nomads in gers (yurts).

While those perceptions are valid, Mongolia may have some surprises for you. The sun shines 250 days each year, and summer days are luxuriously long and warm. Yes, Khan is a national hero (see: the 3-story glimmering steel statue of Genghis Khan on horseback), but Mongolians are most welcoming. The flap door of a ger is open to all, friends and strangers alike — and a hot bowl of milk tea will appear as soon as you cross the threshold.

In the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, you can eat in restaurants, visit a temple, and wander through museums. When you've had enough of the bustle, ride into the steppes — on a horse, a camel, or an all-terrain jeep — and back in time. Under the big sky, you can head north to spruce forests that stretch toward Russia, or west to the jaggy Altai mountains, or south to the wind-swept dunes of the Gobi Deserts (and, eventually, China).

In this episode, we meet a formidable Mongolian warrior princess, listen to the otherworldly sound of Tuvan throat singing, and travel back in Mongol history with the annual Naadam Festival (a.k.a. the Mongolian Olympics).

Then we recommend five great books that took us to Mongolia on the page:

• the story of an ancient warrior woman

• a nonfiction account of the world's toughest horse race

• a YA novel about a female eagle hunter

• an illustrated travelogue of riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad

• the tale of a road trip across Mongolia with twin-brother monks

Listen on your favorite podcast app or on our website. We hope you enjoy the show!

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Endnotes: 19 July

That inviting boat above is floating on Lake Bled, a perfectly charming lake in the Julian Alps of Slovenia. The wooden boat called a pletna is flat-bottomed and has been used as transport to Bled Island since 1590 (or as early as 1150, depending on who’s telling the story). The pletna are based on Italian gongolas and seat about 18 people. The boats are still made by hand and are propelled by two oars wielded by the boatman, a.k.a., the pletnar. There are only 23 pletna boats on Lake Bled, operated by the descendants of the original 22 pletnar families. This video makes the whole enterprise feel very majestic — and here’s a fun video about how to spend a great 48 hours in Lake Bled. Bonus points if you also visit the nearby Slovenian capital of Ljubljana and eat Bled cream cake (Blejska kremšnita).

• This whodunnit choose-your-own-adventure game from LitHub is super fun. It’s the perfect level of engagement for happy hour or during a train ride.

• Did you read the fantastic book Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu; it was the 2020 National Book Award winner. Here’s a sneak peek at the upcoming movie adaption.

• Must-click headline: How to Pick the Perfect Book to Read on a Plane.

• Is this Little Debbie Park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the sweetest park in the state? (Lots of photos here.)

  

• This essay about reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit out loud is a sweet story and a neat etymology lesson. ‘Many fairy tales are written in a prose meter that is specific to the genre, often quite lilting (’Onceup__on__ a time…‘). It’s akin to writing in hymn meter, for example. Such stories are full of iambs and anapests, so that the sentences often start running in lulling rhythms, with occasional choriambs. Beatrix Potter is especially good at this, in The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher… Tolkien has a great ability to write this fairy-tale prose. When you read the book out loud this lilting style becomes much more obvious and engrossing.’

• These photos of Olympic athletes doing their thing in Paris landmarks are just beautiful — and this piece on how athletes get their cumbersome equipment to the Games is fascinating. ‘While swimmers can shove a Speedo in a back pocket and runners can stash a pair of track spikes in a backpack, other Paris-bound athletes face an Olympian challenge in getting their equipment — from boats to guns to horses — to these Summer Games.’ (WaPo gift link)

• Quiz: Can you identify these world capitals? I got 9/12.

• OK! Who wants to go in on this medieval monastery with us? It’s just 30 minutes from London, it’s surely not haunted (!), and the library looks like this:

• What a superbly featured room and what excellent boiled potatoes! Many years since I’ve had such an exemplary vegetable.

• There are a lot of theories about how ‘OK’ became the universal way to communicate that all is well. Here’s the okey-dokey story of how one man discovered its origins.

• News you can use: How to Survive Without a Cell Phone Signal. ‘If by chance you do get lost in the backcountry, the first rule is try not to freak out.’