Food in Mostar: Sadrvan & Hindin Han

Against all odds, Mongolia’s capital city is well-nigh a wonderland for vegans. Ulaan Baatar, despite being in a country that literally eats mutton at every meal and in every dish and frowns upon vegetables, has more all-vegan restaurants than London, and some better ones too (or at least some that I would love to have in London…or at least I’ve been traveling so long that I thought they were better than what we have in London). From Buddhist temple centers to veggie-friendly chains to nearly a dozen outposts of our beloved cult Loving Hut, UB (as everyone calls it) will let you eat extremely well – as long as the restaurants decide to be open when you go. 

We arrived via (awful, smoky) overnight train to Ulaan Baatar (train here; UB city here) super early in the morning, and we were hungry. Armed with a long list of HappyCow and other finds, I was excited to get out into the city and find some amazing vegan food that wasn’t cabbage or kasha (I love cabbage and kasha but a month of it was enough). 

Turns out we would have to wait. 
Remember we arrived at like 7am, and spent just a few hours at the hostel before setting out? Despite researching what would be open early for us, everything was closed! We walked the 20 minutes or so in the pollutiony heat to an area that had one of the six or so Loving Huts and the famous Luna Blanca, the buddhist temple restaurant that is all vegan and yet is in all the not-so-veg-aware guide books. Luna Blanca didn’t open until noon, which we knew, but the Loving Hut was supposed to open at 8am. It said so on their own site. But there was a huge chain across the door! Ughh! So we trekked to another Loving Hut, and another, and they were all closed. Then we tried to find other HappyCow places – first, a place called Love Each Other, which was closed! Then a place called Agnista, which NO LONGER EXISTS. We learned this after walking around a neighborhood forever trying to find it by the very helpful (eyeroll) HappyCow directions that it was ‘near a primary school’.  A shopkeeper on its supposed block pointed to a big ramen place and communicated that it was now that place. COOL. What were you doing to me, universe?! By now, we’d gone through my whole list (and on foot no less). We even chanced upon another vegan-friendly cafe (green juice posters in the window!) that was ALSO closed. I was crushed! Ulaan Baatar was my beacon of hope during the first part of this trip, my surprising vegan city on a hill. But, we soon learned, restaurants and shops are often closed during and around Naadam – which seems SUPER stupid considering that’s when the city is flooded with tourists and people from the countryside! Why would you close during the busiest time of the year?! People need to eat! But I guess all the waitstaff and cooks are also going to Naadam and learning about ankle-bone beer pong, so they have to close. There are only so many Mongolians. 

So guess what. We trekked around the city, famished, for so long that by the time we checked all the above stupid closed stupid places, Luna Blanca was open. 

I mean. 

What a day. 

Luckily, Luna Blanca was fantastic! We loved it so much we went back twice for food and another time just for dessert – and we were always two of many, many tourists – soo many white people in there. It made me happy that so many tourists were clearly sick of mutton and wanted to enjoy good vegan food even if they weren’t vegan. Luna Blanca has a simple menu of salads (yay), soups (yay), and hot entrees of traditional Mongolian foods made vegan. It would have been perfect if they had a fun menu of sides instead of just bread, rice, and other kinds of bread and rice, but as it is it’s a great find. Even though they didn’t have ice cream any time I was there (and the menu says they have vegan ice cream I’m cursed to never find ice cream this whole summer), I still loved it. 

I needed some greens so I started with the sesame spinach under the salad section. I was slightly disappointed to learn that it was cooked spinach and not raw, but hey it’s still spinach, and that probably means I got 10x the amount of actual spinach because when it cooks it shrinks to nothingness. It was really good but mostly perfunctory, and purposefully so. A real star was the Mongolian sampler platter of traditional foods like khuushuur, the fried mutton-filled empanada looking thing, and buuzy (I think that’s what it’s called), the softer mutton-filled dumpling. Getting to try these traditional dishes in vegan form was a must-do, and I think Luna Blanca is the only place that does it. You only need to try them once – I still can’t get over how much khuushuur Mongolians eat during Naadam (like 10 patties per meal every day; trust me you only need or want one). But they were yummy and fun. And, the platter is so big and you can only eat so much of it that we took some of each kind home for the next day! Yay leftovers! 

We also tried two fantastic salads at a later visit – my favorite which was just a plain green lettuce salad with a great dressing (I love lettuce), and Z’s favorite, a pasta salad with tofu. I don’t count pasta salads as salad (helloooo it’s just cold pasta) but since it had tofu I’ll let it slide. And it was really good!

We also tried a shittonne of mains during our visits. We had to get another vegan version of a Mongolian classic, the stir-fried noodle dish called ‘tsuivan’, while we could, and it was pretty good! So much better than the traditional mutton-filled dish, Luna Blanca’s version had soy protein (hooray for you!), cabbage, carrot, and pepper. I mean it’s a big heap of noodles and they tasted good. 

We also tried the Ariun Zoog, which was like a soft meatball of mushrooms and soy nugget in a sauce of tamarind, tomato, and chili, served with two enormous scoops of white rice and – you know it! – cucumber and tomato and pickled cabbage. This was very good, although lacking in other vegetable matter for me. Equally as good, if not better actually, and equally lacking in vegetable matter was the balaton, which was Hungarian porkolt and goulash, the latter of which we saw a surprising amount of in Mongolia and Russia. 

But my favorite dish at Luna Blanca was this soup, simply called the Luna Blanca Special. I know, it’s soup. And it was so simple and I guess boring. But it was just perfect. I needed a good, big bowl of soup (despite the heat) after being without for so long – remember that most of what I cook at home is soup. (Z asked early on in cohabitation if one day we could graduate to solid food.) This soup was in a mild vegetable broth and was full of tofu dumplings and some spinach. PERFECT, sort-of-bland-but-bland-how-I-love-it-not-in-a-bad-way soup. 

The only low points of Luna Blanca (besides how they never had ice cream) were the desserts. Well, just the cakes. We got the chocolate mud cake and the chocolate cream pie over our visits. The mud cake, though it sounds amazing, was the driest, most tasteless cake I’ve ever tasted, bested only by the time early in my baking experience when I forgot to add all manner of sugar to a cake. It was bread, and gross, and this was pretty close sadly. The cream cake was better, because at least the cream made it moist (SORRY I KNOW BUT WHAT OTHER WORD CAN I USE), but it was still in serious need of a sufficient amount of sugar. And I don’t like when desserts are too sweet! But these were like, sugarless. 

You might be thinking ‘wait, didn’t you say you returned to Luna Blanca JUST for dessert one time? um, why?’ Why?? BECAUSE THEIR HOT CHOCOLATE WAS THE BEST I’VE HAD IN MY LIFE. Guys, I’m serious. We both were silent and then said, f-ing hell this is incredible. I cannot even deal with the fact that Mongolia is home to the best hot chocolate you can imagine. It wasn’t just chocolatey and it wasn’t just sweet; it was like…also vanilla-y? and caramelly? I DON’T KNOW. 

I also got a little oatmeal cookie bag to go one night, and they were great, so just don’t get the cakes, and you’ll have a wonderful meal at Luna Blanca. 

When the various Loving Huts finally decided to be open when they were supposed to, we went there multiple times too. I can’t stay mad at you, LH. If you aren’t familiar with the pervasive vegan restaurant chain, it’s a usually-small restaurant with a big menu of sandwiches, salads, and fun but always recognizable entrees that vary a little by region. They are all over Asia, all over Europe, and all over the USA too. Oh, and the best/most notable part? They are run by the veritable religious cult of the Supreme Master a Vietnamese lady who bills herself as an entrepreneur and not a cult leader, and every location plays videos from their cult thingies on TVs. I don’t care if you are trying to indoctrinate me as long as you are giving me good food. Oh, and the UB location we went to? The first time we went, it was playing a video of a concert they gave in honor of the Supreme Master, FEATURING BETTY BUCKLEY. GUYS. I was FREAKING OUT and all these Mongolian people were looking at me. 
As usual, we ordered way too much and got to try a whole lot of stuff over a few visits. One of my favorite things was a huge surprise – the Victory salad, a cute molded (not moldy, molded like into the cylinder shape) mix of chickpeas, celery, seaweed, pickles, red onions, vegan mayo, and topped with a tomato mix. I don’t usually like mayonnaise-y things, but this was delicious, like a scoop of a perfect chickpea-based version of chicken salad, or tuna salad, whatever people keep going for with their recipes using exactly these ingredients. 

We also of course got another perfunctory hot spinach salad, which was good as spinach usually is. I don’t remember much to distinguish this from the Luna Blanca version, but I enjoyed it. We needed to stock up on vegetables (is that how it works?) before our week in the countryside. 

I loved the dumpling plate we got, filled with an indeterminate but delicious mix of the usual dumpling veg and tofu. I was so eager to get to China for dumplings that I jumped the gun and got them in Mongolia! Dumplings are just so good! 

As for mains, we tried this soy nugget platter (it came with green salad! amazing!), which we loved (probably because I mean it was chicken nuggets and french fries and it had been a month since we had such truly Western food). I liked the soy protein club sandwich (pickle, lettuce, onion) which I packed up and had the next day at Naadam, which was a genius idea and it kept beautifully in the tiny hostel fridge (didn’t get stolen!!!). 

We went back to Loving Hut after our week in the Mongolian countryside and desert (next post I promise!) when we had one final night in UB before catching a sleeper train to Beijing. We were so eager for fun foods after a week of mutton (for Z) and rice, peas, and carrots (me). We got the Romanian salad, which was spinach and arugula supposedly but looked like mostly spinach (that’s ok) with orange pieces and a lovely orange and mint dressing. Perfect return to sort-of civilization! We also got a plate of tortilla chips and salsa, which said they came with hummus (HUMMUS!!) but that was a lot to expect in these parts and it was like a hummus-inspired runny sauce (I don’t even care). 

We also got a Mexican burrito wrap that was very decent, and a hot mix of like pumpkin-based vegetable patties in a tomato sauce that I’m not really sure about but I liked it! And we got a side of fries. We needed them. 

Loving Hut, as usual, had a very nice smoothie menu, and we tried a green smoothie with spinach and orange and pear and stuff, plus a chocolate date drink. The chocolate one was delicious, and the green one was fine, but they come with the SMALLEST STRAWS IN THE WORLD. It was about 3.5 inches long, so after a few sips you had to give up and drink straight from the cup strawless. Hilarious and inexplicable. 

The only bad thing about the Loving Hut experience, besides how inconsistent and unreliable their hours were, is that the menu says they have ice cream AND ice cream cake. I think you’ve already guessed that they had neither, any time we were there. To tempt me with ice cream cake and not deliver is an unforgivable offense. But I still love you LH. 

One night, when Naadam had claimed the lives/opening hours of vegan places, we decided to go to a Mongolian BBQ place called BD’s. I didn’t care, I figured I’d be able to find SOMETHING here, right? And I was being a good wife and letting Z go to a kind of must-go place here. It was expensive though – it was an all-you-can-eat buffet – so we looked at the setup before committing. 

GUYS. 

It was the best for vegans, to my absolute amazement. 

They had a salad bar! With more vegetables than I’d seen in weeks! They had a make-your-own stir fry station with tofu and soy protein balls! They had a huge array of hot dishes including braised cabbage and carrots and stuff! And rice and kasha! It was so much food for me when I expected literally a potato. 

I know that picture of my stir-fry after it was stir-fried is not pretty but I don’t care. I stuffed my bowl with bean sprouts, lots of tofu, and literally ALL the soy protein balls in the container (#sorrynotsorry). Then you put your bowl down on a numbered spot by the giant cooking station (wok?) and two guys put on a show with their sword-like cooking utensils (like Hibachi lol) while cooking like 10 people’s bowls at a time. Because they are more concerned with catching their sword-spatulas after tossing them in the air than they are with keeping the diners’ food strictly separated, a few pieces of #3’s shrimp got into my mix (spot #2). Luckily that’s easy to pick out, but if you have an allergy, note that there is some commingling of assets. Aside from the messy cooking of the showmen, BD’s was such a surprisingly treat! They even had good wifi and I did one of my Siberia blogs from there! For dessert, the only vegan thing was tiny spoons of watermelon pieces. And I mean tiny, like one cube of watermelon per spoon. I took 19 spoons. 

​

Lastly, I think my favorite restaurant in UB was the all-vegan Italian restaurant Bosco Verde. I know – UB has an all-vegan Italian restaurant! Where even is there another one of those besides NYC! (Is there one in NYC or just ones with separate vegan menus?) Bosco Verde had decent food, and I’m not sure if the actual food was better than Luna Blanca’s, but the menu was my perfect menu – sooo many leafy salads, delicious veggie-packed soups, fun cutlet-y things as usual, pizza, pasta, and BEANS! SO MANY BEANS! Beans are hard to find so far on this trip, so I’m obsessed with Bosco Verde and I would have loved to have returned but they fell victim to the curse of Naadam closures. 

We started with bruschetta, which we were super excited about, but we would have skipped it despite its deliciousness if we knew that every dish would come with almost of LOAF of bread, each! It was so funny but such a waste! Our guide in the country/desert gave us sooo much bread every meal, too – is it because we are westerners and they think we need bread or do Mongolians just eat a shittonne of bread? 

I had a just perfect vegetable bean soup (mm soup!!) and a giant white bean, tomato, and fresh herb salad (the white beans were giant, not the salad, it was perfect sized). The salad dressing was so delicious it made me love the tomatoes even! I know you are like wait you just said the menu was long and incredible, but you got soup and salad? Guys soup and salad are my favorite foods. and beans. The soup came with good garlic bread and the salad came with lots of toast. Lol. 

Z got a delicious cutlet thing (so many random cutlet things at vegan restaurants!) that came with fries and weirdly cooked veggie slices. 

As for dessert, you guessed it – the menu said they had ice cream, and – you guessed it! – they didn’t. Instead, we got a chocolate cream cake – the same exact cake we would end up trying at Luna Blanca later on in our visit. This meh, sugar-lacking cake is clearly baked by the same outsourced company, one that needs to work on their craft. If any of my amazing vegan baker friends feel like living in Ulaan Baatar (bitch you crazy), there’s a job waiting. 

As for UB food finds, there was an INCREDIBLE grocery store close to the Naadam stadium, super fancy in a sort-of mall and it had amazing random vegan finds. I just got super deja vu – did I already write about this? I don’t care I’ll share again. This shop had clearly marked vegan tofu and seitan mixes in the fridge! And the first good produce section we saw! And Bob’s Red Mill products! We stocked up on the vacuum-packed tofu and seitan, and I will be carting them around until Kyrgyzstan, where I imagine I will really need them. We also found these strawberry Oreos. They were gross. We still ate them all. 

IWe also spent a lot of time chilling at our favorite Mongolian coffee shop chain, Tom & Toms’ Coffee. We liked them too much to tell them that just using “Toms'” is sufficient. The wifi here was strong so we went frequently since the wifi at Modern Mongol hostel was pretty much nonexistent. I don’t drink coffee but they had this amaaaazing grapefruit ‘ade’ made with fresh grapefruit and soda water. It had pulp in it! It was sooo good. I would share a picture of it but trying to upload one literally crashed the computer twice so use your imagination. 

So, as you can see, eating in Ulaan Baatar was better than doing pretty much anything else in Ulaan Baatar. I don’t know how it became such a hotspot for all-vegan restaurants – I guess Buddhism? But I’m a fan of it being one! Hooray for Buddha! Or whatever the reason is! 

​It’s unclear when exactly we should say we began our exploration of the ancient Silk Road, not one road so much as a cross-continental network of trade routes and passes from China, across most of central Asia, and possibly all the way to Rome. (Sea routes stretching from Indonesia to Africa were also part of it, but we didn’t do any watersports; it’s all desert from here on out.) Xi’an was considered a terminus of it, but today it’s such a modern busy city that it didn’t seem very ‘Silk Road-y’ to us when we were there; we were still in ‘China’ mindset and not ‘incredible desert history’ mindset. But there’s no question that once we landed in Dunhuang, our journey through the Silk Road had begun. Dunhuang was one of the most important historical sites of the Silk Road both then and now, and it has provided tons of insight into the dealings and relationships among people, religious groups, and states from ancient times. If you go to Dunhuang, you are unquestionably there to go back in time and learn about its role in the Silk Road. 

So, like I said, the Silk Road was not a road, and not even just because of mountains! It was formed by local traders determining which routes they could travel without dying of thirst, pretty much, and mainly went from one oasis to another. It also included the least deadly mountain passes, though you had to be careful of the season (snow!). Also, contrary to the idea that individual traders ventured from China all the way to Europe, most evidence shows that traders stuck to their local routes, like a very extended game of telephone but for trading. Or I guess a more appropriate comparison would be to the track and field race where you pass the baton. At camp we called it the…I wanna say Fenchurch Street but that’s just because I miss my tube line. Um…steeple chase! That’s it! (Those are similar phrases, right.) Is that a thing people say or is it just passing the baton? Whatever. It was like that where you go just a bit of the way yourself and then pass your crap to an associate or new trader friend. So the romantic notion of traders with endless caravans crossing the desert with innumerable treasures to bring to western Europe is not very accurate. 

​But actually, the idea of the Telephone game works too, because these traders shared information of all sorts with each other that blended into new cultures, traversing the continent and beyond along with the silk, but also with all kinds of other goods, animals, cultural and religious ideas, and Yom Kippur breath. The most important item passed throughout the lands was not silk but paper – documents, books, and even scattered personal notes are what teach us the most about this history and how people traded and what spread successfully and how far it went. And while there are many famous Silk Road sites that have provided immense knowledge through excavations, we’ve learned the most about this spread of communication and ideas (and goods) from one place – Dunhuang, and its Library Cave. 

Dunhuang is an oasis town in Gansu province, squeezed in between the Gobi Desert (yes we made our way allll the way back around) and the Taklamakan Desert (fuck it was SO DRY my eyes hurt in my head). An important early Silk Road city, it’s now known for its outstanding Mogao Caves, an extensive cave system that served as Buddhist temples and housed (and still house) incredible examples of religious Buddhist art – in fact, the largest collection of Buddhist art in the world (painted on the cave walls, mostly). Constructed for meditation spaces in the 4th century, the caves were not well preserved (and still aren’t very) so what there is to see is pretty miraculous. No pictures are allowed inside the tiny dark caves – great idea to try to preserve what’s there, although some caves were closed due to ‘excessive carbon dioxide’ (meaning they aren’t regulating the number of visitors well enough. Also, smoking is allowed. If you have a problem with air quality and too many people affecting the condition of the cave preservation, maybe don’t allow smoking in there FFS, CHINA). 

​In addition to the art, the Mogao caves gave the world its most important contribution to history with the Library Cave, a hidden room in the caves which was walled up to hide thousands and thousands of documents – in fact, over 50,000 documents, including over 15,000 books and over 1000 scrolls. Some scrolls date from as early as the 5th century and all dated from before the cave was sealed in the 11th century. The earliest complete printed book was found here, The Diamond Sutra, from 868. The documents are in at least 17 languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Uigur, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Sogdian, proving how far peoples and ideas travelled. 

​The walled-up cave was discovered in 1900 by a monk known as Daoist Wang, at least according to the book I’m reading (Z’s book calls him something a lot less fun). Daoist Wang was self-appointed as the caretaker of Dunhuang when it had long been falling into disrepair. One day he noticed something going on with the air in them there caves and knocked an inner wall down, and found a room positively crammed with piles of documents stretching 10 feet tall. Hoo boy, this was a big deal, and he knew it. He asked the Chinese government if they wanted to pay for him to have all the documents shipped – he knew how important these were to Chinese history – and the govvies were like nah we don’t have the money to pay for that. Big mistake. Big. Huge. An explorer named Aurel Stein soon heard about the discovery and made his way to Dunhuang to charm Wang into letting him buy some of the documents and take them out of China (to Britain and India). Stein gave Wang like a Benjamin, maybe two, and took TENS of thousands of documents. He is a controversial figure, for many reasons. One, he knew they were worth more, but like, so did Wang, and Wang could have charged more. Also what was Wang gonna do with that money he lived in caves. Two, people are mad at Whitey McSteinface for taking the documents away from their home (are you too good for your HOME?), but the Chinese government wasn’t interested at first so why not bring them to a place with better preservation methods and people and universities who actually want to study them? (NB, you’d think this string of me siding with colonialist kinds of thinking would mean I side with the British Museum on the Elgin Marbles controversy but I saw IN PERSON the whole f-ing modern advanced thing that Greece has since built for them so there’s no reason now! Shaaame!) 

Aurel Stein was also the first person to describe in great detail everything he saw at the Dunhuang caves (see it’s historically necessary to describe everything you see and do in too much detail, for posterity!), and contributed most of what we know about how they were before the onslaught of other explorers, researchers, universities…and tourists. Today, foreigners can’t really book tickets. The website doesn’t have functional English, but also I think hotels and hostels and tour groups just do it for foreigners and there’s no discussion. But you do need to book tickets in advance, because they only let in 6000 tourists per day – and it REALLY should be less, considering the aforementioned CO2 problems harming various caves. We hired a guide and driver from VisitOurChina to get our tickets, pick us up and drop us off at our guesthouse, and provide a private tour of the caves. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, I guess. No, they are a bad company and I strongly urge you never to use them. The local guide they hired for us was great, but what they didn’t tell us (and I don’t think she realized we had paid (through the nose) for) was that private guides cannot lead anyone through the caves – you are put into large (LARGE) groups with other (AWFUL LOUD RUDE) tourists and led around by an official site guide. So we paid all that money for nothing. We were livid, and not just because the huge Italian tour group we were put with was full of rude awful people who snuck photos in the caves despite that being prohibited. I know, Italians betraying me, my own people. 

I do not take that shit lightly and we got a partial refund of our money, but if we didn’t have to deal with the excruciatingly frustrating Chinese tendency to deny blame and never apologize and make things as hard as possible (and also, what contract law?!), I would have fought for all of it. YOU HEAR ME, SOPHY? YOU ARE A LYING LIAR WHO LIES AND YOU HAVE TAINTED THE NAME OF TOY GIRAFFES EVERYWHERE. 

​Despite my blood pressure being at red alert the whole visit, both at our being cheated and at my own people betraying me with insane rudeness, our visit to the Mogao Caves was pretty special. You start in a newly built visitor center and you watch two movies, one about the caves’ history and one about the visit. I mean at least I think that’s what they were about. It was dark and comfy and cool in there and I had a very nice nap. 

After the movies, you get on a giant bus to the actual caves. We did not know about this. It’s a 15 minute bus ride away from the visitor center to the caves, down a freaking highway! WHY NOT BUILD YOUR NEW VISITOR CENTER A TINY BIT CLOSER TO THE ACTUAL THING WE ARE VISITING? FFS CHINA. 

Then you find out your tour company is a bunch of lying liars and you fight but can’t do anything about it because the official site guides are the only ones with keys to the caves (they remain locked at all times except the few minutes you are in them) so you piss and moan like an impotent jerk and then you acquiesce and try to enjoy the damn thing. And it was indeed amazing. The paintings on the cave walls are of varying degrees of preservation, some barely visible, but some (a lot) are gorgeous and clearly visible still. It’s pretty awesome. It’s also very very hot (SANDWICHED BETWEEN TWO DESERTS I SAID) so bring water and a hat and whatever you have that might reflect the sun away from you. My hands have aged so much I can hear them saying “Muriel? Muriel hasn’t lived here for 50 yeeeeears…”

We spent probably 3 hours between both the sites of the cave complex. After we got back to our guesthouse, we wanted to go into the desert to see the enormous dunes and the famous oasis of Crescent Lake, about a 30 minute walk away. Unfortunately, my dry eye syndrome has been exacerbated, to say the least, in this climate, resulting in ocular migraines like I’ve never had before, so I had to take my contacts out and lay in the dark for a while while Z explored what he said (so meanly) was the most amazing place. He took good pictures but I’m so mad I had to miss this. Stupid dry climate.

​Once I could stand the pain, I realized it was like 9pm and I was hungry, so I went into our little fake adobe village to find food. Oh so we stayed at a place called the Silk Road Yododo Inn, a hostelish guesthouse with one nice woman and a very rude man working, nice rooms, but the common spaces were just enormous sandboxes. Not joking, the space in the middle of the guestrooms was all sandbox. Complete with little plastic shovel. It was insane. The room seemed nice but we saw later that it was dirtier than it first appeared, with sand in the sheets (blech) (but of course; it was a sandbox) and dirty walls and quilts. Outside, a bar played super loud music until midnight. And when that music finally stopped, a neighbor down the hall seemed to be hammering into the wall. I think he was moving furniture because Z saw a man carrying a vanity table or something absolutely ridiculous even disregarding the time of night. We can never get away from ridiculous. The guesthouse was on the second floor of a sandy adobe village looking place. So weird but cute. 

​ I thought I might have good luck at the Western Restaurant (full name) but no, they did not speak English or understand my phone asking for no meat (what do you mean no meat! Okay I bring you chicken). I got them to bring me a bowl of rice covered in bok choy, which is better than nothing. The next day, we went to a little food shack hole in the wall place and got delicious noodles and veggies. Shacks are always better, we are learning. 

Overall, despite my eyes and my head and my eyes in my head and the lying liars who lied to us, our short visit to Dunhuang was nice – very informative and interesting. We are lucky to have gotten to see some of the amazing caves and their art from so long ago, even if most of documents are back home in the British Museum (where we are members, lol). The history here is incredible and it was exciting to begin the real Silk Road section of our journey. Even if it mostly means dry air and burnt skin.