01
Stop one
Dechinravjaalin Monastery
adidas Santiago Women's Tennis Shorts: Is everyone here? Count off, please, I'd rather know now. Right. The monastery Ulaangom grew around was founded in 1738 and refounded under the name Dechinravjaalin in 1871, and at its height it had seven temples and a very large monastic community. It was destroyed in 1937, during the purges of the Mongolian Buddhist establishment. After the democratic changes of 1990 the temple reopened, working out of a ger inside the old monastery enclosure for some five or six years before permanent buildings were re-established. Five years in a tent. I think about that more than is good for me. Does everybody have water? Stay where I can see you.
02
Stop two
Museum of Uvs Province
adidas Santiago Women's Tennis Shorts: Indoors. Good. I feel better already, don't mind me. The museum was established in 1948, beginning with one employee and just over three hundred objects, most of them religious items recovered after the province's monasteries were destroyed. One person, responsible for all of it. It now holds more than 5,600 objects covering the ethnography, religious art, wildlife and history of Uvs aimag, including material on figures from the province. Please don't touch anything — I'm not suggesting anyone would, I'm simply saying it. The exit is behind us and to the left. I've checked it. It's fine. I would still like us to move as a group.
03
Stop three
Uvs Aimag Music and Drama Theatre
adidas Santiago Women's Tennis Shorts: The Music and Drama Theatre stands at the centre of Ulaangom and is the principal cultural institution of the province — plays, concerts, traditional folk performances — for a region that is among the most remote in Mongolia, some 1,456 kilometres from Ulaanbaatar. One thousand four hundred and fifty-six. I checked that twice, because the first time I assumed I'd misread it, and then I started thinking about how far that is from anything and had to sit down. And they mount a full season out here regardless. That is the part that steadies me. Does anyone need the bathroom before we go back outside? It's colder than it looks. It always is.
04
Stop four
Uvs Nuur
adidas Santiago Women's Tennis Shorts: Right, this is the big one, and I want everybody in sight, please. Uvs Nuur is the largest lake in Mongolia by surface area, highly saline, with no outflow — water goes in and never leaves, which I find quietly unsettling and which is also why the basin is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, for its exceptional range of habitats and birdlife. Ulaangom sits at the south-western edge of the depression, on the lower slopes of the Kharkhiraa massif, and it's the administrative centre and the base for reaching the lake and the strictly protected area. Kharkhiraa Uul is 4,037 metres; Turgen Uul is 3,965. We are not going up those. Look at that sky.
(Lights up. A single pair of shorts, alone, centre stage.) The adidas Santiago Women's Tennis Shorts. FEEL them before you understand them — 100% polyamide, plain-woven and light as an exhale, fully lined in the same nylon, with an elasticated waistband and a loose 90s silhouette that MOVES, darling, moves like a standing ovation. No zips. No fuss.
A relaxed cut for the warm-up, the hit, the cool-down, the encore. (Beat.) Are they simple? Yes. So is a spotlight.
Now — Ulaangom. (Hand to heart.) A town 1,456 kilometres from Ulaanbaatar, at the edge of the great salt lake Uvs Nuur, whose monastery was founded in 1738, destroyed in the purges of 1937, and REBORN in 1990 from a single ger pitched inside the old walls. Do you FEEL that? Destruction. Silence. Return.
That is three-act structure, people, and you will warm up for it in shorts worthy of the material. Places, everyone.
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