The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Standing on the wide brick steps of the State Department Store, I scanned the crowd for Khaidavyn Chilaajav, director of the Union of Mongolian Writers, who I was to meet for dinner. Its plaza crowded with taxis and pedestrians, the store is still the hub of downtown, though no longer Ulaanbaatar’s only retail center as it was during Mongolia’s seventy years of Communism. Small children spun in circles on a miniature fair ride, while bigger ones bounced on a four-leaf clover of trampolines. Men and women in tattered jeans or silk deels, the