What could this funny round structure be? If you thought it looks like a giant blue billboarded ger, as I did when I first saw it, then you’ve probably been in Mongolia too long. In fact, it’s actually the State Circus. Like the State Department store, this was government controlled during communist rule, and I think that, like the Department store, it has been privatized. (Though I'm not sure about this.)
Generally the circus features acrobats and jugglers, and its specialty is Mongolian contortionists. (Most cultural performances here, even a little concert performed just for me at a restaurant, feature young contortionists.) One guy I talked to said he even saw a Russian circus traveling through (with elephants!) once a few years ago. Privatization or not, this is probably pretty much what went on here during communism, too.
It amuses me (and I think it’s Awesome) that the socialist state, along with education and health care and a department store, saw fit to fund something as whimsical and unnecessary as a circus. But, of course, I have to remember that authoritarian governments often choose the obvious and unnecessary over more practical but less people-pleasing endeavors. I guess the communists had been reading their Juvenal and thinking that literal “bread and circuses” might work for them, too.
But Juvenal never met a Mongol, and as the 1990 Revolution proved, Mongolia is Awesome enough to decide eventually that bread and circuses, (and education and health care) aren’t a fair trade for freedom.
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