Insanity at the stroke of midnight in Ulaanbaatar

The Mongolian capital's strangest bar features naked nurses, child acrobats, vodka-chugging Nazi showmen, and unsolicited lap dances

By Mitch Moxley 12 October, 2009

When the clock strikes 12, a woman may remove your pants.

Friday night at Amrita nightclub, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 11.55 pm. It’s one of those nights: Out for the sake of being out, forcing back vodkas and stuck somewhere in the gray zone between boozy fatigue and drunkenness. The club is loud, gaudy, filled with Mongolian girls in short skirts and pot-bellied Russians in bad suits. The type of place you’d expect to find in a city with a name like Ulaanbaatar.

We’re about to call it a night when the music stops and bus boys clear the dance floor. “You’ll want to stick around for this,” an English photographer who lives in the city whispers to me. Intrigued, I pour myself another vodka and orange juice.

From backstage emerge two young women in nurse outfits. Within two minutes they’re naked, swaying lazily on the sticky dance floor to the Black Eyed Peas.

You'll want to stick around for this.

Mitch Moxley is a journalist based in Beijing. He's written for publications including Time, The Globe and Mail, Foreign Policy and The Guardian from China, Mongolia, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

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Insanity at the stroke of midnight in Ulaanbaatar

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