Warning: This post is pretty boring, but I wanted to record the events.
A lot has happened. Today is Thursday. Michael and I got here a week ago. It’s hard for me to remember all of it, actually. There were many obstacles. We are starting a business in Mongolia. When I first got here, the first thing we needed for some of our paper work was a foreigner registration number. This number is a unique identifier for every foreigner (foreigner is the word that is used in Mongolian) who visits Mongolia. Mine wasn’t coming through. It took a trip out to the Mongolian Immigration office to help us figure it out. In the First Name field, it needed my first and middle name. The person at the office showed me. Michael and I both felt silly that we hadn’t thought of that before driving all the way out there, but we were happy to have it. This was Tuesday.
After that, we rode a ways back, but traffic was slow, so we hopped out and started walking. My fast walk is about 30 percent slower than Michael’s but he slows down for me.
In order for me to register to login to some of Mongolia’s government website, I needed to associate my foreigner registration number with my Mongolian cell phone number. We couldn’t get this to work, so we decided to go back to the immigration office the next morning.
We were hoping it was something simple that we were doing wrong like last time, but that was not the case. The worker at the immigration office was very kind to take some time to help us understand some of the Mongolian government websites. I had gotten a Mongolian phone number on one of the first days here, but since I didn’t have my foreigner registration number at that point, the worker couldn’t associate it with that. I thought it would work since the worker had my passport, and the foreigner registration number is associated with my passport number. I decided just to get a new phone number and ask a worker there to do the association for me.
So, we went to Unitel in the Central Tower which is next to Sukhbaatar Square–the center of Ulaanbaatar. Unitel is a cell phone service company. I wish my Mongolian were better, but I’ve been using Google Translate quite a lot. We went there and bought a sim card and asked them to associate the new phone number with the foreigner registration number. The first person who helped told us the site was broken, so I went back in and tried someone else who said he did it for us. After that we walked home.
We figured maybe it would take a few hours or it needed to sync with some system overnight. We spent the rest of that day studying Mongolian business and immigration law. We still couldn’t get the phone number to sync with the foreigner registration number, so I found a website where we could associate the numbers, but it wasn’t accepting my number. So, we decided to go to that office this morning. We walked some and drove some to and from the General Authority for State Registration of Mongolia office.
I spoke to the people at the front desk in broken Mongolian and Google Translate. They said they couldn’t help. I tried again and asked if there was someone who spoke English that I could talk to. Someone came down and helped me understand that the building I was in was a government building solely for the registration of Mongolian nationals. I had mistranslated something I read on their page, and we went there for nothing.
Outside that building, we called the Immigration Office (we didn’t want to go back there again) and they explained to us that the only people who could associate the two numbers was a phone company. I wanted to go to a different Unitel because I didn’t want to go back to the same people and ask again. We could not find one, though. A lot of times when we’d look for one, it would show a corporate office rather than a place to get service.
Note: To the business owners of Mongolia, please put your businesses on Google Maps.
We went back home to get ready for our appointment with the attorneys at 2:00 pm today. We had many questions, and they had many answers. Michael brought the list of questions to get through. I was ready to wrap it up about 10 minutes into the meeting, but Michael kept asking questions, and it’s a very good thing he did. We found out:
- We’ve been very worried about Lucy. She’s a junior in high school, but she turns 18 in October. With Mongolian immigration, there is a hard cutoff at 18, family visas no longer cover her. The attorneys informed us that with Lucy acting as my representative in the business, she would be covered by a visa.
- The name I had chosen initially English: Bedrock / Mongolian: Суурь was taken by a similar LLC name. We went with English: Loveland Solutions Mongolian: Лавланд Солюшнс
- We think we can get some of the document finalized before we go home. This will save us a lot of time, and we really appreciate the work our attorneys are doing. Hey. For those reading if you need a good business establishment/immigration attorney in Mongolia, I recommend Allison and Kate LLC.
After that, we walked to Unitel. The same person who helped us yesterday helped us today, except this time, he got my phone number associated with my foreigner registration number in less than five minutes. I was able to authenticate to the Mongolian government sites. I was so very relieved.
We felt we couldn’t lose at that point, so we went and opened a bank account for good measure.
Michael.
I can’t begin to explain how much help he has been. I wasn’t sure why it was important that he come with me before, but I absolutely could not and would not have gotten this far without his methodical processes and him pushing me to talk to people again even though I didn’t want to. I will truly forever be grateful to him for coming with me on this trip. I didn’t know him all that well before, but I consider him a friend for life. Also, he was able to somehow exchange his New Zealand dollars with a money changer on the street today, during which he haggled over the exchange rate. This is a power I may never possess.