Home for a Spell

My excuse for the late post–no internet access (or, rather, no time for internet access) since my return to Mongolia at the end of last June. Apologies.  Anyway, I figured it would be appropriate now, on a nice little Saturday night in Arvaikheer, to dedicate an hour or so to a post about what it’s like to go home in the middle of a two-year Peace Corps stint.

I suppose it’s best to start from the flight out of UB. I could probably have counted the number of times I’d been in a car on one hand during my entire first year here, so the prospect of putting myself inside of a large metal tube with wings which relies on the unfathomable principle of lift was something I was not ready to face. To compound my anxieties, I found out that MIAT (Mongolian Air) pilots are all former air force…take-off was like being catapulted through a type-II supernova. The hull of the plane protested accordingly.

I actually had a dream on the flight that we crashed. You can imagine how that must have sat with my fellow passengers.

I’ll skip straight to the America part, as my new fear of air travel would make the remaining leg of the journey sound redundant. In short, coming home was just as much of a mindjob as I had imagined–but in all the best ways. I felt a strange delight in the new areas in life in which I had become socially awkward. I adjusted to a vastly different pace of life for the four weeks I was there, and I got a much needed break from the culinary realm I described in previous posts. Of course, seeing family was the most heartrendingly relieving part of the whole experience, but I’ll get to that.

First, on to social awkwardness. I always considered myself to be a rather socially apt person in my American life, but I had suspicions that spending a majority of my time with the same 7 Americans for an entire year in a rowdy Gobi border town might have an effect on that confidence. It did. On one of my first few days back in America, I took my vastly overweight wolf-shepherd mix, Molly, for an evening walk in my city and tried to get a feel for the place again. She was kind of a buffer–my conversation starter and my security. We happened on a waning arts festival on the canal, and people started coming up to me and asking me questions about her. “What a beautiful dog!” they would say. “What kind of dog is she?”

The first person who asked me this–the first American stranger I’d spoken with in a long time, I suppose–got a very loud and awkward, “UMMM THANKS HI” in response. Another family in a paddle boat far enough away to be allowed their own private discussion began discussing my dog. “I wonder what kind of dog she is–maybe a shepherd mix?” one of them said. I edged awkwardly toward the canal alongside their boat and tried to confirm their speculation, but their conversation had moved on. As had their paddle boat. Still, in a moment of poorly timed conversational bravery, I yelled out, “SHE…is.” Only the elderly man disassembling his crafts tent heard me.

Yet another powerwalking duo approached me and complimented Molly’s beautiful coat. I told them that she had gotten a little heavy in my unspecified absence, and one of the women said, “Awwwwwwwwww, did you just finish your first year of college?”

“NO?!” was the only retort I could muster.

I guess my point is that I had lost the little graces that made me tolerable in public.

shaven and obese, but my little baby half wolf nonetheless <3

me, being SUPER awkward on the DC Metro:

On my first night at home, we went to pizza hut as a family. It was so amazing to sit across from my mother and sister and father and actually put faces to the year-long infrequency of their voices. I ordered a huge pizza and slid back into my booth seat, reached into my bag, and extracted a few bread rolls saved from the flight. “Anyone want bread?” I asked. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy–bringing food into a restaurant like that. Faux pas 1. The pizza was amazing, though.

Maybe this would be a good segue into the aforementioned culinary heaven to which I was reintroduced upon going home. A list, and some pictures, will suffice:

pizza, sushi, ice cream, kebabs, crabs, cheeseburgers, fish, sandwiches, cheezits, pretzels, spinach salads, cheese, kalamata olives.

see the intensity?

treasure the Chesapeake

Venison kebabs, courtesy of uncle Dan

So, in the interest of not dwelling on the unfathomable distance between my current living situation and the contents of the images above, I’ll move on to some of the other things I did while I was home. For the firs two weeks of my stay in Maryland, the weather was exactly like this:

Many of you might see that and think, “how awful to finally come home and to have such heinous weather.” On the contrary–I had been living in a Gobi border town with absolutely not a single instance of rain in over 10 months, so the first two weeks in Maryland were a rainy treat to my senses.

Don’t let the goofy photos fool you, though…This rainy period happened to coincide with a very dark time for my family. I won’t go into details, because this is one of those instances where I think language would fail to express some of the things we were thinking and feeling, but I will say that a member of my immediate family was diagnosed with a very serious and probably terminal illness just a few days after I got back. We panicked and suffered  for two weeks before finding out, post-op, that it was a false diagnosis. All I can say is that I have never been more grateful in my life.

And fittingly, the day we got the good news, the weather transformed into (and stayed like) this:

The next two weeks were smooth sailing–lots of hanging out with my family and going to the beach and spending afternoons in the mountains and playing with my dogs.

baby Gaia

my son, Blaze

my dad, about to get hit in the hip with a fastball.

My Mema came down for four days and we hung out at the beach in Delaware. It was amazing to see her, and it was really special that she came down to see me during my visit. And Seeing the ocean was a total shock to my world after a year of cold desert life!

haha...

Mommy and Mema at my favorite pizza joint

Seeing everyone was amazing…I didn’t realize how much I needed a break from Mongolia and from Peace Corps until I was relaxing and living it up in beautiful Maryland. The whole experience rejuvenated me;  I doubt I would have been able to stay sane during my second year here in Mongolia if I hadn’t gotten a chance to spend time with my sister. This is the longest we’ve ever been apart, and I’ve never been a huge fan of spending time away from her to begin with. Needless to say, coming back to Inner Asia was a little emotional.

Almost as soon as I returned to Ulaanbaatar, though, I began working from 7:30am-8:00 pm, five days a week and sometimes seven, in the city. I lived solo in a nice little apartment in the center of UB and trained new TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) volunteers in small satellite towns in and around Tov Aimag. Though rewarding, it was a gruelling and mentally trying experience to tackle after such a nice period of rest and rejuvenation in America. The city is expensive and trainers were not given per diem allowance this time around. I rarely slept, and on the weekends I felt I had to make the difficult decision between rest and unwinding.

In the middle of July, I skipped home to Arvaikheer for a day and a night to watch Naadam (the National holiday of the three manly sports–archery, horse racing, and wrestling). I unlocked the newly graffiti-covered door to my first floor university apartment to find that it had turned into a sandy, water-damaged hole of destruction and asbestos. The stench of the place was horrendous, and I knew then that I could not live there any more. When I returned to UB to work, I broached the subject of finally moving in with a family into my own ger or house in another part of town. Not only would the housing situation be settled, then, but I would also get a unique chance to live in a Mongolian family’s hashaa (yard) and to reach new levels of community integration through family connections. The PC Mongolia Safety and Security coordinator kindly jumped on board and persued a new housing agreement with my Mongolian supervisor at the university in Arvaikheer. To say that he was displeased, and unwilling to help, would be a vast understatement. Long story short, I am now a high school- and middle school English teacher at the Merged Advanced School for Mathematics and Foreign Language. I have moved into a ger on the slopes of the mountain above Arvaikheer (many of the photos from previous entries were taken from a spot very close to my new place) and I have NEVER BEEN HAPPIER here in Mongolia. Not to jinx anything, but my new job is filled with young and talented professionals who appreciate and seek out my input and engage me in social events outside of the workplace. My projects are almost unconditionally supported from the upper administration, the students are brilliant, and I get to work with young kids, too!

For those of you who don’t know, a ger is a circular, wood-framed felt and canvas tent. Mine is a “four-wall ger,” meaning that it has four curved sections of cross-piece latticework that come together to form the circle. The top is a dome-like shape, the apex of which rests roughly 8 feet above the center of the floor.

All ger doors face south, and as I once lived on the south side of town and am now on the highest ground in Arvaikheer, I walk out of my door every morning and literally look down on my old job. =)

Among the greatest parts of this transition is my new ability to control the temperature inside my living space by building gorgeously hot coal and wood fires in my stove. I also love the ways in which ger life encourages me to be more conscious of the resources I consume; I get my water from a well down the street once a week and store it in a huge blue container next to the entrance to the ger. At any given point, roughly 500ml of this water are kept in a small gravity sink to the right of my entrance, and this is my hand-washing water. I only refill this once a day, and I’ve still managed to stay perfectly clean. I’ve also been distilling some of my “gray”(or used) water back into drinking water.

the view outside my hashaa door

m'ger!

m'ger!!

my ceiling--half is open to the sky until october, when those four sections will be covered with glass to keep out the cold

Anyway, that’s quite a bit of time squeezed into one entry. This summer has been a swoosh of family and friends and work and changes, and I’m optimistic about my second year. I’ll try to keep posting more frequently now that I have an internet cable snaking in through that new ceiling of mine =) tata.

Mongolian Food

I just had an experience that absolutely necessitated an immediate blog post on Mongolian food culture. The team leader of our university foreign languages department initiated a lunch-preparation group a few months ago in which each of the 11 faculty members takes turns making food and bringing it in to work at around 11:00 am on a rotating daily schedule. My coworkers assumed that I, being 1) male, 2) the teacher with the lowest salary, 3)single, and 4) American, would not even be able to cook food for myself, let alone for 10 other people. Sensing that exposing them to some international foods would be a good way to win them over in the workplace, I insisted that I wanted to participate. Before long, I was cooking fabulous dishes and wowing my colleagues–and thereby gaining credibility and access to their inner circle.

Then, just the other day, I noticed that my name was absent from the food-prep lineup on the the large makeshift whiteboard in our faculty lounge. I asked why, and my team leader said, “because you don’t cook, and so it’s very difficult for you to prepare all of this food for us, and you are just a man, so you can’t.” This confused me, considering I had witnessed all of them slip into delightfully international food comas after dishing out effusive praise for each of the meals I had slaved to make for them. Once again, I insisted that they put my name on the roster; I didn’t want to lose any of the cool-points I had earned in the past few weeks. So, with an “Ok, but don’t say I didn’t tell you so” sigh, she scribbled my name into the slot for May 8.

And that’s where the fun began. I woke up this morning at 10:00 and ran to the store  (by the way, it’s snowing again) to buy flour. I had decided on fusion veggie soft tacos, and I only had an hour to make them.

**interesting tidbit–one of the most prominent Mongolian soda and beer companies just released a new soda product– “Kickapoo Joy Juice”–the label of which boasts a stereotypical Native American jumping into a vat of homemade liquor. The soda is bright green, and very, very cheap, so I decided to by 2 litres and try some last weekend. I opened it, drank some, and closed it, and when opened it and went to drink it again, it exploded and fizzed into my sinuses. It went flat 20 seconds later. I have been waking up with blood in my nose and mouth every morning since then, and I now have an upper respiratory infection that makes me cough up brown and bloody mucus. So that’s why I woke up so late this morning. Victory.**

Anyway, I rushed home and made 10 curried tortillas, chopped five green and red bell peppers, stir fried the peppers with garlic and onions and chili powder, and dumped Old Bay seasoning into the mixture. I carted the tortillas and veggies, along with a bag of oranges, sourdough bread, tabasco, soy sauce, sea salt, unsweetened yogurt (as a sour cream substitute), and the requisite Mongolian condiments–mayonnaise and ketchup, just in case–across campus and up three flights of stairs to my faculty lounge. Only one German teacher was there.

I was just finishing arranging the table when people started to trickle in. I gave the first of what would amount to be 5 introductions on how to prepare a soft taco in a way that I thought would appeal to Mongolians–first squeeze a line of mayo on the tortilla, then apply the vegetables, followed by some hot sauce (for the adventurous ones) and a trail of yogurt and/or ketchup to top it off before wrapping it up and eating it. This doesn’t really sound Mexican at all, I realize, but this entry will illustrate later on that any combination of flavors subverts culinary trends here and had the potential to pique the Mongolian palate; any flavor, essentially, is “international.” Bottom line, these things were delicious.

I noticed immediately that my counterparts were only eating the vegetables and leaving the tortillas  to soak in their own juices on their plates. I suppose they forgot I speak Mongolian, as well, because I started hearing muttered grievances through mouthfuls of sauce : “this is hard to eat”,  one instance of “I’m going to far too much after this”,  a few sarcastic utterances of “this is delicious”, etc. No one was trying the hot sauce, as such a strong flavor actually hurts Mongolians.

One of my counterparts took the yogurt bowl and started drinking out of it. Another licked her finger and wiped it across the top of my sea salt container, licked her finger again, and repeated several times. The colleague seated next to me abandoned her taco for a piece of sourdough bread and covered it with mayonnaise, then with yogurt, and ate it. Then everyone decided to do the latter. I just sat back in amazement and laughed.

Eventually, my main counterpart, who has traveled abroad extensively and enjoys a more sophisticated palate, arrived and voraciously ate five tacos–with hot sauce–and loved them. That made me feel a bit better.

The point of this story is to illustrate how concretized the traditional Mongolian culinary scene remains in modern culture. Before the consequences of prolonged Chinese and Russian control took effect, I’m told, Mongolians ate a diet consisting entirely of vegetables and dairy products during the summer, and saved all of their meat for the winter. There is little trace of this now; the modern Mongolian diet is now extremely meat and lipid-heavy year-round, with high carbohydrate intake and little appreciation for vegetables. Most dishes, even when advertised as “vegetarian,” have prominent pieces of goat or mutton in them, with separately and deliberately added chunks of fat. In fact, I have seen people go into the meat markets and buy two kilograms of pure goat or sheep fat right off the animal to later put in their dinners.

There is some seasonal observation of food trends here, but it still revolves around the meat axis. In summer, Mongolians prefer “lighter” meats like goat, and wait until winter to eat the meats that are considered good for insulation, like horse flesh or beef.

**interesting tidbit–I thought I had giardia, a protozoan parasite that is commonly found in water contaminated with fecal matter (and 96% of Mongolian water is)–for several months. The symptoms include diarrhea or constipation, sulfuric gas emissions, weakness, weight loss, and fatigue. I sought medical consultation, did research, took medicines, and nothing helped. Finally, after sending a stool sample to the Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, DC, I discovered that my system had absolutely no trace of any parasite whatsoever. It turns out I just have a digestive allergy to horsemeat–previously my winter nutritional recourse, per the suggestions of my Mongolian counterparts. **

Returning to the homogeneity and limited diversity of the Mongolian diet, it should be stated that there are only five main dishes eaten by a majority of Mongolians:

• Tsuivan–a dry flour noodle dish with fat and meat and sometimes potatoes and carrots
• buuz–steamed dumplings with mutton and fat in them (see the Tsagaan Sar entry)
• Hoshuur–analogous to empanadas, also with fat and mutton in them
• Shul–broth soup, with meat and fat and sometimes potatoes and pasta
• hurag–rice, meat and fat, and sometimes potatoes

**There is also a much-loved sixth option, and it’s gedes–innards. Mongolians love eating nearly the entire inside of an animal. I remember once over the summer, in my homestay, I had just finished saving an email draft to my family that centered on how well I had been adjusting to the culture here. In it, I described how I had heard that Mongolian food was horrible, but was pleasantly surprised to have found nothing so far that had disagreed with me. I saved the email in a folder designated for future internet access and walked into the kitchen for lunch. There, on the floor, was a bloody goat head. My host mother was kneeling over a bathing bucket filled with entrails, and she was funneling blood into a long string of intestines and tying the ends off for boiling. My host father entered the kitchen with a still-bloody slaughtering knife, pulled a bloody intestine out of a pot of boiling water, and instructed me to use the knife to eat it. I was shocked. I ate liver–the least heinous of the mixture–for the next three weeks, until I lied and told my host mother that the Peace Corps doctor had instructed me to stop.**

Of the above bulleted dishes, buuz  and hurag are probably of Chinese origin, and the soups might have been a Russian introduction. There are other side dishes that are widely enjoyed here, but their origins and regard hint further at the lack of options in the Mongolian diet:

• Neeslil Salat–”Capital Salad”–chopped potatoes and mayonnaise mixed together.  A Russian dish first introduced to Ulaanbaatar,  it was considered to be so exotic that people decided to name it “Capital Salad” and the name stuck.
• baitsaini Salat–oil and cabbage mixed together, from China.
• Lovangiin Salat–shredded carrots and mayonnaise mixed together.
• Kimbab–a Korean dish of rice and spam sausages rolled into seaweed and cut into sections.
• perojkie– a Russian snack of ground mutton and rice packed into a yeasty dough pocket and deep fried.
• mantou–a Chinese steamed, fluffy biscuit

Further emphasizing the sparse nature of the Mongolian culinary scene is the notion that a large percentage of the produce and dishes available in Mongolia are known by Russian or Chinese names:

• chinjou– from the Chinese ‘qingjiao’, 青椒,–bell peppers
• baitsai–from the Chinese ‘baicai’, 白菜–cabbage
• jyotsai–from the Chinese ‘jiucai’, 韭菜–green onions/ leeks
• songon–from the Chinese ‘cong’, 葱–onions
• lovan–from the Chinese ‘luobo’, 萝卜–carrot
• manjing–from the Chinese ‘manjing’, 蔓菁–turnip/wild cabbage/ beet
• ongortsii–from the Russian ‘ongurets’, огурец–cucumber
• perets–from the Russian ‘perets’,перец–pepper

And the list goes on and on. Even the one of the standards of weight for measuring vegetables is from Chinese–”Jin.”

As far as drinks are concerned, I think I’ve made the importance of vodka apparent in previous posts. In the summer and early autumn months, however, a welcomed semi-departure from trends in alcohol consumption occurs, and fermented horse milk–airag–is drunk. It has a very mild alcohol content, and one can drink quite a lot of it before achieving a buzz. I’ve heard other volunteers say that it’s an instantaneous hangover, but I’ve never had that experience. I will say, though, that it’s an acquired taste–sour and difficult to handle at first. The truth of it is that on a warm autumn day, there’s nothing better than sitting in a stall in the market under the sun and having a refreshing bowl of airag.

I should say that, though the aforementioned food options do seem quite basic, I was surprised to discover even the slightest amount of diet diversity after my summer homestay. My host family was contractually obligated to provide three meals a day to me, and was paid 7,000 tugrug a day to do so (even though Mongolians don’t usually eat breakfast themselves). And provide they did. When I wasn’t eating liver, I ate goemontau shul–noodle soup, with fat and a few inadvertant stray goat hairs–three times a day for three months. I had no idea that the other options were actually widely eaten until I left my training site, and my world opened up to the other options.

I later found out that my host family was saving the money Peace Corps gave them for food to buy a washing machine after I left. haha. <3

As you may have noticed, the dishes I’ve discussed thus far have mostly the same ingredients in all of them. This, to a foodie like me, should seem like a serious hardship. I won’t lie–I’ve had periods during which I’ve felt disillusioned with the Mongolian diet in my 11 months here. But now I arrive at the portion of this explanation where I tell you how much being here has made me crave Mongolian food intensely, at the weirdest times.  After my summer study, I actually started feeling goemontae shul withdrawal, and I went through a phase where I had to eat flour products to satisfy that. Now, I have the same feeling for tsuivan–the dry noodle dish–and I have to satiate it or I feel off balance.

To sum it all up, last week I went to the gym where I teach yoga and lift weights and had the best workout of my whole service, then went straight to a seedy police bar and ate 10 enormous buuz. Without condiments. I’ve assimilated.

To bring some variety to our diets, most Peace Corps volunteers cook for themselves. There truly are ingredients that we can use to diversify our food intake, as shown by the taco failure mentioned previously, and distate for deviations from normal food trends here is purely cultural. A perfect example of this was when several volunteers cooked pizza and spaghetti for their host faimlies, who fanned their mouths with their hands and hyperventilated at the “spiciness” of the tomato sauce (which, incidentally, had nothing but parsley in it.) Nevertheless, the ingredients are out there–if a little expensive–and we have been known to splurge on  $9/kilo cheese for pizza from time to time. We cook roti with lentils, enchiladas, chili, tostadas, tofu stir fries, peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches, omelettes, steak fajita burritos, spaghetti, pesto baked vegetables, cakes and breads, beer battered onion and pepper rings, kimbab, and vegetarian variations of a lot of the previously mentioned Mongolian dishes. In this way, we’ve all managed to stay healthy under some form of western culinary variegation.

Wow…what a disparaging tone this entry has. Unintentional. I would just like to reiterate that, depite the relative dearth of options and flavors here, and despite the elitist tone I took in this post, I am wholly addicted to and dependent on the traditional food of Mongolia. I know that a year from now, I’ll probably be sitting in some posh sushi restaurant in DC and wishing I had a perojkie and some milk tea to tide me over.

Spring: The Craziest Time of the Year

Apologies, once again, for the insane amount of time between my last post and this one. Part of the intensity of springtime here in Mongolia, as you’ll see in this entry, is the unreliability of electricity and technology like the Internet in the face of a tempestuous climate. But things seem to have calmed down for the time being, so I’m going to try to squeeze an entry in before another biblical storm comes through.

“Spring” in American culture is synonymous with fun and sun–a respite from the perceived hardships of what is, in reality, an incredibly mild winter. In a country where the winter is 9 months long and boasts -40- degree temperatures, imminent spring is something many first-year volunteers look forward to…mistakenly. No matter how many Mongolians warned me that “Spring is terrible,” I still had it in the back of my mind that it would be the end of a pretty uncomfortable period in my service here. Spring is here now, and though it certainly does have its beauty and warm days, it can be far from pleasant.

uh ohhhh

We mid-Atlantic folk are used to the back-and-forth nature of the transition from winter to spring, but living my entire life in that clime did not prepare me for what I was to experience in Mongolia. During the winter here, my senior students came over to to help me winterize my apartment. To do this, they tore up some of my less desirable bedsheets into thin strips  and soaked them in a pot of hot, soapy water. Then they stuck the sudsy strips to the cracks where my windows met the sills and stuffed rolled-up newspapers in the spaces between my double panes. This, they said, would keep out the cold. It did exactly that–but it also prevented me from opening my windows whenever there was a musty feeling about the place (or whenever my kitchen inexplicably caught on fire and smoked me out.)

So, one mild day in February when the outside world seemed to be creeping out of its -40 – degree hibernation (and when I say “mild” I mean still way below freezing), I was overheating in my apartment. I decided, like the rookie I was, that if it were to stay like that, I would have to dewinterize my apartment and open some windows. The next day it rose into the 50s, and I went for a t-shirted hike down the dry riverbed behind our mountains. I was convinced that I had conquered winter. I strutted home and ripped those sheet-strips down out of the window sills and opened my kitchen and bedrooms to the desert air.

Stupid.

The next day it was -35, and there was nothing I could do to restore my apartment to the heat it had before. I convinced myself that it was worth it, and that I would be happy to be able to open my windows if temperatures rose again.

This turned out to be true. I caused several more kitchen fires, the temperatures increased periodically to where I was relieved to be able to open windows, and I was still warm in my 4-radiator apartment. And then spring came. First a few days of 70-degree beauty, and then an epic sand/ dust storm that thrashed itself through the open cracks in my windowsills and filled my house with brown Inner Asian sand and organic matter. Schools were canceled, businesses shut down, and people stayed inside unless it was absolutely necessary to go out. I kicked myself for having removed those soapy strips.

It’s been like that for about a month now–60s and 70s with intermittent dust storms. Sometimes the wind dies down, but the dust just floats in the air like a huge brown blanket and stays hot and backlit by a blazing  high-altitude sun.

uh ohhhhhhhhhhh

Sometimes it’s warm and beautiful in the morning, and I leave my house on the southside of town and walk to the market or to friends’ houses in summer clothes. I conduct my business in town, and when it’s time for me to return home, the skies have darkened, it’s dropped 30 degrees, and it’s snowing. This makes it all the more frustrating when I go into town for scheduled commitments–like police department English classes, trainings, or meetings–and I arrive to find out they have been canceled for whatever reason. I’m left, then, to walk home in my t-shirt through the newly miserable weather when I could have just stayed home.

Last wednesday shattered the last glimmer of trust I had in my ability to guage Uvurkhangai weather patterns. It was about 60 degrees and sunny when a traveler and I headed up to town–I had my cop class, and she was going to hang out with my sitemates. In the middle of my lesson–just like a school kid distracting his classmates at first sight of flurries through the window of his 4th grade classroom–I froze and stood staring out the window of the courthouse at what I  had previously thought was just a strange glass tint. In fact, it was a deep brown cloud rushing around the city and bending trees and bushes to the ground at 60 mph.  After my lesson finished, I threw on a hoodie and rushed outside to my sitemate’s work, where I was owed some money. It looked like this outside:

people fleeing at my friend's work

my school

Afterwards, I let the horrifying winds push me home to rest a while and wash up. Fine sand filled my mouth and ears and hair; in any other context it would not be too big of a deal for me, but people in Mongolia are susceptible to pink eye and other infections from sandstorms due to the fact that a large portion of the dust blown around in storms actually contains fecal matter.

I napped for a while after braving the storm, and when the winds died down the traveler and I decided to meet up with my sitemates at his house. While we were enjoying coffee and a movie, the sand/dust storm picked up again and it snowed almost a foot outside in some places. Then the lightning started. As I may have written in other entries, the  strength of the prevailing north-to-south winds makes walking into town from my apartment a 20-minute ordeal, but walking back to my apartment from virtually anywhere else in town takes around 10 minutes for the same reason. Walking home from my sitemate’s house that night took three and a half minutes.

sand/dust/snow/lightning storm

The next day, the snow melted and flooded the town, like so:

my school apartment complex

and then, after a beautiful sunset, the flooding froze and coated the town in thick ice.

sunset over the mountains

The pleasant transition into American Spring tests the work ethic of students and working adults alike. One might wonder, then, what the consequences of a Mongolian Spring would be on the population here–particularly in a desert province. In my experience, spotty attendance and an exponential loss of interest in all things scholastic result from the weather here at my university. Even teacher punctuality and attendance drops off completely in springtime in some places in Arvaikheer. This can be extremely frustrating, considering the fact that Spring comes shortly after Tsagaan Sar (the White Month–see last entry), which is marked by over a month of no work in some instances. Many of my best students have been exhibiting signs of apathy and fatigue lately, and it certainly has an effect on their performance.

At first, I couldn’t seem to figure out what it was that was making my students and colleagues behave this way. There’s no cabin fever if there’s no reason to go outside, and the winter-spring transition was one in which the weather had just changed from one kind of horrible to another. But then I started feeling an intense fatigue, too. I would wake up on the weekends at 11 am and be completely exhausted by 8 pm, after having done nothing. This has stuck with me for a few weeks now, and I can honestly say that I’m beginning to understand why Spring is so counterproductive. In America, I would sometimes get sick during seasonal transitions if the temperatures fluctuated too quickly. Though I haven’t gotten sick here yet as a result of temperature changes, I can feel the stress it puts on my system; to put it in perspective, microbiologists at pharmaceutical companies use controlled rapid temperature swings to make bacteria weak enough to open up and take on new DNA to protect themselves (and the tailored DNA usually codes for the production of chemicals used in the creation of medicines, but whatever.) My point is that temperature swings like the ones we have here are TERRIBLE for your body.

On a more concrete level, thousands upon thousands of livestock die every time we have storms like this. This has historically been a huge problem for rural Mongolia, and the issue of desertification in provinces like Uvurkhangai only compounds the personal, communal, and economic impact of losing livelihoods to storms. In the aforementioned sand/dust/snow/lightning storm, for instance, Uvurkhangai lost 60,000 sheep, goats, and cows, and several people died. A program called The Ger Initiative (in cooperation with a company based in Germantown, MD, mom and dad), used to provide capacity building trainings and resources to herders and farmers who had lost their livestock to such storms, but the organization is being phased out in Mongolia.

Switching gears a bit, I’d like to point out a non weather-related challenge of springtime in Mongolia: graduation. Like all other social milestones, graduation is something that is heavily prepared for and celebrated here in Mongolia. This usually involves buying expensive clothes or having them made from flashy fabrics, traveling, and tons of money spent on parties. It has come to my attention lately, as graduation approaches, that people in Arvaikheer go to Ulaanbaatar to buy fancy graduation clothing, and people from the deep countryside come to Arvaikheer to buy theirs. So, in and around the last week of April and first week of May, there is a huge population turnover in my town.

I wish I could say that I noticed this when I stopped recognizing as many people, or that I caught on when I saw more traditional clothing being worn, but in truth the only reason I can tell this is happening is because there are more drunk men stumbling around in the markets and streets. To qualify, this is not to say that all countryside people are drunks–on the contrary, as stated in previous entries, herders are among the most successful and upstanding members of my provincial community.  The difference here is that the weather is getting nice, and when many countryside families come into town to buy clothes, other friends and family tag along for the ride. The women and young adults do the shopping while the men entertain themselves. In a country that has more vodka factories per capita than any other nation on earth, an increase in population in a given area, however temporary, is bound to bring a higher incidence of alcohol abuse with it.

One also has to take into account the fact that an influx of countryside friends and relatives is sure to stir up social activity, which is almost always marked by alcohol consumption. So, in other words, it’s gotten pretty rowdy over the last few weeks.

highlights:

• I was chased through the market the other day at full speed by a fiercely drunk man, who was trying to choke me. He pursued me through the busy isles into a large white department store, bought an orange, and stumbled out. I called the police, but no one picked up.
• two separate groups, in two separate cars, ran me off the road when I was walking the other day. One came up onto the sidewalk to hit me, and the other charged at me and forced me up against a building. I wasn’t hit by either of them, but it still scared me a bit. Both parties drove away laughing.
• I saw one young man roundhouse kick someone else in the  face in the square yesterday in a screaming fit of rage, and then they walked away arm in arm.
• a visiting volunteer was nearly knocked down when a fight broke out between two drunk men in the doorway to the meat market as we were leaving, and one of the men was pushed onto her.
• several countryside male students at my technical institute who matriculated and then did not attend a single class returned to Arvaikheer to attempt to get their diplomas, saw me for the first time all year, and decided I was a tourist that they could harrass.  Light, but obnoxious.

Each of my sitemates has a slew of similar stories from the last few weeks, but fortunately we have all been here long enough to be secure in our longterm safety and membership in the community. As I said, with temporary population turnover comes new interpersonal challenges, and I think we are all more than capable of putting up with these setbacks until graduation comes. The real challenge is dealing with the remainder of a wildly tempermental phase in Mother Nature’s schedule.

Tsagaan Sar–The Greatest Holiday Ever

As I prepare to write this entry, I’m trying to think of ways to include an explanation of my post-party-tipsy state into a disclaimer about the quality of the post. No need now, I suppose. Just get ready for the coolest entry ever…because this one’s about the coolest holiday in Mongolia: Tsagaan Sar.

Tsagaan Sar means “White Month,” or alternatively, “White Moon.” Considering the fact that it is marked by the first new moon (i.e. black sky) of the lunar calendar, however, it is usually translated as the former (or erroneously as the latter). And though this entry is an attempt to portray Tsagaan Sar from the perspective of my own experiences, I should probably say a few things about the holiday in general beforehand.

It is an intensely family-oriented holiday, and for this reason I must admit that I was a little nervous to celebrate it here in Mongolia for the first time. During the first three days of Tsagaan Sar, families dress up in traditional Mongolian clothing (hereafter referred to as ‘deel’ ) and visit each others’ homes, where they are met with gifts, refreshments, and the traditional holiday staple that is buuz–steamed goat meat dumplings. Guests are also expected to bring gifts of money, sweets, or small practical items when they visit homes. A whole series of behavioral protocols, which will be visited in a later section, are also observed during this holiday. The most important thing to take away from this introduction, though, is the fact that Tsagaan Sar is–by far–the most important and widely (read: wildly) celebrated holiday in Mongolian culture.

Families are expected to spend up to 3 months’ salary in preparing for Tsagaan Sar. This money is put to use towards buying the materials necessary for the hand-production of up to 2,000 dumplings, dozens of traditional lard-fried sweet bread products, candy, and (of course) vodka. Cold weather in the weeks leading up to Tsagaan Sar offers Mongolians the perfect opportunity to produce these items and freeze them outside, but increases in average temperatures have made this difficult in recent years.

So, to move onto my own experience, the first celebrated portion of Tsagaan Sar is actually Tsagaan Sar Eve–or Bituun. Foreign residents of Mongolia are  cautioned that this has the potential to be the most painful of the celebration days, as it tends to inspire parties limited to nuclear families. I was fortunate enough, however, to experience Bituun with my best friend Uugana and her family; she is my main counterpart, and our relationship is one that routinely bridges the inconsistencies between American and Mongolian cultural trends. She was happy to share this auspicious day with me–a foreigner external to her personal and familial adherence to tradition–and I was very grateful. Bituun does not feature any of the customary motions or greetings of the rest of this complex holiday; on Bituun, families simply eat together and finish preparations for the actual celebrations, which occur the following day.

Uugana’s son Yusoo played video games and enthusiastically showed me his Playstation car-racing simulator prowess while Uugana’s husband Saikhnaa put the finishing touches on the Urz centerpiece–a decorative skinned goat-hindquarters placed on an ornate wooden tray in the center of a low table in the living room. Saikhnaa and his young brother-in-law, Uka, used an antique Mongolian steak knife to remove and snack on portions of the slab of meat.

Saikhnaa and Uka slice away at the urz

Another family's urz display with side dishes

I came to this Bituun celebration with the assumption that gifts were requisite for participation, but I was wrong. That I was included in this very laid-back celebration of the opening of Tsagaan Sar was a true honor and a testament to my friendships with Uugana and her family.

Interestingly, the word ‘bituun’ is actually a verbal noun of a term that means “to eat until completely full”, or “to eat until unable to eat any more.” Bituun certainly lives up to its name; I was served buuz, carrot salad, and milk tea until I was ready to explode.

buuz

As I said before, I felt extremely lucky to be invited to Bituun at Uugana’s house. It was perfectly within her culture-dictated rights to spend Bituun with only the members of her immediate family, and she still chose to include me. My anxieties surrounding the hardships of a family-less Tsagaan Sar, however, were realized on the second day–the designated extended family day.

I was slated to host 11 of my counterparts at some point during the holiday at my apartment. I was told to prepare pizza, vodka, and candy for all 11 of them–”but no gifts, because of the global recession,” according to my manager–but the event was canceled at the last minute when half of my coworkers traveled to the countryside to visit relatives. I was left friendless, essentially, for the bulk of this most social of holidays…or so I thought.

I had believed that my dearth of home-invitations stemmed from a previously unnoticed lack of community-integration, and as a volunteer, I can tell you that this is the worst feeling someone can have. That it fell on a joyous holiday made it that much more unbearable. Soon enough, however, I realized that the first official day of Tsagaan Sar was for relatives, and that ANY invitations as a foreigner were to be much appreciated. I ended up going to the home of Baagi and Byamba–a former Mongolian Denver resident-cum-Arvaikheer Merci Corps employee, and a head monk (lam) at a beautiful monastery in town, respectively. This husband-and-wife team is considered to be among the most affluent in the town, and their spiritual and logistic contributions to the community are widely celebrated. I felt so honored to have been invited to their Tsagaan Sar party with my American friends.

Baagi (purple shirt) and Byamba in their apartment. Byamba owns his own monastery and stupa, and his father is the founder of one of the city's most prominent construction businesses. He is a Red Monk, which means he is allowed to marry and have children. Red Monks tend to focus on community projects, while Yellow Monks are required to engage in introspective prayer and the private (celibate) achievement of enlightenment.

This was my first Tsagaan Sar visit outside of Uugana’s family. In these visits, which begin after Bituun, guests are required to hold blue bolts of traditional fabric called ‘hadag’ in their outstretched, upturned hands. If the guest is older than the host, he or she must hold the hadag thusly above the arms of the host, who also holds a hadag in the same fashion. If the guest is younger, his or her arms must be held beneath those of the host. The younger of the pair is expected to lean in for the elder to place a Mongolian kiss (which may be a strong, brief sniff through the nose) on each of his or her cheeks. During this greeting, both parties say the phrase, “Amar Baina uu,” “Amar Sain uu,” or a combination of the two. This translates roughly to “Are you resting well?” and its use is strictly limited to greetings during Tsagaan Sar. Every person in the household must be greeted accordingly, and then everyone may fold their hadag and place them in their deel pockets before offering small gifts to the eldest member of the household and sitting down in the main living room for refreshments.

The aforementioned urz platter remains the centerpiece of the table for the duration of Tsagaan Sar, and next to it is a stack of lard-fried bread bricks called heveenbov. They are arranged in a circle in one, three, five, seven, or nine layers, depending on the age and/or rank of the host. These ornate bread bricks are often topped with candy and sweetened white dairy products to symbolize the purity of the White Month. Young couples typically stick to 3-layered heveenbov stacks, while the elderly display larger arrangements. The heevenbov structure contains, without exception, an odd number of layers. This is due to the fact that the bottom layer represents happiness, the next layer sorrow, the next happiness, and so forth. To show an even-number-layered heveenbov is to suggest that sadness permeates life, and it is never done.

Heveenbov. This model may appear to have six layers, but the top disc is merely a cover for the otherwise topless arrangement and is meant to support candy and sweetened dairy products.

During Tsagaan Sar, the heevenbov serves a solely decorative purpose. Separate glass trays of candy, as well as plates containing sausages and cucumbers, are passed around the room clockwise for guests to consume. Shots of expensive liquors, bowls of fermented horse milk (airag), and glasses of homemade Russian beer (brashk) also move around the room, and recipients are expected to either drink the entire offering or to touch it to their lips before returning the container directly to the host. Depending on the household, the passing of liquor can be a gendered endeavor, with red wine offered to women and vodka to men.

One of the more interesting customs is the exchange of snuff between guests. Men often carry ornate glass or agate bottles of powdered tobacco in embroidered silk pouches on Tsagaan Sar, and it is customary to swap bottles during household visits. One man will remove the bottle from his pouch and hold it out in his right hand (with his left arm bent under his right elbow–the default respectful passing gesture of Mongolia), and the recipient will simultaneously accept the snuff bottle with his right hand while sliding his own bottle into the other man’s. Each will then remove a small amount of snuff from the bottle using the spoon attached to the inside of the lid and deposit it on the skin between his index finger and thumb, inhale it deeply into each nostril, close the bottle, sniff the lid, and return it to its original owner the same way it was passed.

As with any major Mongolian social event, toasting and singing tend to be a large part of Tsagaan Sar home-visits. Toasting, of course, serves as a spoken reminder of interpersonal appreciation and friendly affirmation for guests and hosts alike, and it often sets the tone for drunken merriment. Sometimes, though, the hosts–who usually remain comparatively sober on Tsagaan Sar and opt to get their guests drunk–decide to do the singing (especially when they have the added confidence of affluence and marital happiness, à la Baagi and Byamba!)

Guests normally visit individual homes for 1-2 hours before leaving. In my limited experience, the hosts’ presentation of gifts for the guests is typically an unspoken signal for their departure. The gifts I have received, incidentally, have so far been way beyond my own financial means–be they foreign sweets, expensive personal hygiene products, phone unit cards, or crisp (and lifesaving) bills.

Before I go into a soc/anth rant about the collectivist- wealth-redistribution benefits of such a holiday, here’s a play-by-play of my first Tsagaan Sar so far:

After visiting Baagi’s and Byamba’s place, I went home and lamented the fact that I did not have more houses to visit. My other American friends all seemed to be involved in parties at their respective coworkers’ homes, but everyone from my entire work realm seemed to have gone away for the holiday. As mentioned earlier, I was beginning to feel as if my loneliness was a reflection of poor cultural integration skills–but then I remembered that a mere expression of my interest in Mongolian  cultural processes has always landed me exactly where I wanted to be socially. So I sent “Happy Tsagaan Sar” text messages out to almost everyone I knew in town, and sure enough, I started getting invitations. The following two days turned out to be filled with enriching cultural and interpersonal experiences.

Yesterday, I visited the home of my coworker’s sister, whom I had never met. I arrived before my other friends, so the vodka poured for me before anyone else had to touch it. I was alone with a couch full of complete strangers, whom I thought were staying, but they ended up leaving after we had all carried out the customary hadag greeting protocol. I ended up having a lengthy discussion with my coworker’s brother-in-law while stuffing myself with buuz, vodka, brandy, whiskey, Irish cream liqueur, airag, brashk, milk tea, and salad. Eventually my other friends arrived, and we had a very jolly gift exchange and conversation period.

My coworker's sister's family and friends

After visitng my coworker’s sister’s home, I returned to Uuganas house for an official Tsagaan Sar party with my American friends. She had even prepared vegetarian food options–something that is very scarce here in Mongolia–for one of my sitemates, who is abstaining from meat during Lent. I was told that this party would phase out into a jaunt across the street to my director’s home–the home of Uugana’s father-in-law–but it never happened.  I returned home slightly tipsy and got into my pajamas just in time to receive a text message from a tenuous acquaintance that read “REPLY ME–MY HUSBAND WILL COME TO PICK YOU UP. WHERE DO YOU LIVE?”

I sensed that I might be in for a rare opportunity to get to know an entire whole kinship group to which I had never been exposed. At such a late hour–midnight, actually–I felt like it was even more of a social adventure. So I rushed back into my traditional clothes and ran out the door to meet the text-sender’s husband in a landcruiser. We drove to an apartment complex near my campus and ascended eight flights of stairs to the apartment of Duya–a Japanese language teacher at the magnet elementary school where I help coordinate a computer-based educational resource program. Once again, vodka, buuz, salad, airag, milk tea, and conversation with new friends.

It got very late, and I had the impression that it was time for me to leave. Duya and her husband told me that, despite my apartment’s close proximity to their complex, I would have to accept a ride home in their vehicle. I explained that I am more than accustomed to walking alone at night, especially from such insignificant distances, but they insisted. So I followed them down the stairs to the parking lot, where a white van filled with happy women and children pulled up. We got in and, thinking I was going straight home, I set my body at an uncomfortable angle on the edge of the seat by the frozen sliding door.

We drove through the darkness of Arvaikheer for over an hour–into nameless alleys and down steep dirt bluffs, through dry riverbeds to hidden houses, all the while dropping laughing girls off at points throughout the town. I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone would know this labyrinth of homes and dusty streets so well, and my tispy brain was working overtime in suppressing what the night’s vodka had turned into a very urgent bladder. I found out then that Duya was not taking me home; she was bringing me to her father’s house, where there was supposedly a car waiting to escort me back to the area that was originally within eyeshot of where I was before.

So, my decision to use a faint social connection to meet some new people led me to a whole household of people I had never even seen before. Her father’s house rested on a hill above the city in a dark corner on the far northwest side, and it was filled with people. There was more meat, more vodka, more tea, and by then I was barely able to walk from a combination of drink and sensory overload. Still, though, I made some new friends and received some very interesting gifts; Duya’s mother handed me a bar of chocolate and a half-used orb of yellow anti-bacterial liquid soap on our way out.

I remember walking out of the house into the man’s yard and looking out over the city. The lights of the gers and houses and apartments were far enough away for the Milky Way to be the brightest light in my field of vision, and the holiday had rendered the entire town silent. It was really an amazing site, and a truly incredible feeling; I felt like I had really done the right thing as Duya and her husband guided me into her father’s car and drove me home.

Today I dragged myself out of bed and went to a giant hadag-greeting at my school at 9 am with faculty and staff. It lasted until 10 am, at which time everyone shot out the door to their respective social obligations. I then joined my friend Brian at the ger of a mutual student, Zaya, on the northwest end of town for an afternoon Tsagaan Sar visit. She lives with her mother in a gorgeously decorated and very warm ger, and she had infused all of the buuz she made with chili powder. Spice, for those of you who  have not heard, is simply not done here. So I was very happy.

When we first entered her home, she instructed us to go and pay our respects to her altar–a sort of lars familiarum containing photos of her deceased grandparents and incense–and to spin her brass Tibetan prayer wheel three times. We then sat down and ate about forty buuz with salad, goat meat, brashk, airag, vodka, and milk tea.

Zaya's ger

Zaya (foreground) and another student, Chimgee (background)

Zaya and Chimgee

Zaya's mom and Chimgee. Her mom is sitting next to the stove, which is supporting a jignur--a tray designed for steaming buuz.

We left after Zaya gave us money and candy and headed to another household for a repeat of the same meal, sans spice, and about twenty times more vodka than I was prepared for. The walk home this evening is blurry in mind as I write this, but I have these charming photos to prove it happened:

Anyway, as promised, a quick rant on the cultural and collectivist benefits of Tsagaan Sar.

If it’s not obvious already, I’m fascinated by collectivism, and it’s getting to the point where anything that even remotely suggests roots in, or promulgation of, collectivist behavior practically screams out at me.  I have to turn it over in my mind and think about it and record it. Tsagaan Sar is no different. In fact, I would say that this holiday is one of the most glaring examples of Mongolian collectivist culture possible; the exchange of gifts, the obscenely high amounts of money spent on preparing food and sweets and alcohol on guests, not to mention home preparation–all of this month-long effort is churned into an enormous financial, social, culinary mutuality! Everyone–regardless of socioeconomic status–hosts, and everyone visits. Almost in the same way that Halloween candy is snatched up in stores and hoarded until kids come around and receive it at our doorsteps, individual Mongolians’ tireless efforts and exhausted salaries culminate to contribute to a vast redistribution of community wealth and resources, and it happens every single year. Most communities observe the official first three days of Tsagaan Sar, but many people consider it to be a February 1st- January 31st holiday; a family who hosts and visits everyone they know in Arvaikheer during Feburary and decides to summer in the countryside seven months later might go through the entire Tsagaan Sar greeting-and-eating process when they finally get to see their relatives in the summertime. Like so much else, this depends on the community, on the family, on the individual at hand.

I’ve said it before, but I’ve most definitely experienced problems in the community integration process since I arrived here last August. I thought my coworkers’ sudden flight to the countryside would leave me lonely and bored during this incredible holiday, and the thought of missing out got to me more and more every minute I had to wait. When those invitations started coming, though, I’m not sure I can liken the sentiment to anything I’ve felt since I’ve been here. The only thing that surpassed this feeling of being included in positivity was the actual process of participating in the holiday, and I’m already looking forward to next year!

Mandokhae, Chimgee, Zaya, and I outside of Zaya's house

PARTY TIME

I would be remiss in my attempts to give any semblance of an accurate portrayal of Mongolian culture if I neglected the enormous party element any longer. So, without further adieu, I give you the epic party post.

haha...that's not water...

I think one would have to live in Mongolia for a few months, as I have, to begin to understand the scope of partying and celebration that goes on here. As with any nation harboring a prevailing collectivist societal wind, Mongolia boasts a mainstream culture that is extremely social in nature. As I may have mentioned in previous posts, Mongolians’ self-concept is derived almost entirely from their relationships with their personal surroundings–family, kinship groups, friends, work, etc–and not on subjective qualities, actions, or any of the aspects inherent to the trends in individualist cultures (like that of America). In Europe and the West, a combination of plague and industrial revolutions over the centuries contributed in altering social constructs in a direction that favored individualism for survival and comfort over collectivism. In Mongolia, however, the maintenance of one’s position as a part of one’s group is still the deciding factor in one’s survival–be it survival in the workplace, in the family network, or quite literally, survival in the face of extremely harsh weather conditions.

To tie this back into partying, then, socializing is not just a good time; on the contrary, partying serves to fortify and reaffirm a sense of belonging and solidarity among members of a group. And though no Mongolian would ever contrive an enormous party just to let people know they are included, and though said reaffirmation is never a driving force in the social decision making process involved in planning and executing a party, the results are still the same–partying continues to strengthen relationships and provide windows of opportunity in the modern Mongolian context.

To illustrate these concepts, I’ll have to limit my explanations to just a few of the holidays that I’ve experienced since my arrival in Mongolia (which are many–there is usually at least one that is widely recognized and celebrated per month!), namely weddings and New Year celebrations. But before I do so, let me make it perfectly clear that the social importance and crucial adherence to tradition in some of these celebrations do not, in any way, preclude excessive behaviors or wild, wild…stuff…Sometimes at school parties I can’t tell whether I’m at work or on a disco MTV Spring Break Girls Gone Wild Pirate Ship of Naughtiness. That should be a bit more elucidated in the following explanations.

Weddings

Weddings are definitely among my favorite celebrations in Mongolia, and this might be due to the fact that one of the first big social events I ever attended was the wedding of a gym teacher whom I had never met from a school located in Kharkhorin, north of my town. I was invited as the guest of another volunteer living in the town, and I was a bit nervous as a complete stranger. I quickly realized upon arriving, though, that this wasn’t a problem; once again, evidence of a collectivist culture–I was friends with one of the guests, and was therefore deemed an acceptable presence at the wedding. This may seem strange from a western perspective, but the reason for that lies in the contrasts between conventional American weddings and Mongolian ones. Because you see, Mongolian weddings are just huge parties.

A Mongolian couple is considered married the instant they move in together (and sometimes sooner, depending on the couple; relationships rarely last longer than 3 months without the issue of imminent marriage, or splitting, being decided.) It is perfectly acceptable, therefore, for children to come into the mix before any official, legal marriage takes place. With this being the trend in Mongolian relationships, the formality of the actual ceremony of marriage is often disregarded (at the last wedding I attended, the groom and I were the only people who dressed up, and everyone else was in tanktops), and there is a lot more room for fun and carousing.

My first wedding began as most Mongolian weddings do–dozens of people sitting on whatever surfaces they can find in a large circle in the living room and exchanging awkward pleasantries and introductions. A large spread of fruit, candy, a sheep rump, meat, sausage, sliced cucumbers, juices, beer, and vodka was set in the center of the room, and no one seemed to be touching it. A few guests were timidly sneaking bits of the display into their hands and eating them surreptitiously after a few minutes, so I took that as a sign to do so as well. So did everyone else, and eventually the trays of food were passed around clockwise until everyone was eating. Then the youngest male family member of the bride took a seat next to a large wooden drum filled with fermented horse milk, or airag, and spooned portions of it into a series of bowls with an ornately-carved ladle. He would then pass the bowls to whomever he decided should drink, and they would return it to him for refills to be passed on to other guests when they were finished. Traditionally, each bowl of airag should be drunk to completion, but if the recipient does not want to finish it, he or she can touch it to his or her lips and attempt to return it. The distributor usually refuses to take it back at first, but he is bound to accept the unfinished bowl after three attempts. He then adds more airag to it and passes it to someone else. It gets all over the floor in the process, as tradition dictates that even untouched bowls still require more airag to be added upon being returned to the distributor even when they are already full.

According to tradition, each guest is required to drink three bowls of airag, three bowls of Mongol aerekh–the clear, high-content fermented byproduct of traditional Mongolian cow dairy items–and three bowls of straight vodka, and not necessarily in that order. As a result, every single guest at a Mongolian wedding gets completely plastered. It’s actually kind of beautiful–the laughter increases by the minute, refusals to drink get more absurd and are met with more hilarious denial from the alcohol distributor, faces get redder, songs erupt, food gets everywhere, and the atmosphere takes on a tremendously jovial feeling to it. Eventually, this is tempered by periods of quiet during emotional standing toasts, first by the parents of the new couple and then by the other guests. After the toast has been said, the speaker is expected to sing a song–any song–and all of the guests join in the singing after the first few words. The speakers go in order according to where they stand in a counter-clockwise fashion until everyone–including the foreigner–has spoken and sung. The whole thing gets more and more like karaoke and less like homage as the drinks pour.

I once sang “The Star Spangled Banner” out of drunkenness at a wedding, and by the third line the guests were telling me to sit down. A rendition of some Bjork song–I don’t remember which–had me just as unpopular at another wedding not too long thereafter.

During all of this, except for the toasting period, the bride is expected to resupply empty trays and plates with food and candy and continue food preparation. The groom sits at the north end of the room in a centralized position and stays there for most of the night.

At one wedding, I made it clear that I wasn’t feeling up for six bowls of fermented dairy on top of three bowls of straight vodka, so my punishment was 15 shots of straight vodka in two hours. The pressure was immense–even a colleague of mine who is allergic to alcohol was made to drink. But my social credibility was at stake as a new member of the community, and succumbing to partying as a social inclusionary behavior paid off for me in the long run.

New Year

Unlike weddings, New Year parties never put me in danger of becoming the event photographer (as the only one with a camera). So This portion will have more photos.

My experience with new year parties has been limited to large-scale school/work events, but I’ve seen enough to know that the New Year is just as alcohol-soaked as weddings, if not more so. Once again, it is customary for work parties to lay out lavish spreads of food and alcohol on long tables in a large hall. At my particular branch of the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, the New Year celebration was held in the gym with a ring of 20-meter-long tables arranged under huge departmental logo banners on the walls. Every table boasted at least $1,000USD of food and drinks, and I was surprised to see that the school had even splurged on baby pigroasts for each table.

a lavish table spread at my school's faculty new year party

the cyrillic text on the pigs was written with mayonnaise. it says "happy new year" in mongolian. the other side said the same thing, but in russian. no one even thought about eating any part of these charred piglets.

I should note that there were actually two parties for the new year that week–one put on by the senior class in honor of faculty, and the second put on by faculty in honor of themselves–neither of which took place on or even close to New Years. Both were also combined with the Mongolian version of Christmas, as the two are considered to be one holiday.

my seniors in front of the great new year's christmas fiberoptic tree

Like all Mongolian parties, both celebrations were rife with performances and speeches. Several of the departments competed against one another in risque coordinated dance routines. I was not so surprised to see that the performance that swept the adoration of the second celebration’s crowd, though, was a ten-minute slapstick routine featuring men dressed in pig-masks and Ming Dynasty Chinese clothing  jumping around the room, mocking Mandarin language in loud twangy squeals, and hitting people in the head with buckets. No one could stop laughing long enough to explain the cultural significance to me, but it was a pretty clear display of anti-Chinese sentiments.

senior students performing at the first celebration, which was put on by the senior class in honor of faculty. the girls all made their own dresses for the occasion.

That it was a vocational party meant that there was an added element of the announcement of professional awards, as well. These garnered little attention, as alcohol had distracted much of the guests. Most of the awards were announced to deaf ears, and eventually the ceremony slipped into a slightly debaucherous dance festival with flashing lights and wild motion. The most fascinating thing about this, though, is that the instant a slower song came on, everybody grabbed a partner and assumed the respectable, agile movements of the traditional Mongolian waltz without skipping a beat. Then a techno song would return to the playlist and everyone would resume grinding.

awards!

For the sake of brevity (or something close to it), I’ll spare the details on the other holidays and just describe some of the basics. Teachers’ Day, for my community, was more insane than New Years–more vodka, more money spent on pizza and fish and chicken and pineapples and all sorts of things that aren’t usually available in Mongolia. Soldiers’ Day may have already happened, and if so I don’t remember it, but I know schools and government offices are closed (which means everything else is, too). Men are expected to drink a lot. Women’s Day is coming up in March, and traditionally women are completely relieved of their domestic responsibilities and men have to assume the stereotypical Mongolian housewife role for an entire day (staying at home, cooking, cleaning, tending to the fire, taking care of children, washing clothes, etc). The king of Mongolian holidays, though, is Tsagaan Sar–or “White Moon.” It marks the beginning of a new lunar year, and it usually takes place in February. For each family, it calls for the preparation of thousands of meat dumplings (buuz), candy, alcohol, and gifts. In urban centers, families will leave their houses each day for three days and visit dozens of households around their community. At each house they are offered small presents, buuz, and sometimes even money, and they are expected to return the favor when visitors enter their homes at another scheduled (or unscheduled) time during the three-day period. In the countryside, this holiday can often last up to a month.

On a personal note, I was told by an English teacher colleague that I would be exempt from the normal responsibilities of a Mongolian Tsagaan Sar host due to “the global recession” (and I was impressed at her vocabulary when she said it), and that I would only need to prepare “pizzas, a meat dish, and one candy bar each for eleven people.” No small feat, that. I still luck out as a foreigner, though; the average Mongolian spends up to 3 months’ salary in preparation for Tsagaan Sar, and a few pizzas from scratch and horse meat curry won’t set me back too much.

m'little pizza in m'little oven

I’ll say it again–it is next to impossible to fully convey the intensity and importance of the party lifestyle here, and my frustrations as a foreigner are even harder to contextualize without offering some idea of the allocation of funds for these events. My school, for instance, may have spent over $20,000USD for the most recent Teachers’ Day party (which was the source of the wild video clip earlier in the entry). While these expensive celebrations are happening back to back, the school can’t seem to get its hands on the money to replace a few broken sewing machines or to repair the ceiling in the English resource room.  And to make matters worse, preparing for these events seems to take precedence over making the necessary arrangements for the beginning of the following semester. My work has yet to finalize its spring semester course schedule, and we are already approaching our third week of classes–and all because teachers and administrators were too busy preparing their dance performances, drinking, and making decorations. Having never experienced anything like that in my entire life, I’ve caught myself feeling a judgmental regard swelling up somewhere under my tolerant exterior; but then I remember how important these social activities are to the maintenance of a solid communal unit, and it begins to (almost) make sense.

Without going into too much detail, my relationships with my colleagues last semester suffered immensely under the pressures of our discrepant work ethics, and at the hands of a few gossipy parties who feared for the security of their own jobs and resorted to some group-damaging self-preservation.  I thought that I had officially been excommunicated from the interpersonal network of my surrounding job culture. But I put on a smile and went to these New Year parties, and by the end of the first night I had waltzed with all of the enemies I thought I’d made, looked at camera-photos of their children, and made my way back into good graces just by sitting at a table and eating and drinking and laughing with everyone. Vocational survival = achieved. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

rare party fruits

Mongolian Travel and all its Glory

Apologies for the inconsistent posting! I  just returned from a 10-day business trip (sans internet) around various parts of Mongolia, and the experiences I had made me realize that it was about time to discuss the challenging world of travel in this fascinating country. Prepare for a wildly anecdotal and generally all-over-the-place post.

Giving an accurate account of the intensities of travel here in Mongolia would take a lot more time and consideration than I’m able to offer, but I can at least try. The reason for this explanatory difficulty, as with so many other aspects of communicating the nature of this lifestyle, lies in the incredible contrasts between Mongolian life and the lifestyles of my readership. To say that travel is a challenge here, then, might not mean as much to someone reading this post from the comfort of a computer desk in America as it would to a fellow volunteer living in Mongolia. (No judgment there–I promise–just bear with me!)

I suppose the first thing one should know about the nature of travel in Mongolia is the unfortunate fact that, with a few route exceptions, virtually all inter-city travel must go through the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Even if a desired destination is between my hometown, Arvaikheer, and the capital, I have no choice but to go straight to UB past my destination and find a means of transportation that backtracks to where I want to go. Direct transport is an option for some people if they have their own vehicles and are willing to do off-road driving, but this works out to be a tremendous, and often dangerous, inconvenience.

This is due in part to the fact that Mongolia has only two adequately paved roads that stretch over one or more aimags (provinces), only one north-to-south railway that runs from the Russian border in Selenge Aimag to the Chinese border, and scattered (rarely used, expensive, often runway-less) airports in several cities. This lack of a transportation infrastructure, combined with Mongolia’s status as the second largest landlocked country on Earth, makes travel a huge undertaking.

Part of these challenges, at least from a foreign perspective, is the wide range of alternative driving techniques and risks that Mongolian drivers (Jolooch) are willing (or compelled) to take in order to get from place to place. In the case of my particular town, superstition often plays a large role in such driving decisions. There is a brand new, almost fully-completed paved road extending the majority of the 300-kilometer trek from Arvaikheer to Ulaanbaatar, and yet some drivers consider this road to be bad luck. Bus or van drivers who fear the pavement feel more comfortable adding as many as 11 hours to the trip if it means sticking to familiar sand and dirt paths, which can be extremely bumpy and nauseating for some passengers.

I once crammed myself into a van with 21 other people and rode through the open all-terrain desert–parallel to, and within eyeshot of, the paved road–for 17 hours to the city, when it could have taken a mere 6. At the time I was livid…But as frustrating as it can be to experience discomfort and delay at the hands of a superstitious driver, one still has to respect the cultural significance of such ideas. It requires a lot of effort, but I try to take pleasure in the notion that adherence to traditional cultural trends in transportation is evidence of aspects of Mongolian culture surviving in an increasingly complicated and externally-influenced modern era.

Check out this video of the ride from Battsengel Soum to Tsetserleg, Arkhangai Aimag:

^^The blue/red/white plastic cover over the bed of the truck in this video was used to secure a pile of dead sheep in place. Slaughtered livestock are usually transported in the beds of trucks, on the tops of vans and cars, and even alongside passengers and personal belongings on the insides of vehicles.

On the way to Battsengel Soum. There were seven people (including me) in the back seat of this four-seater jeep, and three in the front. A complete stranger was sitting on my lap (not pictured).

In addition to acting on customs governing the safety of particular travel routes, many Mongolians also tend to avoid travel on certain designated “unlucky” days of the week. In my village in Selenge last summer, for example, it was impossible to find cars into the closest city on Saturdays or Wednesdays due to their perceived inauspicious qualities.  As increasing foreign investment, urban relocation, and the post-Soviet climb of  social mobility continue to fuel the values and agendas of a less traditional lifestyle, though, finding travel options on these “unlucky” days is getting easier.

To compound the travel difficulties that stem from overcrowding, sharing space with dead animals, and uncomfortable off-roading, nausea is a common side effect for many Mongolians during long rides. Buses, in particular, seem to draw out the worst symptoms, and passengers whose rural lifestyles have scarcely exposed them to rapid (i.e. non-horse) transport have the most intense reactions.

Virtually every Ulaanbaatar-bound bus ride I have ever been on has featured a seven-hour chorus of vomiting. Headphones have proven to be quite useful in my carry-on.

the partially-nauseated bus to UB

I’ve noticed that when female passengers get motion sickness, the drivers often let them sit or recline in the cushioned chair adjacent to the console at the front of the bus while they vomit into the on-board trashcan. Sick men tend to just stay in their seats and vomit into plastic bags that they have prepared especially in the event of nausea.

I know this sounds like a load of complaints, and I know all of these personal anecdotes may seem too subjective to be representative of the foreigner experience in Mongolia, but I stand by their accuracy. In the interest of not sounding like a total softy, though, I’ll combine my last two general issues into one worst-case scenario (with which I have quite a bit of experience already): winter breakdowns.

Traveling in the summertime yields all of the same frustrations for me that traveling in the winter does–crowded buses and vans, bumpy rides that leave the coccyx shattered and the skull migrained, timing issues, peripheral peanut gallery nausea–with one exception:

In the summer, one doesn’t run the risk of freezing to death if one’s van breaks down.

Winter is a different story. After mid october, exhalation condenses and freezes on insides of the windows in all vehicles, and visibility is therefore limited to small portions of the front windshield. The floors of vans and buses are usually the same temperature as the outside air, which creates tremendous discomfort in the lower extremities. And this is all while the vehicles are running smoothly! The instant the vehicles break down, the front doors go open while the driver is alternating between tweaking whatever it is that broke in the undercarriage and returning to his seat to check on engine performance. The frigid air whistles its way in through the open doors until the vehicle is fixed.

an etched out vista in the frozen window of the bus on the way back to UB

If one is traveling by van and the van breaks down, everyone has to get out while maintenance is being carried out. If this should happen at night, under-prepared passengers have to figure out how to survive in unspeakably horrendous conditions.

That said, I do not know of a single Mongolian who would ever set foot outside his or her own home without enough clothing to stay warm for a while. I have, however, broken down in a van during a freezing cold night, and I witnessed a young mother barrage the driver with indescribable rage until he figured out a way to make the van sputter along for at least 5 kilometers at a time until he could find an automechanic shop. Everyone was a little frightened that we would be stranded.

I had been in the country long enough at that point to know that when Mongolian passengers  express discontent at the inconvenience of mechanical mishaps, something is seriously wrong. And this brings me to a trait that never ceases to both impress and infuriate me–the ability of the average Mongolian to regard such adversity as just another part of the adventure. In my first 8 months here, I have been on perhaps 10 trips in vans or buses. I am not exaggerating when I say that not a single one of those excursions began or ended on time, nine of them them had me positioned in a space too small for my body, and eight of them were  marked by at least one break down that lasted more then forty minutes in the cold. And yet, somehow, the aforementioned experience with the young mother was the only instance in which I observed even the mildest of frustrations in the responses of my Mongolian co-passengers.

At first glance, this seems like an absolutely lovely way to travel. What better company with whom to share your travel experience than someone who never, not once, complains?  Step back, though, and imagine the lone foreigner straddling the lap of an elderly Mongolian stranger in the back of a frozen van with a busted timing belt in the middle of the Gobi Desert, at night, in late October. He will most assuredly miss his morning business meeting in the city, and he’s frustrated–huffing and puffing, kneeding his face, sighing loudly, shaking his head. In the cultural context of Mongolian travel, his behavior–which would be deemed perfectly normal for such an inconvenience in America– is unacceptable. He–(or “I”, if you haven’t figured that out)–is made to look like a complete and total misanthropic ass by his calm surroundings.

This is the source of the admiration-frustration combo that summarizes my regard for the Mongolian travel disposition. Once again, though, we arrive at the same conclusion–that the contrasts between my personal/national cultural background and the structural and cultural trends inherent to my new life in Mongolia have put me in a position to reexamine and reevaluate my own perspectives. In this way, it is absolutely crucial to recognize the circumstances that give rise to Mongolia’s contentment with the state of things as they are; Mongolians are not frustrated by the same concepts and trends that might frustrate me, as a foreigner, because our respective vistas are informed by vastly different experiential sources. That the American life I’ve lived before was so different than the life I have here, in an altogether different context, is not a reason for me to take a judgmental stance.

And I’ll do my best to try to remember it the next time my bus breaks down.

Mongolia: Rural vs. Urban

Part of the beauty of Mongolia’s complex cultural, historical, and geographical landscapes is the intensity of the contrasts therein. Perhaps the starkest of these contrasts is the one that exists between Mongolia’s rural and urban populations. This wild discrepancy shows itself in nearly every aspect of the two halves–be it in air quality, visual aesthetics, or simply in peoples’ personal attitudes and ideals. Without taking a glimpse at these differences, it’s impossible to begin to understand the full scope of life in Mongolia.

By some estimates, around half of Mongolia’s population( over 1 million of about 2.9 million) lives in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. The city is a sprawling and polluted jumble of modern construction, business headquarters, factories, restaurants, and hotels in the center, with crowded ger districts climbing on to the surrounding hills in every direction.  Ulaanbaatar’s situation in a bowl of large mountains once made it an ideally defensible location, but a combination of modern technology and the burning of coal in factories and private residences (which continue to increase in number at an alarming rate each year) has covered the city with an impenetrable blanket of smog during winters for decades.

The ger districts can be seen in the distance

Ulaanbaatar is said to be the coldest national capital on Earth, with an average annual temperature of -1.3 °C (29.7 °F). During the winter, temperatures routinely drop to -40°C  (-40°F), and survival in these conditions depends on the consumption of vast amounts of energy for heating. Apartment complexes and busineses are linked up to specialized or shared coal burning facilities, and each family in the ger districts burns wood and coal in individual stoves that double as cooking surfaces.

smog over Ulaanbaatar

On a personal note, stepping out of the bus from Arvaikheer in Ulaanbaatar (or UB, as it’s often called) is always a shock to the senses; the smoke in the air is so strong that I can sometimes taste it when I first breathe it in. This is normally one of the most irritating contrasts between the countryside and the capital during the winter, but Arvaikheer is certainly not without its own horrendously polluted days. There are times when the forecast calls for deeply cold weather in my town, and businesses, apartment complexes,  and schools rev up their coal furnaces overnight accordingly. The next day, even if the weather turns out to be rather pleasant, the entire town has no choice but to wait for the coal fires to die down in the furnaces. In the mean time, buildings are super-heated, and the air around the town is pumped full of black smoke. Fortunately, Arvaikheer is only half-ringed by mountains, so smog can usually blow off into the desert with little impact on the immediate area. On days with no wind, though, it’s a different story…

Arvaikheer on a smoggy day =/

the same ultra-smoggy day in Arvaikheer =/

Thankfully, though, unlike UB in the winter, the sky in the countryside almost always looks like this (sans temple, maybe–and this photo actually shows an unusually large amount of ‘clouds’, but still) :

clean air at Amarbaysaglant Temple in Selenge, my former province of residence

Before going on any further, I should mention that the Mongolian word for ‘countryside’ is ‘hudoo’, and most Peace Corps volunteers consider the hudoo to be the sparsely populated or otherwise uninhabited parts of Mongolia. For instance, I would say that my summer home in Sant was located in the Hudoo, because my village only had 2080 people in it. To UB residents, however, every single place that is not Ulaanbaatar is the hudoo, whether it’s unpopulated expanses,  small villages, towns, or even relatively well-populated cities. So, my current home in Arvaikheer is thought of by Uvurkhangai residents to be a city, while cab drivers in UB tell me I’m from ‘the hudoo’ whenever I tell them where I live.

I suppose I didn’t fully understand this discrepant labeling until I actually spent some time in Ulaanbaatar. As mentioned in previous entries, I had been living in a converted cardboard and plaster toolshed in a muddy (but beautiful) village all summer, and the closest thing to a city that I’d seen before August was Darkhan, population 70,000. So when I first got a chance to sit down in a classy UB mahogany-paneled Italian restaurant with roaming professional violinists and stained glass windows, I was amazed.  And for those who are willing to pay the price, these places are available everywhere in Ulaanbaatar; sushi restaurants, night cubs, art galleries, natural history museums, paved roads, glass skyscrapers–physical and experiential evidence to support UB’s claim to being ” like little a European City.”

an alarmingly posh restaurant in UB

After a summer of village life, spending time in restaurants like the one pictured above was novel and refreshing. I only had about five hours of UB time before heading off to Arvaikheer at the end of the summer, though, so I never got the full experience until I returned to the city for a business meeting in October, and again in November and December. The times that followed were equally refeshing and rejuvenating, but each time I returned to Arvaikheer I was relieved to be out of the city. There’s something disruptive about suddenly exposing oneself to the comforts and amenities he or she left behind in a former lifestyle. Pizza and sushi remain at the top of the list of material things I miss most about my life in America, but transporting myself to a crowded Mongolian city where these things are at my fingertips involves a great deal of ancillary effort–the least of which is time commitment. The most difficult thing about allowing myself a taste of the lifestyle I left behind in America last May is the transition between rural and urban culture; the act of temporarily leaving the comforts I have worked hard to learn to appreciate in my simpler, rural lifestyle. I find that my trips to the city–to pizza, to sushi, to consumerism–also bring me closer to conflict, to excess, to noisy crowds. As I said before,  I almost always return to Arvaikheer feeling relieved.

my town =)

As an American foreigner living in the Inner Asian remoteness of the former Soviet Union, my integration to the local and nationally prevailing cultural currents is bound to be strained. It hasn’t been an easy transition, but it’s also been a fascinating experience that has hinged on my ability to balance my existence along the same rural-vs-urban line that cleaves the Mongolian population. As a westerner, my personal culture aligns quite seamlessly in certain material ways with the lifestyle of the capital city, but as a volunteer I feel that I can connect on a much more personal level with rural communities. As is the case in nations all over the world, the booming and crowded capital city inevitably produces and houses citizens with certain specific ideals, goals, and interpersonal trends that differ greatly from those that arise from the circumstances of a rural lifestyle. Ulaanbaatar and its surrounding ‘hudoo’  mass–the second largest landlocked country in the world–are no exception.

awwwww, 'hudoo' Arvaikheer =)

I’ve noticed during my several trips to UB that I rarely had to use any Mongolian language to get by. When I tried, or merely did so out of ‘hudoo’ habit, my conversation partners–waiters, storeclerks, hostel workers–seemed to always answer me in English (or some semblance thereof). Even homeless people in UB have mastered their (often complex) pleas for support in six or seven European languages, in hopes that one of them would work on my foreign ears. This ability to speak other languages both stems from and continues to feed foreign investment in the country, and English, Russian, German, Japanese, and Turkish language instruction programs throughout the nation continue to inspire rural youth to move to the city for work.  Once in UB, these people take on quite a different air about them–akin, perhaps, to the proverbial American small towner changing completely after moving to New York. Among the most obvious of these changes is that few Mongolians in the most trafficked districts in the capital wear traditional Mongolian clothes; to do so would be to stand out, and residents of UB tend to look down on countryside dwellers and their attire in favor of a more ‘western’ look.

some women in traditional clothing at a local stupa complex opening ceremony outside of Arvaikheer

Concomitant with the personal agency changes that members of rural communites make upon living and working in UB is often the unfortunate departure from the collectivist interpersonal trends inherent to rural Mongolian lifestyles (if only due to separation from family members who remain in the hudoo). During my summer in Selenge Aimag, five of the six youths with whom I was closest in my village were  in the process of receiving an urban college education, had already graduated from an urban university, or were planning to do so. These young people had different goals from those of their parents–most of whom were farmers. There is no telling what kind of effects this may have on the Mongolian agricultural economy in the future, but if Selenge was any indication of trends in youth goals, Mongolia will have some vocational restructuring to do in a few decades.

Alcoholism is an enormous problem in Mongolia, and it is incontrovertibly more pronounced in rural communities than it is in the cities. This stems from boredom and unemployment, mostly. With 50% of Mongolia’s population under the age of 25, it will be increasingly crucial to divert Mongolian youth away from alcohol in the coming years. To tie these most immediate thoughts together, then, it’s recently become one of my personal goals to engage in youth-directed alcohol awareness education with an emphasis on how to maximize the social and financial potential of living an educated rural lifestyle. I do not believe in steering all of Mongolia’s youth toward city life–especially not when they can be inspired to improve the quality of their own lives, as well as those of their communities, while simultaneously ensuring the security of Mongolia’s agricultural future.

Some of the rural-dwelling sheep herders in my province, incidentally, are among the wealthiest people in the region. If that’s not enough proof that Mongolians can circumvent the ‘City-or-Fail’ route, I don’t know what is.

*

If you have any questions about the contents of this post, feel free to leave them in the comments section. Thanks for tuning in!

My Town!

After a first entry filled with carefully vague allusions to my whereabouts, I discovered that I am, in fact, allowed to disclose my location–provided I don’t give the exact situation of my house in relation to other landmarks in the town. So, I decided to do an entire entry on my city!

I said before that I’m living in a province in the middle of Mongolia. To be more specific, the name of my province, or aimag, is Uvurkhangai. “Uvurkhangai” means “Southern Khangai,” and refers to the province’s situation in the southern portion of the Khangai Mountain Range. These mountains take on a lower, more sloping nature as they stretch south, and my town rests in one such tamer section of the range in northern-central Uvurkhangai.

our low-lying Khangai

view of the hills to the north

ancient rock carvings on the big mountain. no archaeological studies have been done on this site, but homologous rock images in other parts of Mongolia have been dated at roughly 40,000 years old.

carving of a woolly mammoth and gazelles--the depiction of woolly mammoths in rock carvings would suggest that they are at least 10,000 years old. A previous Arvaikheer volunteer who studied cultural anthropology noted that the whiter the carvings are, the older they are.

My town, behind a pole covered in sacred blue cloth, or 'Hadag'

The name of my city is “Arvaikheer,” which is a shortened pronunciation of the name of a famous

horse, Arvagarkheer– the fastest horse in an important race of over 1,000 horses sometime in the late 18th century. Arvaikheer is, indeed, deserving of a horse-themed name by virtue of its many surrounding herdsmen, large wild-horse herds, and the distinction of having the nation’s 2nd best fermented horse milk, or airag. Recently, local authorities decided to build on this equestrian reputation by constructing a large complex of stupas, or buddhist shrines, in the center of Arvaikheer valley. These 108 stupas, collectively called “Morin Tolgoe” or “Horse’s Head,” surround a painted statue of Arvagarkheer, and they boast a strong horse aesthetic. I was fascinated to see this blend of buddhist devotion and municipal pride; each stupa has two sides carved with two of the “eight auspicious signs of buddhism” (a pair of golden fish, a victory banner, a white umbrella, a conch shell of melody, a sacred vase, a dharma wheel, an endless knot, or a white lotus of honesty) in gold leaf friezes, and two sides carved with horses in various poses.

statue of Arvagarkheer, at Morin Tolgoe

the stupa complex, pre-completion

an example of the horse emblems on the stupas

It wasn’t until my second trip to the stupa complex that I heard a fascinating bit of folklore that further drove the concept of the horse aesthetic home. Facing the semi-circle of columns that encases the statue of Arvagarkheer is a famous mountain called “Aav Khaerkhan.” Aav Khaerkhan, or “Father Mountain,” is the site where a Robin Hood-esque story took place in Mongolian oral tradition. In the story, a do-gooder bandit who stole sheep and gots from the rich and redistributed them to the poor was being chased through Arvaikheer valley by a local police force on horseback. When he reached a wide and violent river at the center of the valley, he realized he could go no farther. The police were approaching fast, but try as he might to ford the river, the bandit’s horse was too afraid of the rapids to cross. Desperate to escape, the bandit invoked the name of the big brown mountain swelling out of the land across the river : “Aav Khaerkhan, take me to safety!” And just like that, his horse rose into the air and flew him across the water to the top of the mountain, and he escaped the authorities to continue stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

that black bump in the distance is Aav Khaerkhan

So, I know that was a lot about horses, but I felt the need to make a few establishing shots before going on with my explanation of the town itself.

The lifeblood of every town in Mongolia is the market, or zakh. For my first few months here, I spent nearly every day walking in and out of kiosks and stores in the market and talking with vendors and customers. Places where things are sold are definitely the best spots to hone your language skills in any country, and they provide a very visual framework on which to begin building an understanding of the culture on a consumer level. Arvaikheer’s market centers on the sale of home goods, clothing, motorcycle and auto-repair materials and services, food, and ger supplies.

view of the main road in the market

a rainy/snowy view of the market in august

For the first week after I was placed at site, Arvaikheer was experiencing scheduled power outtages between the hours of 6 am and 6 pm. This was when I did the bulk of my market exploration (and the bulk of my ill-informed housewares shopping). I remember perusing the dark stores during the day and not having the common sense to pay extra attention to the things I was buying…With no electricity and no lights on the inside of the shops, it was impossible to check the reliability of electrical appliances before buying them, and I stupidly ended up purchasing a tripod hotplate with a faulty leg. My food went half-burnt for a month before I discovered other cooking options.

Aside from the market, people spend a lot of time in Ayuush Square in the center of town. This is where the aimag government headquarters are, and across the street is the communications center (post office + internet cafe) and the town’s most respected night club, “New Leader” (no Mongolian name).

Ayuush Square and the Government Building

Arvaikheer is the fastest-growing aimag center in terms of development, and it is expected to surpass Darkhan as a commercial center in the next two to three decades. There is even talk of moving Mongolia’s national capital city back to Kkarkorin–the ancient capital and aforementioned senior class fieldtip site, which is also in Uvurkhangai– and this would further enhance the politico-economic importance of Arvaikheer. In the mean time, I enjoy the quiet, dusty nature of this little desert town, and I will continue to post on it proudly =).

If you would like to see more pictures of rock carvings, or more pictures in general, feel free to email me at pmongolia@gmail.com.

FIRST POST!!!!!

So, I’ve been promising friends and family that I’m going to create a blog for my Mongolian experiences for about…seven months now. A few things happened during the holiday season, though, that finally pushed me out of the realm of mere planning…There are so many things that go on here in my life that necessitate a disciplined journaling routine, and I think enough fantastic things have piled up in recent months that I just had to do it now.

And now is the part of my wind-up where I have to say something to the effect of  <The views expressed in this blog do not in any way represent the ideas, opinions, or concerns of the United States Peace Corps, the United States State Department, or of any other second party.>

Anyway, in the interest of not skipping over the first seven months of my stay here, I’ll go through the main points of the experience thus far. I lived in a beautiful mountain village, or soum, in northern Mongolia from June until mid August. I stayed with a Mongolian host family–three boys about my age, a hardworking farmer-cum-teacher father, and a cosmetics-saleswoman mother–the entire time. They turned a cardboard and plaster storage addition into a room for me, and it was cozy and perfect. I was kept awake by what I thought were mice for a large part of the summer, but when I saw little clawed wings poking out through the cracks in the ceiling one night, I was relieved to discover they were bats (which meant the spider/ mosquito population was kept mostly in-check).

During the summer I attended Mongolian language and culture classes for about 6 hours a day with eight other Americans. It was probably one of the most blissful times of my entire life; the heat was intense, the air was more pure than anything I’d ever breathed before, the Milky Way was almost frighteningly bright at night, and the initial inability to communicate with my community forced me into a much more concise and nonverbal communicational persona. It all just felt so clean and perfect.

the view from my front yard during the summer

Concomitant with the summer’s lifestyle-simplification was a total lack of accessibility to the outside world. We had no way of contacting our family or friends in America, except during rare visits to a nearby city, and there was no way for us to even communicate with volunteers in other training sites unless it was done through the passing of notes by our trainers. This dearth of communicational amenities was actually kind of refreshing; I remember being so anxious to tear open the manila folder of letters that our trainers brought from time to time and see what kinds of news there were from other soums.

Eventually the end of the summer came, and what I expected to be a tearful goodbye with my host family turned out to be somewhat of a rushed departure. My host father had decided not to attend our final “host family appreciation” party at a famous monastery in the province, or aimag, and on that day he ended up falling into our well and breaking part of his spine. My host mother was consequently pretty preoccupied during those last few days of training, and her uncharacteristic distance made leaving the soum a lot easier on the heartstrings. We boarded one of those big travel conversion vans (which will hereafter be referred to as “mikrs,” the Mongolian term) and rode to the nearest city, where we had a wonderful swearing-in ceremony complete with talent performances and speeches. I gave a shaky speech in Mongolian…I remember having to pee so bad during the entire thing. I couldn’t have made much sense. Afterwards we were directed outside to a public park which had been designed in the shape of a scale model of Mongolia with geographic borders and labels for aimag capitals. An M-17 or M-18 volunteer called our names and site placements, one by one, and we were made to walk out to the approximate locations of our respective site assignments and stand there until everyone had been called.

I don’t think I’d ever felt so much anticipation–two years is a very long time, and the most challenging thing about Peace Corps at that stage had been the months of uncertainty that had built the experience…Uncertainty while waiting for the initial application to go through, uncertainty while waiting to find out to which region we had been invited, uncertainty while waiting to hear which country would accept us, uncertainty when flying away from home and not knowing a single person, uncertainty when arriving in Mongolia and not knowing where our training sites would be, and then the ultimate uncertainty of not knowing how the interpersonal relationships we had built during training would hold up under the added pressure of being geographically separated from one another in the second largest landlocked country on earth.

I was relieved to see that I had been placed in a prominent aimag center with not one or two or three, but seven other sitemates! It was to be located in the dead center of Mongolia, in the only aimag that contains all four of Mongolia’s geographic features: desert, mountains, steppe, and plains. I was given a position as an English teacher at a university in the town, and I was to live in an apartment. I was absolutely thrilled, which is a lot more than many of the other volunteers could say.

A few days later I was nestled in my new apartment with a gorgeous view of the Gobi desert right behind my building , seven excellent sitemates who would soon become my best friends, and a lot of work to do.

one of the first pictures I took at site

So I started work, and on the very first day of planning, my training manager and one of my Mongolian coworkers (hereafter referred to as “counterparts,” peace corps lingo) sat me down and explained to me that I would be taking my senior students to the north of my aimag for a ten-day field trip, during which they were to learn about Mongolian history in English and practice their tourguiding skills. I was flustered at first, because I had literally just gotten to site, but in the end I of course went and had an absolute blast.

When I returned from the trip, my students were speaking better English, and I felt like I had built a good working relationship with my counterpart (who had accompanied me on the excursion). Immediately upon returning, though, I noticed that I had missed out on the first two weeks of crucial reputation-building and vocational niche-carving…Not only was I entering classes two weeks late and having the awkward responsibility of surprising teachers with in-class observations/evaluations, but I was also feeling awkward at having to try to squeeze myself into the workplace after the semester had already begun. Not to mention the fact that the previous volunteer at my host country agency was twice my age. So, from the get go, respect has been an issue–both in the work place and among the youth on campus. I continue to deal with those challenges, but every day brings me closer to integrating with my community on a deeper level.

the view of my town from the mountains

Now that we’re all caught up, I can move onto the reasons why this week inspired me so intensely to blog once and for all: New Years. It was probably the most spectacular celebration I’ve ever witnessed, anywhere, ever. I had participated in several New Years/ Christmas parties with faculty and students all week (Mongolians recognize the two as a single holiday, for some reason), but of course, in accordance with the cultural trends of much of the rest of the world, New Years Eve holds a special significance here in Mongolia as well. On December 31st, I ended up hanging out with my fellow American volunteers in a friend’s ger (circular canvas dwelling) until just around midnight. At 11:45, I believe, we went outside to look at fireworks. I had no idea what I was in store for–HUGE, fourth-of-july-grade mortar explosions in a 360-degree panorama all around the city, lighting up the mountains, shaking the ground. It was so picturesque. People were even shooting them out of their apartment windows, at which point they would fall a few meters and then explode at the bases of the buildings or crash into other apartments. I should have been terrified, especially where I was standing–but I was too mesmerized by the intensity and beauty of it all.

I spent the night at a fellow volunteer’s house that night so as to avoid the streets after such a late hour, and when I awoke the next morning, one of my counterparts called me to make sure I would be “ready for our trip to the countryside in an hour.” I had forgotten all about it, but I lied and told her I was ready. I walked out of my friend’s apartment when I had gotten my things together and was surprised to see the entire city completely covered in perfect, footprint-less snow!

January 1

I strolled home in the warm winter sun and put on my heaviest Mongolian winter boots, brushed my teeth, and jumped in my counterpart’s husband’s mikr. We–my school’s business management faculty, my counterpart, and I–rode into the frozen desert ten or so kilometers outside of the city to barbecue and celebrate the new year. The instant we arrived in the desert, the food preparation began. We found a cluster of small boulders between which to build a fire, and someone had brought a metallic disc with holes in it to place over the fire. I didn’t know what was going on until I saw my counterpart produce a vat filled with spiced and lemon-juiced beef. We tossed the pieces of meat onto the metal disc and watched them sizzle until they were ready. We ate them ravenously for a few hours while chatting and getting acquainted with one another.

snowy desert

The fresh air and food (and copious amounts of vodka) had everyone’s spirits soaring, and the snow and sun had us all at a perfect temperature for the first few hours. (During the Mongolian winter, snow is often associated with warmth. This is due to the fact that -35 degree temperatures and 0 per cent humidity cannot yield precipitation; so, whenever it’s “warm” enough to snow, the contrasts make it feel almost like spring.)

As with any Mongolian social gathering, there was a lot of singing and performing. And, of course, competition played a huge role. Mongolians have an incredible competitive streak to them, and this is probably leftover from nomadic times. Before people settled into permanent residences, inter-clan encounters were limited to summer competitions called “Naadam,” during which men from different tribes would come together in one place to show off their wrestling, archery, and horse-racing skills. This desire to prove ones fitness in ones community/personal environment–be it at work, at school, in the countryside, or wherever– remains a large part of Mongolian culture. So, at our little desert party, the women had a foot-race, and the men had a hands-tied-behind-the-back- sumo wrestling competition.

women's foot-race!

I was nervous at first to participate in the wrestling part, because I didn’t know any of my potential opponents, but then I realized that everyone seemed to be really eager to see how I would do. So I competed…

me in a hands-tied-behind-the-back-sumo wrestling match

And I did ok!

victory is mine!

While the sun was out, it was a great day. I think it was an excellent opportunity for me to reach that level of community integration I mentioned earlier in this entry; networking is one thing, but eating spiced beef in a frozen desert for seven hours with a bunch of vodka-drinking New Years Day partygoers is something entirely different.

After the wrestling ended, I convinced everyone to go slide with me on a frozen river a little ways into the valley. We all ran down to the ice, and I figured we would just slide around, but I suppose I should have known that the Mongolians already had a traditional game planned for such an occasion. They split us all into two large groups and set up three full bottles of vodka in a line about 20 meters away from where we stood. Each member of both teams was given two smooth river stones to slide toward any of the three bottles ahead. In this way, it was kind of like shuffleboard, only the object of the game was to hit the bottles. Hitting either of the two outer bottles earned one’s team a single point, and hitting the center bottle earned 10. Of course the bottles shattered on contact, but we made sure to clean the evidence before we left.

As I was one of two sober people at the party, my team won the competition 22 to 0. I unfortunately don’t have any pictures of this game, but I do have one of the river:

frozen river fun!

Ultimately, the sun started receding behind the boulders and the mountains in the distance, and as the shadows lengthened I could feel my lower extremities screaming for some warmth. There was none, unfortunately. The sun went down, and just when I thought it was about time to leave, some of the more inebriated partiers decided they wanted to cook more of the spiced beef. I stood far away from the fire this time, because they were trying to ignite it with a gas-torch, and they all looked a little wobbly. One woman was trying to warm her hands on the flames, but was actually holding her hands in the fire. I tired to help her, but she insisted she was fine. I guess she was. Another man fell face-first into the fire, but was caught before any damage was done. My residual exhaustion from the night before had prevented me from drinking any alcohol during the desert party, and as a result I suppose I was the only person at the party who could actually feel the cold (and the only one who was worried about getting burnt).

Some more singing and toasting occurred, and just when I was beginning to think I might die a horrible, frostbitten death in the snow and sand, someone decided it was time to go home. Before I knew it, I was crouched on my bedroom floor between my space heater and my radiator, rendered immobile by a deep bone chill. Still, though, I was so happy to have had such a wild experience.

Moral of the story? I may be on my way to community integration, but I have a loooong way to go before I can run with the big dogs, so to speak. I know I said that the other partygoers’ alcohol consumption may have staved off feelings of freezing to death out there, but a lot of them were wearing the flimsiest dress shoes with dress socks! No wool or huge Mongol boots like mine! And yet, somehow, I was the one freezing. To be fair, this is my first winter here, but still. Hats off to Mongolians for laughing in the face of extreme conditions.

I hesitate to even include this part…but I woke up the next day with a serious case of bronchitis, which ultimately led to a 103-degree temperature and WILD hallucinations that Oprah was standing in my room and trying to get me to stop spending all day resting in bed like I needed to. I also had an unfortunate hallucination that I was the size of an ant, and so my entire room was terrifying and fascinating for about an hour.

That I can even sit and type this now is a miracle after that! But I’m feeling great, and I’m so grateful to have had such an awesome experience in the desert with my new friends. Stay tuned for more antics as the weeks go by!