The last fortnight has felt like the longest two weeks of my life. It feels like I've been here 2 months already! Perhaps it's because we've barely had a chance to take a breath since landing. I think a lot has had to do with the confusing and exhausting process of trying to find a place to live. But after quite a lot of bilingual negotiation and a few hiccups, including but not limited to flooding our downstairs neighbour's bathroom and our washing machine becoming 'unearthed' and shocking us after every wash cycle (we googled it), Lauren, Jess and I have settled nicely into Grandma's flat! After nearly two weeks of eating out almost every meal it was nice to finally have some home cooked grub accompanied by some cheap vodka. It seems that drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes are just about the cheapest things to do here. Vodka is about AUD$5 for a litre and cigarettes can be as cheap as AUD$1 or so.
I've been really surprised just how expensive it is here. Prices for most things compare to Australia which, when on a volunteer allowance of about 1/4 of what I'd normally earn at home, makes it even more difficult to fork out the money to buy fresh fruit and veg. A kilo of laundry powder is about AUD$20, 12 rolls of toilet paper cost about AUD$8.50. It's incredible! You have to shop around to find the best bargains but as the temperature drops, motivation to go and find good prices drops too. I've never done this before but out of curiosity I actually compared inflation rates for Aus and Mongolia!
Anyway...enough of that. We've been up to some fun stuff this week! We've started Mongolian lessons. Our teacher, Orna, comes to our flat every morning for 3 hours. We'd been warned before that Mongolian is one of the hardest languages to learn for native English speakers. No shit. For one, they have about a million different vowel sounds! OK. Maybe that's an exaggeration. But there are three types: front, back and neutral vowels. The difference is barely audible for English speakers. The clearest difference (and by clear I mean muddy) is between the Y (front, "ooh") and the y (back, "oh"). Yep. Nightmare. There are also 8 noun cases. I don't even know what that means! Anyone? Anyone?
Here's a video Ben took of Orna sounding out the Mongolian alphabet. God help us.
And
if you were worried that we'd forget about all the 'important'
Australian days off, never fear for we celebrated Cup day in style! We
had a sweep and some had "champagne" (from Russia) with "strawberries"
(from a jar). I kept with beer. I drew NIWOT who did well for about 2
minutes then died in the arse. Andrew, another AYAD drew Dunaden AND Red Cadeaux.
Cheater.
Ying and Morgan wearing the felt hats they MADE!
Watching the race action!
Andrew, the cheater/winner
I think this is a "Monster Head" fiddle
We also went to see Altan Urag, a Mongolian "Traditional Folk Rock" band at Ikh Mongol pub. Apparently all the musicians are 'classically' trained in Mongolian traditional instruments. They are amazing! But, as is normal for Mongolia, they played about 5 songs and were done in about 25 minutes! After much googling I discovered they made the soundtrack for the movie Mongol and have played at Fujirock festival.
Awesome lady drummer
Perhaps the best thing we've done so far was visit 3 generations of a Mongolian nomad family. The whole day was amazing, I couldn't wipe the silly grin from my face. Along the way we stopped by the roadside where a man stood with two magnificent eagles! At this point I thought I'd wet myself with excitement. Thankfully I held it together! In the western Aimags (provinces) of Mongolia, particularly Bayan Ulgii the Kazakh people have, for centuries, trained eagles to hunt rabbit, fox, marmot and wolves. Unfortunately the eagles we saw were not the real deal. But I was excited all the same. I am hoping to go to the annual eagle hunters festival at the end of my assignment. I can't believe I am IN this country!
The scenery here is amazing. Breathtaking. Even now that everything is dead and brown from the cold. You can't tell from the pics above, but it was so cold I nearly lost my fingers! We drove for about 90 minutes out of the city, towards Terelj National Park and away from the smog of the city. The roads here (even in the city) are terrible. And the drivers are really aggressive, no one really pays any attention to the rules. I'm not sure there are any. I wish I knew our driver's name because he is super awesome, but an aggressive driver like the rest! He speaks a few words of English but says them with brute force, like each one has been smashed out of him "GOOD. MORNING." and "BYE. JESSY." His daughter came with us on the day trip, she is absolutely gorgeous, and despite his brutish manner, he turns into a marshmallow when she's around.
After about 40 minutes on a relatively "sealed" road, we took a seemingly random turn off onto a dirt path. We had to meet a man that would show us where the family had set up their winter camp. I guess he was leading the way.
Our convoy heading out onto the steppe
Beautiful, semi-frozen river
Mongolian Horses!
Real Mongolian Cowboys
Just imagine when it's green!
Getting sniffed
We arrived at the camp at about 12.30 and were greeted by the grandparents in the most touching manner. We got sniffed! It sounds strange, but it was actually so lovely! I nearly cried...but I cry all the time. Mongolians greeting one another rarely kiss each other on the cheek. An
older person will often grasp the head of one younger during the
greeting and smell their hair or face. Nice huh? I hope I smelt good. We were invited into the main ger (which literally means "home") and drank hot, slightly salty, milky tea. It was really delicious. It was made even more delicious by the offering of little nugget-y doughnut things that you could slather with sweetened butter. Mmmmmm. I also tried the dried curds "aarool". They're really, really hard and are quite...aromatic. I wish I could have liked them, I really wanted to, but it's really quite pungent like sour milk. Oh well, it's an acquired taste.
Drinking tea. Doughnuts and aarool on the table.
Roar!
Nomad families have a winter and a summer camp. The winter ones are
usually more sheltered, tending to be closer to the base of hills that
provide some solace from the cold and the wind. They also have more
permanent shelters for their animals. Their dogs are gorgeous! But not for patting. They are strictly guard dogs. Other AYADs have told me how when going into the country side to visit nomad families, you do NOT go to the loo at night, the dogs will attack you as they'll take you for a stranger, or a wolf. It was really hard to suppress my urge to go and roll around with them. They look like lions!
I had my first taste of proper horhog! It was actually quite delicious! You'll remember from an earlier blog I linked y'all to a recipe. Most of the veggies were "optional" and are usually left out. But as we brought all the ingredients with us, there was no shortage of potato, carrot, mushroom and even bok choy. Of course there was a large quantity of mutton, but it really wasn't as strong tasting as I had imagined! Horhog is the real version of a Mongolian BBQ. They heat up stones in the fire then put them into the pot with the raw meat, top it with all the veg then cook it for about 2 hours on top of the burner.
Horhog
Fishing out the stones
The highlight of the whole day was meeting and talking to the grandfather. He and his wife are Khazakh Christians and had religious iconography all over their ger. Compared to the ger where all the cooking was happening, the grandparent's was far more ornate, the wall (after all there's only one wall!) was adorned with beautiful Khazakh embroidery as well as family photos. The grandfather was half deaf and spoke no English so much of our communication was in a Mongolian/English sign hybrid. He started rummaging around his few belongings and pulled out a carefully wrapped Canadian magazine published by the Royal Ontario Museum. He showed me the front cover which pictured a fox pelt. I admired it for a while, not knowing if I could or should look through the pages. Grandpa helped me out. He opened the magazine to the main article in which he featured! I learned that about 10 years ago a charitable organisation sponsored his grand daughter to go to Canada to have surgery for her congenital heart disease. A few years later, a Canadian Professor visited the family and as a thank you the grand father gave him a fox pelt that he had killed, skinned and cured himself. The pelt is now a part of the ROM Asian History collection. Amazing! The grandfather was understandably very proud of the magazine even though he couldn't read a word of it. His grand daughter has since been invited back to Canada to study at the Professor's university when she is old enough.
Grand father and his magazine
The most amazing boots in the world
This place, it's people and their hospitality has taken my breath away! I still have to pinch myself now and then to remember that I'm actually HERE!
Looking back over the ger camp from the hillside
The well
Oh yeah! We stopped of at the GIANT Chinggis Khaan statue on the way home. It was getting really dark and it was bone shattering cold. I'll be back during the daytime to climb up the horse. But here he is in all his glory.
The highlight of the whole day was meeting and talking to the grandfather. He and his wife are Khazakh Christians and had religious iconography all over their ger. Compared to the ger where all the cooking was happening, the grandparent's was far more ornate, the wall (after all there's only one wall!) was adorned with beautiful Khazakh embroidery as well as family photos. The grandfather was half deaf and spoke no English so much of our communication was in a Mongolian/English sign hybrid. He started rummaging around his few belongings and pulled out a carefully wrapped Canadian magazine published by the Royal Ontario Museum. He showed me the front cover which pictured a fox pelt. I admired it for a while, not knowing if I could or should look through the pages. Grandpa helped me out. He opened the magazine to the main article in which he featured! I learned that about 10 years ago a charitable organisation sponsored his grand daughter to go to Canada to have surgery for her congenital heart disease. A few years later, a Canadian Professor visited the family and as a thank you the grand father gave him a fox pelt that he had killed, skinned and cured himself. The pelt is now a part of the ROM Asian History collection. Amazing! The grandfather was understandably very proud of the magazine even though he couldn't read a word of it. His grand daughter has since been invited back to Canada to study at the Professor's university when she is old enough.
