We're going down the road

to tiny cities made of ashes

All I wanted to do the entire drive back from Bayangkhongor (unnecessarily 4 days long. but that is because we visited a moderately sized city made of ashes, its name was Kharkhorin) was listen to this song, naturally I didn't think it would make sense to bring my ipod to visit the nomads. None of the eleven of us had a charger. It was tragic. Next trip, I suppose.

I wrote this earlier this afternoon. I just got like, 20 free minutes of internet by accident. Love this cafe.

30 March 2008
Student Hostel

I just dropped off laundry with a few of the kids here- I was planning on just throwing in my two pairs of pants and a sweater and chipping in a few thousand tugrik for the luxury of not having to wash the pounds of dirt out of the jeans I wore for two weeks straight in the countryside. We were misled about the size of the load though, and I just officially spent seven dollars on a load of laundry. Oh well. Cost of living in Mongolia- reasonable if you live like the locals (eating buuz), somewhat distressing if you indulge, which it is hard not to do after returning to UB and having options like apples, a coffee at the UB hotel, Chinese food. We get 12000 TG per day for food on weekends-3000 for breakfast, 4000 for lunch, 5000 for dinner- which is a lot, especially since nobody’s found a place to eat breakfast yet anyways. Finally figured out that produce and cheese at the State Department store is marked by how much it weighs, not how much it costs…so the six gala apples for 1,055 TG was indeed too good to be true (1.055 kilos was about 5500 TG which isn’t too far off of American prices I guess).

Enough grumbling about spending money-the past three weeks I think I spent maybe five dollars on candy and pickled vegetables when we went to visit the soum center (equivalent to a county seat). I am back in UB after a 2 week homestay with a herding family in Bayanghongor aimag (Galuut soum. It’s mentioned in the Lonely Planet Mongolia as having a canyon “worth a visit if, for some bizarre reason, you are in the region.” We visited that very canyon after the epic soum center visit that happened halfway through our stay-the river in it was frozen so we all climbed down and slid around happily on that sunny, windy day. It was in that canyon – which opened up eventually to a picturesque landscape of mountain-river-hillside with ger-vast steppe – that I decided to try to spend as much time as possible outside in my remaining time there.

Here's the view basically from outside my ger and up the hill a bit. That is my little brother in the picture, the sun set between the mountains and over the river.

The second week (time post-canyon) was better than the first week, which was always bound to be a little awkward since I couldn’t speak the language and had little idea what was going on. I also drank a lot of milk. These three factors combined made me empathize a lot with why babies spend so much of their day sleeping. I got about eleven or twelve hours a night, it was extravagant and glorious. I also had a bed and a sheepskin lined deel tucked around my mummy bag each night, so was never cold, for which I am grateful.

Mostly what I did each day was wake up very slowly to my family starting the fire, doing some early herding (or something outside. I was always still in bed), and telling me to “relax a little, relax a little”. The first word we looked up in my crappy black-market purchased dictionary was “amarax” which I think is a very nice way to say relax (ah-mah-rah). It is also the word I heard the most in my ger, maybe after “Tea?” which was offered to me and others constantly. Eventually I would get up and put away my sleeping bag and thermarest (thanks Vanessa. I think there might be some baby goat poop on it, but not very much) and have a bowl of milk tea (milk, wee bit of salt, effectively no tea) with last night’s dinner in it. You take the buuz that have gotten cold overnight (all the fat is congealed) and break them up and put them in your tea – Buuz cereal!!!

Then I would do my language homework, walk up to the big pile of rocks that was my favorite bathroom, sit around the ger, write letters, take pictures, and around 11:30 ride to language class at whomever’s ger it was at that day. Typically my uncle/brother Sunday-Monday (his name was Nyamdawaa, which Tuya my teacher told us means Sunday-Monday, which is the best name ever) (okay the reason he is my uncle brother is because he is my father’s eighteen year old stepbrother whom my parents effectively adopted, and he always lied about his age and said he was sixteen because he was shy about being small. The picture is of him herding, he was very good at it) would take me to class, but my mom took me once and my dad a few times as well. The horses responded incredibly well to my host father’s “chou!” commands, so those were particularly nice rides. It’d be about 20 to 40 minutes. I figured out how to post when trotting on the second day, and cantered a lot subsequently, which did a number on my tailbone one cold day my deel kept flying out from under me. Riding was very fun, even though my horse was not really all about doing what I wanted it to (huge fan of stopping for a bite of snow whenever possible).

Language class was always pretty fantastic. We’d sit around one of the gers for two hours while the mother made us lunch, and I ate more candy than I would have thought possible in the meantime. Delicious. After class our corny little language group (me, Hannah, Dan, Paul and Tuya the teacher) would do an activity such as soccer against Zaya’s language group and their families on the flat plain by Miriam’s ger. Or hike up the hill behind my place that turned out to be a mountain that never ended, but at the very eventual summit we ate peppermint patties and could see the soum center and Tuya mysteriously had some Red Hot Chili Peppers on her fancy cell phone so we rocked out to that. This is a picture of a class in my ger . . . Tuya and Hannah are sitting on my bed. Paul's deel was and is ridiculous.

The best post-language class afternoon I would have to say (although soccer in riding boots and deels was wonderfully ridiculous, and all the dads were impressed with my ball handling skills) was the smoky two hours spent in Paul’s ger playing cards with the young men who were in charge of getting us to class and back (Sunday-Monday; Paul’s very goofy 20-year old herder who was unrelated but took care of the governor’s yaks since she had a newborn baby, or something; Sober Munkoo, Tuya’s good natured and good looking twenty year old brother -Hannah and I both left Galuut Soum with pretty big crushes on him; Paul’s adorable thirteen year old brother and his super smily wonderful father (who on the last day stopped me and Sunday Monday on our ride home from a volleyball game to show me a NEWBORN BABY YAK that was possibly the best thing ever); I suppose I should now mention Drunk Munkoo. He had incredible teeth, and was always drunk, an important character in the cast of the community as he traveled from ger to ger each night and at language class the next morning we shared tales of his exploits (shaving his beard with a lighter, being helped onto motorcycles, playing anklebones with impossible dexterity) from the previous night. But mostly his teeth were amazingly white and straight and glowed.) Anyways, eating candy and playing cards with these people until almost dark – the herding was done by the time SundayMonday and I got back home – was a time I hope to remember for awhile. I lost a hand towards the end and was out of the game so I broke out my harmonica and practiced You are My Sunshine and Amazing Grace while everybody got all excited about the game around me. The picture of some of these guys is from our last day when we went on a fast ride (in an effective herd of horses, this was thrilling. I galloped at the end) and hike up to the tallest rock in the area) [l-r lea's dad, mikaela's dad, sober munkoo, Sunday-Monday, Miriams little brother home for spring break, Paul's older younger brother)

On the last Friday of my homestay (we left on Monday) we went on a group trip after language class to visit an old monastery nearby and some Buddhist paintings on the side of a cliff by a river. It was very windy and gorgeous to see water. Later that evening I accidentally deleted all of my pictures (formatted my memory card when I was checking how much space I had left) which, well, was upsetting. So there are many images that I am sad to never get to share for real. Don’t worry, I filled up my memory card the last two days anyways. Here are some of them:

My family - This is a funny picture for at least two reasons 1) My hair, which my mother did Mongolian Schoolgirl Style the last few days and 2) My little brother throwing a fit in the corner, as per usual. Most people had trouble believing he was a boy because of his long hair and that he was dressed in pink the majority of the time. I believed it after he ran around naked all night the first night in the ger, and after I saw him beating up on the baby goats. Oh, gender roles. L-R 3 year old brother, Pops, Mom, cousin, me, sister, Sunday-Monday. The all-important Machine (Car) is behind us, i think it used to be a russian ambulance. We unveiled it for this photo shoot.

My host siblings. Awwww. I'm sad my sister was only home on weekends (countryside children either board in the soum school, or, in my sister's case, live with other relatives in the soum center while attending school). But we were lucky to have transportation to get her every weekend. My little brother was certainly something.
Later on our last day in the countryside, a volleyball game. The herders loved wrestling and volleyball. The net is a rope (I think a few reins tied together) strung between two rocks. I liked soccer better, but hey. My team almost won the mini-tourney Tuya started.

Me on my "free-spirited" half-wild horse that my father trained, with Sunday Monday in the back. Also that Eternal Blue Sky.

I’m in UB for a month of school dotted with excursions (Erdenet for a day, Eastern Gobi for a weekend, I think we’re going to a National Park, and then somewhere else I forget) and a three-week homestay that begins on Saturday. I will have much more opportunity to update (we visited Kharkhorin, where, Cornell, the silver tree that my goodbye party was inspired by once stood) and hope to capitalize on that. I’m going to eat a delicious gala apple now though.