A few weeks ago, our Russian friend decided to celebrate his birthday by taking us all out of town for a picnic.
It was a pretty cloudy spring day, but that didn’t stop is from having a lot of fun. At some point I got roped into a game with a bunch of teenagers that involved passing a volleyball back at forth around a circle and if you messed up (which I did, frequently), you had to sit in the middle and dodge volleyballs being pelted at your head by excitable sixteen-year-olds. That was fun.
It was really, really windy, so our little fire required some serious protecting.
And when various pieces of meat flew off the makeshift grill, I entertained myself by throwing them up in the air and watching the falcons swoop down and catch them. Which as silly as it sounds was ridiculously awesome and totally made my week.
I roped Other English Teacher and our Inner Mongolian friend into hiking up the mountain with me. This required a lot of scrambling up giant rocks and precariously wedging ourselves into gaps in the boulders, and then at one point I misjudged a rock and started to slowly slide down the cliff face towards the 500 foot drop. But then Other English Teacher saved me and I’m fine, mom, really.
The top was WINDY!
And the view, as always, was lovely.
We climbed down just in time to eat chicken and watch the sun set.
In the spirit of more lovely views, Other English Teacher and I recently decided to attempt the really big mountain on the other side of the river as our last hiking expedition before he went home. We never actually made it to where we were trying to go–every time we got to what we thought was the top of the mountain, we realized we were standing on a smaller peak behind the actual mountain. But it was still gorgeous. And hot. And gorgeous. Whatever, have a lot of pictures.
Stay tuned for the next episode of Kulturschock!, in which we commit genocide against geese.
Friends of ours are moving into their ger while they renovate their house, and when they invited us to come help put it up, we were all about it.
Warning: The following is a highly technical, very scientific account of a ger-raising. Apologies in advance for the readers I will lose along the way.
Step 1: Put the floor down and the lattice walls up. Step 2: Put the center roof piece thingy together by some dark magic that happened in the 2 minutes you were in the house playing with the cat. Step 3: Gather your roof poles. Step 3b: Attempt to balance one end of the pointy roof pole on the lattice wall while guiding the other into the tiny hole in the center thing. But the pole is really heavy, so if you are short, it’s basically like playing the world’s worst game of reverse jenga. And if you’re inside the ger, think dodgeball but with heavy pieces of wood falling from the sky. Step 3c: Do one pole for every five the strong Mongol guy next to you does. When he tells you you’re doing a good job, use this as an opportunity to dance around in circles and take pictures of your audience. Step 3d: When all the poles are in place, back off and let the Mongolian guys figure out where the foreigners went wrong.
Step 4: Pull a piece of canvas over the roof of the ger. Practice your sailor’s knots. Or, if you are not a sailor, tie bunny ears and pray. Step 5: Brief interlude in which you are distracted by fiendishly adorable children. Don’t be hard on yourself. It’s a weakness we all struggle with. Step 6: Work in teams to carry giant walls of sheep. Also know as massive pieces of felt; wrap them around the ger. Stand on your toes and cling desperately to the side of the ger to hold the felt in place while more things get tied to themselves. Make sure the felt isn’t flush to the floor because moisture or something. Step 6b: At this point, your ger should look like a really big, naked sheep. Hugging the fuzziness is generally frowned upon and doesn’t smell great either. Step 7: Let the people who knows what they’re doing…do stuff. Like put the big, circular roof felt on. Step 8: Watch other people pull a canvas thing over top of all of this. Belt it down, and help pull the belts tight. At some point while you’re on the other side of the ger pulling on things, a blue something-or-other will appear at the bottom of the ger (more dark magic). Step 9: Carry the stove in. Step 10: Tadaa! Step 10b: Eat pizza.
Amish raise barns, we raise gers. Another thing to cross off my Mongol bucket list!
The conditions we live in in Mongolia are conducive to several things: one, never being surprised by anything, ever; two, strategic avoidance of whatever cow, goat, sheep, horse, yak, or dog is currently blocking the road; and three, improvisation. Mongolia is nothing if not excellent training for your improvisational skills, and when you’re about to turn 27 and realize such an occasion dictates that one goes bowling, prepare to take a bowling alley where no bowling alley has ever gone before.
Step 1: Collect ten (10) beer bottles. Emptied by other people, of course, because you’re the only moron who spent three (3) years in Germany and managed to come out still hating beer.
Step 2: Fill up said beer bottles with two (2) inches of water. Place outside for thirty (30) minutes to freeze.
Step 3: Take your frozen beer bottles and head to the river!
Step 4: Collect everyone you love who is within reasonable distance.
Step 5: Set up your pins and your lane.
Step 6: Collect four (4) rocks. Two light ones (that shall thereafter be referred to as “the pink ball” and “the light blue ball”) and two heavy ones (thereafter “the death ball” and “the fire ball”).
Step 7: BOWL, BITCHES.
Step 7a: And when it turns out that rocks + frozen river = things don’t roll, commence chucking the bowling balls at the pins.
Step 8: When you stop being being able to see the pins, retire to your apartment and have a party. Eat cake decorated by people who think they’re HILARIOUS.
My birthday, as it turned out, coincided with a Peace Corps training thingy, which meant a whole bunch of people I really like but haven’t seen in a while, were in Khovd–so double awesome. At one point there were over twenty people in my little apartment, and it was awesome and the best birthday I could have imagined for Western Mongolia
First, huge apologies for the blogging hiatus. Constructions workers in a neighboring province were doing construction (duh) and somehow managed to slice through the cable providing internet to all of Khovd city/province (it wasn’t totally clear which). In typical Mongolia fashion, no one knew anything, so in typical Mongolia fashion, we shrugged out shoulders and resigned ourselves to being surprised when the internet came back. It did, after almost a week, but since it’s been back it’s been even crappier than normal, so uploading pictures and video from Khovd University’s birthday bash had to wait a few days.
Anyway, back to the story.
Khovd University turned 35! Slash was celebrating 25 years since Khovd students were instrumental in the democratic movement in Mongolia (or something), so there was a weekend of festivities to be had.
Friday:
The main event of the Khovd bash was a university concert at the theater put on by the students and teachers. The foreign teachers had been asked to come up with something, so myself and my also-ukulele-playing cohort the Elf (English Language Fellow) had put together a song for the concert on Saturday. Except on Friday night we discovered two things: 1) the concert was now Sunday, reasons unknown, and 2) we needed to haul our butts down to the university half an hour ago to do our song for the concert organizers so they could make sure we didn’t suck/play Insane Clown Posse. So we played a song, it wasn’t Insane Clown Posse, the organizer dude was happy, and we were done.
JUST KIDDING there are cameras and you have say something on them because you’re white and we need white people so the university looks good on national TV, kay? Wait, no, sing a song and THEN say something.
Rolling with things is a skill I am artfully cultivating, and this time we got rolled in front of a Christmas tree made out of VHS tapes, where we played our song, said our schtick and went home to ponder the general strangeness of our lives.
Saturday:
I was walking down the stairs on Saturday morning when I ran into one of my coworkers who was like “Spontaneous dress rehearsal at the theater RIGHT NOW, but you can come in an hour.” So I called up my Elf friend, and we headed over, where we sat around for a very enjoyable two hours watching the other students/teachers perform before we peaced out to do work and told them to call us when they needed us on stage.
Blurry picture of the teacher’s rehearsing their Russian military song, there was lots of marching and cool hats.
A few hours later we got the call, so we ran back over and were immediately ushered onto the stage for the dress rehearsal…which we weren’t actually dressed for. We were supposed to be wearing “traditional clothes,” but I don’t own petticoats and the Elf had left his Pilgrim buckle hat at home. It took some doing, but we finally convinced the concert organizers that we would not dress like hooligans.
A disappointing lack of pilgrim buckle hats and Puritanical values.
Sunday:
Festivities day! I went to the opening ceremonies at 8 am (Mongol Time: 9.15), which probably would have been interesting if I had understood anything. As it was, the most interesting part for me was my calculated sneaking past the girl in the door who was holding out a bowl of milk for everyone to drink from as they went in, mostly because I had no idea a) if was was actually milk (i.e., not fermented), b) what she was doing, and c) what the protocol was for clueless foreigners.
Good news, apparently it’s a) actually milk, and b) a luck thing.
Also, there was morin khuur, aka Monglian horsehead fiddle, which I have discovered I am more or less a morin-whore for. I will sit through anything, no matter how long-winded and boring, and not consider it a waste as long as you can promise me some morin khuur because that instrument is amazing.
After the opening ceremonies there was naptime (not scheduled), followed by something in the main square that I didn’t understand but there were balloons so it must have been important.
A few hours later, we headed over the theater to watch the last-minute rehearsals. This in itself was really entertaining, as we were watching the concert-opening dance. Students in traditional costumes stood in front of the stage and did a dance before welcoming other students all carrying props representing their majors (personal favorite: the girl with the taxidermied duck because, you know, biology), who then also did a dance.
We watched them rehearse this dance twice before they decided they were good to go. Then, and only then, were we told that we the foreign teachers were supposed to be doing this dance with them, but it’s cool, we watched it right, so we can follow?
Sure. Totally. And that’s how we did a dance that mostly consisted of swaying/clapping with some air-punching to a Michael Jackson/Mongolian song mash-up.
THEN it was speech time, and if there’s anything I have learned about Mongolia, it’s Don’t Ask Questions, but after that, it’s Mongols Love Speeches. Which are fun for a little while as I test my Mongolian against them, but fifteen minutes later after I’ve thoroughly disheartened myself by realizing I only understand numbers, pronouns, and the occasional verb, they are distinctly less fun, especially because being concise is not an Olympic event the Mongols will be winning anytime soon AND there was no redeeming morin khuur. So my Elf friend and I commandeered a staircase backstage and had a ukulele jam session for an hour and a half, which was pretty fabulous.
Except at this point it had been about seven hours since I’d eaten anything, and the speeches had been going on for two hours, so I figured I had more than enough time to run home and shove some bread in my face, especially because I live less than a minute from the theater. Except of course the second I got home I got a CONCERT ACTUALLY STARTING NOW text from Other English Teacher, so I had to promptly turn around and fly back to the theater like I was being chased by all the demons in Hades. And I did it in heels.
The concert itself was pretty spectacular. Mongolian traditional music and dance are some of my favorite things about living here, and there was plenty of both to be had. One dude went on stage and busted out some pretty insane overtone singing, which was amazing. And then it was our turn:
We stuck around for the rest of the concert and then headed off to the reception, where this time I did not sneak past the girl with the milk, I drank it. Then we had to sit through some more speeches that I tried to pay attention to but was slightly distracted by the enthusiastic drunk man next to me leering at my left ear. But then there was a morin khuur, so leer away. There was also lots of delicious food, including a sheep head with brain attached that I might have found delicious if I hadn’t made the decision to stick to the delicious rice.
And thus concludes the Khovd University anniversary festivities. Morin-whore, over and out.
Kulturschock! 