Things I do differently in Mongolia (than I would in Canada)

1. I never put my bag on the floor (except at home).
   Mongolians don't ever set their bags on the floor as the superstition goes that if you do, you will be poor.
   
   
2. I drink hot water.
   It keeps me warm and we boil our water anyway.
   
   
3. I drink instant coffee.
   That stuff has to be cancerous. It just doesn't look right.
   
   
4. I always have toilet paper on me.
   Most public washrooms don't have toilet paper.
   
   
5. My long underwear are just another layer of skin now.
   
   
6. I point with my whole hand not with my index finger.
   We were told Mongolians don't point at each other but after a few months here, I can tell you that they do. But now, it's a habit and I can't help it. It looks weird.
   
   
7. The first question I ask at a store or restaurant is "Do you have ..." not "Where is ..." or "Can I have..."
   Never assume they have something even if it's on the menu or that you saw it last week.
   
   
8. I say hello to children and sometimes to grownups I don't know.
   Only if they say hello first. This exchange is usually followed by a giggling fit on their part especially if they have friends around.
   
   
9. I hem holy socks, gloves and other clothes needing repair.
   To save money, yes but also because we're only here for a short while and we want to travel with a light load when we leave Mongolia.

Things Aaron does differently in Mongolia

1. He has my red backpack permanently affixed to his back.
   The backpack is home to his laptop, essential working tool of the IT specialist that he is.
   
   
2. He argues with taxi drivers that try to charge us too much.
   Most cars don't have meters but even with meters there's ways to add on extra mileage. The majority though charge us the right rate.
   
   
3. He says things like Yanaa! (Oh no!) and Teem uu? (Really?)
   
   
4. He sometimes eats potatoes AND rice at a meal.
   For some reason it's perfectly acceptable to serve both on the same plate.
   
   
5. He hangs out with people that are his parents' age!
   The common bond of volunteering in Mongolia is enough to forget about age differences. Old fogies John and Mary can hike up a mountain faster than fit 20-year-olds.

Erdenet

The train to Erdenet takes just under 11 hours. We left at night and arrived in the morning. We could have taken a minibus for five hours instead but we chose the train. Safer. And cooler. It was one of those older trains from Soviet times. Each car had a small coal fire to warm it up.

We shared our sleeper with two Mongolian women; one just had surgery while the other was seven months pregnant. The first was quite talkative and kept us occupied with conversation. We didn't sleep especially well that night most likely due to the strange surroundings.

I made a notable entrance in Erdenet by falling into the arms of several Mongolian men as I tried to step off the train. I blame the clunky boots and the small steps. The people from the hospital where Aaron worked for the two days were very friendly and made sure we felt at home during our stay in Erdenet.

Erdenet is one of the nicer cities in Mongolia. I said in an earlier entry that it's the second largest city but I was mistaken, Darhan had a growth spurt and Erdenet fell into third spot. The mine has been nice to the city and helped with some of the infrastructure. Erdenet has the largest pool in Mongolia and many sporting facilities.

We slept better on the train ride back to UB perhaps because we knew what to expect this time. This little trip is training for our upcoming 30-hour train ride to Beijing.

Off to Erdenet

Aaron and I are taking the overnight train to Erdenet tonight. Erdenet is Mongolia's second largest city at around 90,000 people and is a big mining town.

This is again a work trip for Aaron. He will be working at the hospital while I'll be enjoying the city. You know, drinking a nice tall non-fat latte at Starbucks, window shopping for the latest fashions and stopping by Tim Hortons to warm me up after my walk around the city's sights.

Or it may be slightly different.

We'll be back in UB on Saturday.

Wild for wild horses

Last Monday, we went to a national park about an hour and a half out of town to see wild horses. Called Przewalsky horses (or tahi in Mongolian), these horses were reintroduced to the area after disappearing in the wild several decades ago.

Tahi have 66 chromosomes instead of the usual 64 chromosomes for a horse. I don't quite know what this means but it's interesting.

There's 197 horses in the 50,000 hectare park. They hang out in groups of up to 20 horses.
We saw three separate groups while we were there. They were quite pretty and we spent a long time observing them from a safe distance. There were young foals in the groups. The baby horses are white for the first year.

We also saw deer in the park and hiked a mountain. Our group were the only ones visiting the park... all this space and only the wildlife to share it with.

Again, we'll upload our photos as soon as we can.

Amar bain uu?

This is the question you ask people during Tsagaan Sar (literally White Moon). Tsagaan Sar is the Mongolian New Year which sometimes coincides with the Chinese New Year, like this year. The celebration lasts a few days (for some, up to a month) and consists of visits to family. Tsagaan Sar is about starting a new year but also honouring the older members of a family. Everyone visits the eldest person in a family and then keeps on hopping from one house to another. At each house there's a spread laid out that includes a sheep's rump, Mongolian cheese and dried curds, salads, chocolates and meat dumplings. Meat dumplings (or buuz) are central to the celebration and you can't leave a house without eating a few. The women prepare buuz in the hundreds if not thousands.

One thing I haven't figured out is how they know when to visit and when to receive. It's all very confusing.

Aaron and I visited the family of Aaron's co-worker on the weekend. We were invited to her grandmother's place. Her grandmother is 86 years old and was the first woman to drive in Mongolia. On the day of our visit, she wore her nicest del (a Mongolian long coat) and sported two medals for having had 10 children (one medal for every five). When we first came in, we greeted her with "Amar bain uu?", which roughly means "Are you at peace?", "Are you rested?" while placing her arms over ours. She then sniffed our cheeks.

It was nice to see a big happy family together. It made me miss my own.

The city was crazy on the weekend with everyone driving around with their families. There were even traffic jams. It was great to look out the window and see everyone dressed to the nines in either Western clothing or Mongolian clothing.

We'll post photos soon...

Trip to Choibalsan

Choibalsan. From Ulaanbaatar, go east until you almost hit China or Russia and you'll be in Mongolia's fourth largest town at around forty thousand people and twenty thousand dogs. Aaron was asked to visit the town's hospital and dispense advice on their IT infrastructure. I went with him. We spent five days in Choibalsan last week.

It's very flat out there, much like the Canadian Prairies. The sky just keeps going and going.

The first sign that we were no longer in a big centre was the drive from the airport to town. We got into the hospital's ambulance (a normal mode of transportation in Mongolia) and drove off the paved parking lot onto a dirt road. The dirt road is the main road that connects the airport to the town.

There are a few VSO volunteers in Choibalsan. They and the PeaceCorps volunteers entertained us on a few nights. They gave a glimpse of volunteer life outside the capital. A life where you don't ever order the chicken in a restaurant because it's "all knuckles and bones". A life where DVDs are more precious than gold and are passed around because there is no DVD shop in town.

The Dogs

There are many stray dogs in Mongolia and Choibalsan seemed to have been blessed with even more stray dogs than the rest of the country. Big dogs, little dogs, fluffy ones, ones you'd rather not touch, frozen ones, limping ones, pocketable ones. They feed on garbage and on the scraps that residents surreptitiously give them. They try to keep the dog population in check with periodic dog culls. By dog cull, I mean that the residents are encouraged by the local government to kill stray dogs. Spaying and neutering would be a better solution but there are other more pressing problems that need addressing first (like poverty and tuberculosis and unemployment). When we went the dog cull had just recently happened. Nevertheless, they were still hundreds of dogs milling about. One dog was a small white fluffy thing. Not gray, white. I was amazed, how can a stray be so white?

The Russians

Choibalsan was once buzzing with Russians. In the 1980s, as many as one hundred thousand Russians were based in Choibalsan. They were army, factory managers and workers. In 1989, everyone left. The Russians had built little towns around and in Choibalsan where they lived. They left big apartment blocks and other buildings behind that now just stand abandoned. Choibalsan went through a rough patch in the early 1990s and many of the abandoned buildings were gutted of anything salvageable. It's impressive to see these huge structures half demolished but still very much a part of the landscape.

Choibalsan has space. Lots of it. So if they get bored of the town centre in one spot, they just move it down a little further. There's no demolishing and rebuilding on top, it's more of a drop everything and move on. Many people live in big apartment blocks like in UB. The town doesn't really sprawl out. There's a definite line between countryside and town. Our favourite activity while there was to walk out into the countryside and see how far we could get from the town. We were like the Saskatchewan joke of the dog that runs away and you can see it run away for days. We tried to reach some abandoned Russian buildings on the horizon but never made it. They just kept on being further and further away.

It was a fun trip.