Dulaankhaan or the story of Billy's unfortunate end

Once upon a time (last weekend actually), a group of 14 dedicated volunteers (and spouses) descended upon a quiet little town named Dulaankhaan. Dulaankhaan (translation: Warm-King) is about four hours north of UB towards the Russian border. Pete, one of the 14 volunteers, had once lived in Dulaankhaan and was now playing tour guide to the other 13. Pete had worked there helping a group of women start a jam cooperative.

We stayed at Dulaankhaan's newest and only hotel which also happens to be the only building in "lower" Dulaankhaan with a second storey. A family runs the hotel, a convenience store and the public transportation to and from Darkhan, Mongolia's second largest city about an hour away.

The highlight of the trip was to be a horhog party on the Saturday with the women from the jam cooperative. A horhog is a Mongolian speciality consisting of meat (usually mutton) cooked in a pot with hot stones. It's usually done outdoors in the summer but ours was done inside.

We met Billy on Saturday. Billy was a nice three-year old goat who was kind enough to sacrifice himself for our party. One minute after I petted his nose, Billy was on the ground, hooves up with a man's hand deep inside his chest snapping off the main vein (or was it the aorta?) from his heart. Billy died to an audience of shocked foreigners. The man attached to the hand then brought Billy inside, skinned him and removed the internal organs. While Billy was being cut into pieces, the women were preparing blood sausages and cleaning the stomach and intestines. Mongolians eat just about everything on a goat. It was all quite quick. And bloodless. Not one drop of blood was spilled. Finally and again to the shock of the foreigners, Billy's head went into the freezer for future use.

Billy was cooked with hot stones in a big pressurized pot. He was joined by potatoes, onions, garlic and spices. We ate, we sang and then danced. The women tried to teach us the tea cup dance. The dance is all in the shoulders but our shoulders didn't want to listen.

It was relaxing to be in the countryside away from the city. Deadly quiet too. Hours can easily go by without a car driving down the main drag in Dulaankhaan. Most residents walk or ride their horse to get around town.

I'd go back to Dulaankhaan in a second. Perhaps not to live but another weekend there would be nice...

Happy Women's Day!

International Women's Day is celebrated differently here than in Canada. First off, it's a full national holiday with schools and businesses closing for the day. Secondly, the day is more of an appreciation day. People celebrate the women in their lives. Husbands and sons cook dinner and give gifts to their wives and mothers. Grandchildren visit their grandmothers. It's almost like having Valentine's Day and Mother's Day on the same day. Yesterday, in one of my classes, the male students brought chocolate to give to the female students and well, me.

Weather report

For two days last week we could feel that spring was on its way. The snow was melting, the mercury made it above zero and the clothing layers started coming off people.

Then, just to prove us wrong, 10 centimetres of new snow blanketed the city. Once the snow storm ended, the temperatures plunged and we've been waking up to temperatures below -30 every morning since. Some days it does warm up during the day.

Last Sunday, a few of us (Aaron excluded) went sledding. It was ridiculously cold but we had a great time. There was a small sled rental place at the bottom of the hill. So much fun. I'm almost hoping the snow stays longer so I can go back.

A herding herder

A herder takes charge with his whistling and herds some cows out of a corral. I give him a "good job" compliment. I think he's done it a couple of times before.

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.

Now that's just wrong

Teaching has been an interesting experience. There are days when it feels totally natural to be in front of a class and the students are totally immersed in whatever we're doing and there are other days where I just can't get the students to participate in the day's activity. I'm trying to play more games with them lately just because they tend to forget that they're speaking English while doing it.

Yesterday in class, I wrote "The pen is in my hand" on the blackboard and a few minutes later I kept seeing "The penis in my hand" in students' notebooks. When I looked back at the board, I saw just how little space I had put between "pen" and "is". Oops.

Another Japan video, pictures and more

It took us a little while but we have gotten up two albums of pictures and another video of our trip to Japan. It was a great trip, but it's nice to be back home.


I have been busy since being back in Mongolia. I now have a contract with the WHO in Mongolia to assist with IT on several of their projects. My placement at the Chingeltei hospital consists of only 8 hours of work a week now. With the WHO I will be going to the far eastern part of Mongolia (Choibalsan) in a couple weeks to help them with their IT infrastructure. I think MC will be coming along. With only just over a month left in my contract with VSO (yes I am still working with under VSO for the WHO contract) we are starting to look into our plans of travel. I think Thailand is at the top of the list.

Raisin Juice

This is a conversation I had a few weeks ago:

Coworker: Mary*, do you want... (looks in dictionary) ...raisin juice?

Me: Do you mean grape juice? Sure, I'll have some. (She takes my cup, goes to the canteen and returns. I look at what she brought me back.)

Me: Oh, you really did mean raisin juice!

In my cup, there was this greeny-gray translucent liquid with bloated raisins hanging out in the bottom. It was pretty good, not too sweet, not too watery. Very refreshing.

The same coworker wants me to try aarts, a liquid milk curd drink. I've so far avoided it.

Raisins in Mongolian are called uzem. Grapes are ussand uzem which translates to "raisins with water". I'm guessing raisins came to Mongolia before grapes.

We often buy raisins (for the cabbage salad mainly) and once we got a pack of raisins made from grapes with seeds. Yum, crunchy raisins.

*They call me Mary at school. I just leave it be, it's easier.

Japan videos

I recently uploaded a few videos of our trip to Japan. A couple are videos of the Tokyo fish market, one is some live crab at the market and the video of MC driving rounds them off. Check 'em out!

No thanks, I'll walk

I was offered a ride to our flat today. I was about to say "No thanks, I want to get some fresh air." Instead I caught myself and replied "No thanks, I want to get some exercise." As Marie-Claude already said Ulaanbaatar is anything but a city that you want to get fresh air in.

Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver.

My eyelashes were icicles this morning.

Sighting: Stray dog sporting full-on dreads. Quite a sight. I actually stopped and looked at him for a while. I wanted to take him home and shave him. I don't know dog breeds but he was like a tall, long hair cocker spaniel. I didn't have my camera with me (not that it actually works in this temperature).

Smoke

I figured it could theoretically happen but I hadn't seen it yet. In an earlier post I wrote about the open sewer holes all around the city. UB has a shortage of sewer grates, I'm not sure why but it does. Some of the open sewer holes are on sidewalks, some are on the streets. Some are huge gaping things, others are smaller but big enough to fit a car wheel. On my way home from work yesterday I saw a car stuck in one of the small ones. One of the front wheels had sunk into the man hole. The people riding in the car all came out and lifted the car front to free the wheel. A man walking in front of me rushed over to help them out. I can't imagine the damage this would do to a car. Poor car. Cars lead difficult lives in Mongolia.

If any of you look at the Ulaanbaatar weather forecast once in a while and see "Smoke" as the description, it's not a translation issue. It may look like fog but it's actually the smoke from the coal power plants and from the surrounding ger districts that has come down on the city. I could smell it in my first breath of "fresh air" when I got off the airplane on the way back from Japan. No wonder Mongolians always talk about the fresh air of the countryside.

The sentry and the driver

There are two jobs in Mongolia that have equivalents in Canada but somehow feel totally different here.

The sentry:

Jijuur is defined as sentry in my dictionary. But really, a jijuur is a door person. Practically every commercial and residential building has one or more door persons. In a commercial building, the door person is usually male and his main duties are to "monitor" who comes in and out.

Residential buildings usually have women acting as jijuurs. There's one for each entrance. The women sweep and clean the stairwell, take out the residents' garbage, roughly monitor the who comes in and take care of the sidewalk and street in front of their entrance. In exchange, they get a small salary and a place to live. Their apartment is the cramped space under the stairs on the ground floor. There's usually enough space for themselves, a small bed and a dresser. I was told that the women often come from the countryside following some kind of marital breakdown or family trouble.

We have a jijuur living under the stairs in our entrance. We say sain bain uu to her every day but that's about the extent of our interactions. Most times, she stares at us wide-eyed.

In the morning, there's usually an army of jijuurs out on the streets sweeping away. No matter the season, they're sweeping. Dust or snow.

The driver:

There are various types of drivers in Mongolia. Some organizations will have one person whose whole purpose is to be the organization's driver. VSO has one. Some are bus drivers and minibus drivers. Some drivers are entrepreneurs. They are taxi drivers or long-distance drivers. Their cars may be unmarked but this is how they earn a living. I think it may be a job Mongolian men do when they're unemployed. Or a job they do because they like being out and about. Instead of herding cattle, they herd people. When I ask my students what their dads do, a great number of them respond driver.

Dodging dodgy traffic

There's one thing that every foreigner learns quickly when they set foot in Mongolia: pedestrians do not, ever, have the right of way. That's just the way it is. Mongolians are very patient people but for some reason, if they're in a car, their patience vanishes and they will inch their way to their destination at the cost of traffic rules and pedestrians' well-being.

When we first arrived, we found that the easiest way to cross the road is to have an "escort". We would wait for a Mongolian to come to the intersection and simply follow him or her into the street. Unfortunately, there are times when escorts are hard to come by and we must venture out on our own. We've come to know certain intersections quite well and can predict when to cross.

Aaron and I have also mastered the multi-stage approach to crossing a street. One lane at a time. If we get stuck in the middle of the street for a while, I sometimes turn my feet to the side so they stick out less into the lane.

Now that it's winter, there's an added unpredictability to the traffic: slippery surfaces. The snow has been compacted down into ice and most cars only have bald poorly-inflated summer tires. Talk about fun.

Sidenote on the sidewalks: Many sidewalks now have a strip of ice going down the middle. Pedestrians have the choice between sliding down the ice to their destination or walking on the more stable compacted snow. The best one so far is a sidewalk that goes up a hill near our house. It's a long straight hill and you can just let yourself go down this nice ice strip. Our local grocery store is at the top of the hill so we get to slide home. Aaron's tried to slide up but it doesn't work so well (blame gravity). Aaron fell once going down but his fall was cushioned by the grocery bag. Thankfully, I was carrying the eggs.

Japan is so yesterday.

We left Japan yesterday and made it back to cold Mongolia. It was hard to pry ourselves away from all the wonderful food and the mild weather, but we did it. We saw Venita and Jean-François; Eric and Tanisha; Daisuke; Mike, Yuka and Heagan; and Peter and Shannon. We saw Tokyo, Kamakura, Okayama, Nakasho, Kurashiki, Kyoto, Hiroshima and Miyajima.

Tokyo

Tokyo was huge and bright and clean and sunny. It was fun to explore.

The weirdest things we ate

1. Fish sperm sacks (think silky smooth and creamy)
   
2. Cow tongue (delicious barbecued yakiniku-style)
3. Deep-fried chicken cartilage (crunchy, yet satisfying)
4. Half-cooked chicken (the Japanese have a thing for raw things it seems)
5. Pounded rice balls (really elasticky)
   

Christmas and New Year's

Christmas Eve dinner was a feast at Venita and JF's place. Tourtières, stuffing, chicken, chocolate cake, oh my. Christmas morning we woke up really early to go to a fish auction. We spent New Year's Eve with Mike and Yuka (Yuka for the first part of the night). We were in an amusement park for the countdown with thousands of others and saw fireworks from behind a tree. We were in Kyoto on New Year's Day visiting temples along with the Japanese who were doing their prayers for the New Year.

Dinner with Daisuke

One evening, Daisuke brought us to this hole-in-the-wall chicken yakitori place near Shinjuku station. It was pouring rain outside and we walked down this tiny alley that had one tiny chicken place after another tiny chicken place. We walked into one and huddled in the back corner and ordered one little dish after another. Chicken skewers. Shochu (a Japanese alcoholic drink). Raw fish. It was great.

Daisuke is Ryuko's boyfriend, a woman we met in Ulaanbaatar.

The vending machines

Aaron and I calculated (on a really long walk in Kyoto) that there's one vending machine for every 60 citizens of Japan. They were everywhere! We hiked to the summit of a mountain and sure enough, there was a vending machine at the top. And we used them quite a bit. Many offered hot and cold drinks; others, cheap cigarettes and still others, beer. There was also the ice cream vending machines.

The washrooms

Heaven! Pre-warmed seats, soap (a luxury in Mongolian washrooms), toilet paper (also a luxury, heck intact seats are a rarity) and loads of buttons that I didn't dare push. There's public washrooms everywhere too. Aaron's bladder seemed to shrink in Japan and he spent his time visiting as many facilities as he could. Only one thing, why the cold water for washing hands?

The trains

Japan's train system is plain amazing. It runs on time, it's frequent and the subway and longer distance trains are well-integrated. We had one-week rail passes (thanks Linda and Michael for the quick work on sending those our way) that allowed to hop and off anywhere in the country and they were the greatest things ever.

The ferris wheels

Japan is littered with ferris wheels. Every city has at least one. We didn't ride any.

Hiroshima

It was a strange feeling walking around in a city that 60 years ago had been obliterated by an atomic bomb. It looked like any other Japanese city with bright lights and lots of shopping opportunities. There is only one building left standing in the city centre that show damage from the bomb. The Peace Museum nearby tells the story of Hiroshima and they do it quite powerfully.

Peter and Shannon were wonderful hosts and took us around Hiroshima quite a bit. And we got to sleep in a real tatami room in their apartment.

Aaron will post photos shortly.