A Big Crush, A Small World

Ok lovely readers, uncross your legs and take off those Depends now. Here's the story. I apologize for the wait, but I had a bit of traveling and Thai jungle trekking and cobra- and tiger-avoiding to do. More on that later. It starts about a month ago, at a little place called Oasis. We went there frequently because the company owns it. It was kind of our hangout spot. One day we went and there was a new waitress there. She was very cute. I said "That new waitress is very cute." Little did I know what this innocent comment would get me into.

So my friend Lhagva said, "Let me handle this." And he wrote on a napkin (in Mongolian), "My friend thinks you're cute. He's the one with the glasses. Here's his number: ..." And gave it to her. Then Monday morning, I got a text message from her! It said (in Mongolian) "Hi, I'm the waitress from Oasis. My name's Otgo." And I was all like whoa! So I had my friend Matt who knows Mongolian text her back because she didn't know English and they went back and forth a few times and it was all good. So we went to Oasis again the next weekend, and my boss was making a big deal about it, so I went up and talked to her with a translator, and she said my texts were boring! And that angered me. So I sent her a more exciting text asking her to see a movie. And she said she'd love to! But then 15 minutes before we were supposed to meet, she canceled on me. Stood me up. So that was bogus, but probably for the best. It may have been an incredibly awkward date, considering we couldn't communicate with each other. Like, "Sain baina uu?" "Sain. Sain baina uu?" Point to movie you want to see. Go watch movie. "Bayartai." Bayartai." And leave. Like maybe the most awkward date ever. After that I figured she probably wasn't interested, and even if she was, we couldn't talk to each other, so I gave up. Yes, dear reader, I threw in the towel.

I saw her a few times after that and said hello and she gave me a radiant smile and I lamented my poor language abilities and all that, but that was about it. But here's the kicker, my wonderful reader, what you've been waiting for for a week, what's been keeping you awake all those long nights, what's been haunting your thoughts all this time. Do you remember that lovely family that I lived with for five days? Those 13 people that I ate and slurped and slept and peed with for five days? They were HER family. Those little kids that I pushed around in rusty hand carts and slid down gravel slides and threw cow dung around with? HER little cousins. Tsitsgee Ikhchee, the nice lady who cooked for me and made my bed? HER aunt. Those two guys listening to terrible pop music on their cellphones all the time? HER other cousins. That guy with the impeccable fashion sense (Adidas sweatpants + blazer) who laughed at me when he asked me if I spoke Mongolian and I replied in Mongolian: "I don't know." HER FATHER.

How did I find all this out? Well, some of my coworkers came to pick me up on their way home from that company picnic. And right as they were pulling up, Otgo came running up to the ger with a lovely smile, yelling "Johnny Johnny!" and jabbering away. And I had no idea what was going on, and thought she must have come with them on the way home, since she too was at the company picnic. So I was like hey and kind of confused. And I got in the car, but realized there was no space left, and the little kids grabbed her and pulled her into the ger. And my coworkers informed me that, no, she hadn't driven with them, that her father picked her up. And I realized that the guy with sweatpants and blazer had borrowed my phone earlier to make a call, and sure enough, I checked my phone and he had called her. So she must have been very confused answering my phone call and talking to her dad. And they said, yes, this was her family. So I laughed at what a small country it was.

Now how does this twisted story end? The next day, my last in Mongolia, I had a lot of business to take care of, including paying a visit to Gandan Temple to thank the sky gods for a successful journey and ask for a safe trip home. But just as I was about to head up to the temple, I got a call saying "Otgo has the evening off work. She wants to see you. Do you want to have dinner with her?" I think the little kids put in a good word for me. Those little kids loved me. But what could I say? The temple, or my waitress, finally arrived on my doorstep after all that time? I ditched the sky gods and went to dinner, a double date with Matt, who had texted for me earlier, and another Mongolian girl who didn't speak English. We went to a nice Indian restaurant. And they did most of the talking and I was kind of lost. She told me some of what her family said about me. I think I mad a good impression. Afterward we went to see my buddies The Lemons play. Odnoo came over and sat with us, and I think that impressed her. But alas, the sky gods were not pleased with my choice of some silly dinner over them, and they turned that very dinner against me in the worst way. I won't go into details, but let's just say multiple bodily functions were at work. Five days of eating food cooked over cow poop without washing my hands and I'm fine, but then I go to one of the nicer restaurants in UB and get deathly ill. It's quite clear to me there was some divine intervention going on there. So I took my leave from Otgo. We had a long and passionate farewell, and there was much wailing and gnashing of the teeth and rending of the clothes and tearing of the hair. She said "see ya" and I said "see ya." She promised to learn English and I Mongolian. And I went home and became closer acquaintances with my toilet on my last night in Mongolia. And that's the story of the waitress.

I figured it was a bad idea to have the sky gods angry with me before flying through their domain, so I paid an early morning visit to a little shrine and apologized to the sky gods for choosing some trampy woman over them, and promised to go to a proper temple in Thailand, if only they'd heal me and grant me a safe journey. And with the combined forces of the sky gods and some powerful antibiotics, I dried up, and got on the plane to meet my lovely sister and her charming boyfriend in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I am now, having more adventures and culture shock. It's hot and colorful and my diet contains vitamins and there are plants in the city. I visited a temple my first day here, and a few more since, and I think the sky gods are appeased. I'll spare you the details of how I know that. I'll probably write some more stuff, but you can also follow Phil and Julia's blog at http://globetacklers.blogspot.com and they'll probably cover most things we're doing.

Until next time, dear reader.

Herding, Slurping, Living.

So I'm back from my little countryside adventure. It was sweet, and a fitting way to end my trip here. On Wednesday we drove out to Terelj. It's about an hour from the city and is possibly the most beautiful place on earth. The scenery is stunning. In a few days I'm gonna try to upload a ton of pictures. But for now, maybe Google will aid your mental picture. So we drove out there, stopping at gers every now and then to ask where this family was. We found them, right by Ayanchin, a fairly nice resort that Mr. Ambassador likes to frequent. But that's neither here nor there.

The family consisted of a mother and father, three sons aged 20, 14, and 10, and an adorable little 5-year-old girl. And it made me wish that I too had an adorable little sister. Oh well. They spoke no English. So that was fun. And even though they repeated their names to me like 5000 times, I still only know the mother's name, Tsetsgee Ikhchee or something like that, and the youngest son, Purbaatar. That's because they were always yelling at him. Even when the mom was going over their names, she introduced him as the one whose name they were always yelling "Purbaatar! Hey Purbaatra!" Not that he was causing trouble, but just because he'd run off and wander around and generally not listen. But he was hilarious. The little kids liked playing with my camera and phone, so they took hundreds of pictures and went through every single one I'd taken, and play snake on my phone. And they'd accidentally call people every now and then and then hang up, which must have annoyed a few people. The 2 younger kids were crawling all over me within 5 minutes, and the rest of the family warmed up in short order.

The standard day was quite relaxing. I'd hang out with the kids and amuse ourselves while the two older sons rode off somewhere, I think to tend the herd. They had about 20 cows and maybe 10 calves. The kids' favorite activities, aside from the aforementioned snake and camera, included running around, sliding down a gravel pile, throwing rocks at the windows of an old abandoned shack, and pushing each other around in some old rusty hand carts. There'd be some chores, we'd clean the gers (they had 2), chop some firewood, and collect dried cow dung for the fire. The kids quite enjoyed standing on top of the dung pile and throwing chunks at me for me to catch and put in the bag. And I'd never have thought that getting cow manure thrown at me could be fun. And there'd certainly be a nap at some point, and I'd hike around and explore the beautiful park, and take tons of pictures. And food. The food was simple, hearty, and plentiful. Mostly milk products from their cows: yogurt, bread and butter, buuz, soup with meat and noodles or rice, and copious amounts of milk tea. I didn't have anything else to drink for those 5 days, not even water. Milk tea is a miracle drink. It's warming on cold days, surprisingly refreshing on hot days, thirst-quenching, stomach-soothing, and a universal dipping substance, for buuz, bread, anything. Milk tea is always drunk from a bowl, and always slurped aggressively. Our dad was a pretty good slurper, but the best was the grandma next door, I suppose because she's had 70 years to fine-tune her slurping technique. My favorite meal was when we all sat on the ground around a leg of meat, and the dad would cut off chunks and hand them to us. My favorite part of the day was in the evening when the cows would come home and we'd head out to milk them. The mom would milk while Purbaatar and I would wrangle the thirsty little calves away from their mothers. The doorless outhouse was out back, but I used the neighbors' doored model out of modesty. And the sanitation system consisted of a jar, which when filled with water served as a sink, shower, bathtub, anything. It was a remarkably versatile little jar.

On Friday, some relatives from the city arrived and stayed the rest of the weekend. And these city dwellers brought cigarettes and potato chips and cheap plastic toys to this pristine environment. Sort of indicative of how the city has corrupted the Mongolian people. In UB, they smoke and drink and rob and cheat and lie and fight. And in the countryside they slurp their milk tea and tend their animals. So there were 14 of us between two gers, and that slept us all. 2 to a bed (except for mine), roll out some blankets on the floor, and voila. And we all ate together in one ger, covering every surface and slurping away. It was remarkable how such a simple lifestyle worked so well. They had few material possessions, mostly just necessities, and housed 6 people in 2 rooms, but they were well-fed, healthy, and happy. And very loving towards each other. It made me miss my own family quite a bit (do you like that one Mom? That was for you).

They were very warm in general, and we got along remarkably well considering we couldn't communicate. But I understood the hand signals for eat and sleep and pee, and I picked up a few Mongolian words. Like when it was raining, they talked about boroond a lot. I learned that one from Fire. And I got used to "tsai uu?" which means "tea?" That's not to say they didn't talk to me a lot and try to teach me things. But Mongolian is a very difficult language, and I think I was there for the perfect amount of time, because any longer without communication would get awkward.

On Saturday, the company had a picnic in Terelj, so I met them up that afternoon. Most of the people were staying at a ger camp up the road a ways, but the boss and our advisory board members were staying at Ayanchin, about 50 meters from my little ger. So I had quite a bizarre experience when I washed up with the jar, said goodbye to the grubby little kids and walked 5 minutes to meet 4 guys sitting on a deck talking about hedge funds and real estate and high net worth individuals. That's kind of what Mongolia has been for me. Weird transitions between things like this. Then we drove out to the ger camp, where most of the company's employees were hanging out, and we played some bball and ate some hurhog, which is meat and veggies in a big pot cooked by hot rocks. It was delicious. A lot of times, they just cut open the animal and put the hot rocks inside and sew it up again and let it cook. But this time was less exciting. After about 2 hours of being away from my family, I began to miss them. That was strange. And then I returned home that night to my little ger and all was well.

I returned to the city the next afternoon. Most of the family was gone, I have no idea where, so I didn't get to say goodbye to them, which was pretty disappointing. And right as I left came the surprise of all surprises! I discovered a very funny coincidence, but something that you will have to wait until next time for, dear reader, because my fingers are tired and it's a long story. Try not to wet yourself in your anticipation. But all in all, it was a fantastic experience. I lived the way half the country lives, and met some wonderful people. And frankly, I was happier to have made their acquaintance than that of Odnoo or Asashoryu or Agiimaa (I didn't tell you about Agiimaa, reader, but youtube her if interested). They were simple, lovely, welcoming, and very generous.

The Lemons / Broin' Out / Playtime / Taxis / Nazis / Going to Herd Some Sheep...

Ok. So. One night over a month ago, my fellow intern and I were at a restaurant and this band came on and played a few songs. And they were quite good. They played a few songs in Mongolian and a nice Coldplay cover. We took notice because the lead singer was very distinctive looking, he was kind of small, and had a beard and sunglasses and a hat, very non-Mongolian. And the bass player looked like Attila the Hun. The next day, we found out that these guys were the Lemons, the most popular band in Mongolia. So we thought that was cool. That weekend, we saw the singer at a club, and our Mongolian coworker knew him and asked him to come over and sit with us. So we hung out with him for a while. His name's Odnoo. He didn't speak too much English, but was super friendly, and still wearing his sunglasses. And it was quite dark. So I don't think he saw us at all. But from that moment on, we were bros.

We've seen more of their concerts and hung out with Odnoo a few times since then, and he's always been friendly and approachable, which is cool because this guy's like the biggest rockstar in Mongolia, and our brolationship has really blossomed. And he's always wearing his sunglasses. Apparently he never takes them off. Some say it's because he was weird looking eyes, but most say it's because he's really flipping cool. I think it's the latter. Here's my favorite one of their songs, partly because it's sweet and partly because I can understand the chorus (it means "hello, hello-o"). You can see my bro. He's the one with the sunglasses.

So this weekend was this big 2-day outdoor music festival called Playtime, kind of like the Bonnaroo of Mongolia, but with maybe a thousandth the amount of people. It's at a hotel about 25 minutes outside the city, set on the banks of a river at the foot of the mountains. It was a gorgeous day and the scenery was absolutely stunning. And people camp out there and hang out and eat khuushuur, and there's 37 bands playing between 2 days. Which must be every single band in Mongolia. I don't know where they scrape all these guys up. Some of them were terrible, but most were pretty good. And The Lemons were headlining it, and they put on the show of a lifetime. They were rocking and the whole crowd was singing along and jumping around and it was all good fun. The bands that followed them were pretty terrible, so we left and found some tea and khuushuur.

I left that night, and took the most terrifying taxi ride of my life back to the city. While the trip out took 25 minutes, we got back in a flat 10, tearing down little country roads, weaving between cars in the city, and blaring Russian techno-pop. I was hanging on for dear life the entire time. The only English my driver knew were a few choice curses he yelled when we hit a speed bump at 70 mph. And then after all that, he overcharged me. But he had a meter, so I couldn't argue. Taxi drivers here are sharks, and taxi service in general is pretty sketchy. Probably 5% of taxis here are actually marked as such, and have meters. The rest are just unmarked cars that stop and pick you up when you hold out your hand. But those might actually be better, because you can't argue with a metered fair, though they are all rigged. One taxi driver I had was actually an artist who gets in his car when it rains and drives people around to make an extra buck. So I avoid taxis whenever possible and never ride them alone because they are sketchy.

Oh, and a little while ago my coworker showed me this article from Time Magazine about neo-Nazis in Mongolia, and we were quite scared. Whenever we've walked around since then, we've wondered which establishment could be the fabled "far-right hangout." We think we have it pegged, an unassuming little place across from the Masterfoods, but we don't have the guts to see if it's "adorned with Nazi paraphernalia." But I finally ran into my first Mongolian Nazis this weekend. They were just two guys chilling at a club, but one of them had a Luftwaffe t-shirt with a big swastika on it, and another had the Parteiadler on his hat (thank you wikipedia for the word). And it was really disturbing. I wouldn't be surprised, and you can mark me on this, if Mongolia is overrun by some weird facist dictatorship in the next fifteen years. Seriously. It's brewing, even though they say Mongolia is only one of the true democracies in Asia.

And tomorrow is my last day of work! After that, I pack up and head to the countryside for 5 days to live with a family. I'll have my own ger to sleep in, which is quite luxurious. And I don't really know much else of what I'll be doing, except that the family has livestock, so I hope I'll be doing a little herding and milking and wrangling and all that jazz.

Hmmm, oh! and I met one of the best sumo wrestlers in the world today! He's Mongolian, held the title of world #1 for a number of years until he was dethroned by another, younger Mongolian. So the two best sumos in the world are Mongolian, a fact which, I hear, causes no small amount of ire among the Japanese. But the Mongolians dig it. So anyway, this giant guy was walking out of a restaurant as we were walking past, and I thought "wow, that's a big dude," but my friend was like "DUDE! That's Dagvadorj!" And I was still clueless, but he explained who he was and hyperventilated a bit and so we ran after him and we asked him for a picture. He was kind of in a hurry, but stopped and let us take our picture with him. But alas, we took it on a cellphone, and when we got back to the office, found out that it hadn't saved or something, and so the incredibly awesome picture was lost forever. He speaks very good English and is fluent in Japanese as well. And he has a very limp handshake; I suppose because he would break many many hands if it were firmer. Seriously, his hands are like the size of hubcaps.

Well, I'm off to the countryside soon, and then my time here's just about over. Hmm. Some reflections next week.

The Fruit of my Labors

The website for the Institute is up and running! Hoorah! Check it out here:

http://mongolia-institute.org/

We also have Facebook and Twitter accounts! We're so 21st Century. I wouldn't mind it if you followed us on Facebook/Twitter and made us look bigger and more presentable. That wouldn't be bad. My boss would not be unhappy.

Mm... Food

Mongolian food is delicious. Believe it or not. I think the entire Mongolian cuisine has been shaped by the winters here. Which are really frigging cold. UB is the coldest capital city on earth. So Mongolians only eat what can survive the winters, and they only eat things which will allow them to survive the winters in turn. So no fruits or vegetables or any of that nonsense. Just meat and potatoes and milk and mayonnaise and fat.

The national food of Mongolia is khuushuur (hosher), and I think a metaphor is the best way to describe it. Imagine a letter, a sweet, tender love letter, written on sweet, tender mutton. This letter is mailed in an envelope of dough and the postage is grease. And we're shipping this thing overnight express. So hopefully that gives a good picture: a delicious, greasy dough envelope lovingly filled with mutton. Some are crispier, some are doughier, all are delicious. I could live off these things, and I often do. At the Naadam festival, there were about a million khuushuur stands. The best I've ever had I bought from two little kids carrying a bucket of the stuff around. Other foods are buuz, which are mutton dumplings, tsuivan, a noodly dish, and a lot of dishes with various combinations of rice, potatoes, mutton, and sauce. I once had a soup that was literally just cubes of fat in broth. It was disgusting.

Salads here are interesting. They call anything that's drenched in mayonnaise a salad. So you have potato salad, coleslaw, and that's about it. Suutei tsai is the traditional drink - it's milk tea and it basically tastes like melted butter. It grows on you. It's kind of like hot chocolate but instead of a chocolate taste it's a butter taste. Mmm. Then there's airag, the famous fermented mare's milk. I've had airag of both the horse and camel varieties. The taste is pretty unique - kind of like a lemony, milky yogurt. It's really invigorating. We keep a bottle of it in the office to increase productivity.

There are some pretty good restaurants in town: American, French, Japanese, good Indian, and a ton of Korean. My favorite is Zochin Buuz, which is a Mongolian fast food chain. They serve up cheap, dirty Mongolian food. It's great.

Things I have not yet had that I am intending to are: boiled sheep's head, roasted sheep, and blowtorched marmot. Actually I think I'm going to avoid the marmot because they're endangered in Mongolia. Because people blowtorch them all the time, I suppose.

And that's about it for Mongolian cuisine. I think my stomach will be in shock when I head to Thailand.

Homophones

There are few things Mongolians love more than socialism and the Beatles, so Ulaanbaatar may be the only place in the world where there are statues of Lenin and Lennon a few blocks away from each other. This makes me very happy.

(note the Playmobil billboard in the background. awesome.)

I'm back at work now after the weekend. It was pretty relaxing after a Friday night out until 6am. Which is early, because the rest of the people turned in at 10am. Mongolians are late nighters. I spent Saturday in a French cafe, and saw the circus the night. It was cool. They liked jumping around and making giant stacks of people. I spent Sunday afternoon sneakily taking pictures of a flooded development (it rained a ton Friday) for propaganda purposes, and reading Dostoevsky on a mountaintop. It was blissful.

And I got some pictures uploaded, some some older posts have been updated.

Naadam

This weekend was Naadam, the summer festival, which is the biggest event of the year in Mongolia. The whole country basically shuts down for 3 days, which makes it really frustrating when you're trying to find food. But, it was really sweet.

I had an interesting Naadam weekend. On Friday, we received word that 8 hedge fund managers from Hong Kong were in town for the weekend. One of them went to grad school with my boss, and they're all loaded with money so he wanted us to show them around with the hope that they might invest. Now I really have no idea what a hedge fund manager does, but this weekend I learned that they are basically 40-year-old frat boys. I haven't yet decided if this is funny or pathetic. I also don't know how being a 40-year-old frat boy translates into a career with wealth and prestige but oh well. So Friday night I was driving around UB in a hummer with some hedge fund managers. And that's a cool story, right? And one of them knew Harcourt Place so we bonded over that because the club of people in the world who know Harcourt Place is very very small.

Saturday was the opening ceremony for Naadam, and a little drizzly. I was supposed to go with the Swede but she wasn't feeling well, and I called up two of my coworkers but they were m.i.a. so I wandered down to the stadium by myself, bought a scalped ticket and found a seat squished between two Mongolian mothers and their adorable children. I got there kind of late, so my seat was in the front row of the rear of the stadium, so I couldn't really see too much. But what I did see was pretty cool. They start by marching in these 9 horsetail banners from the parliament house, which are the symbol of the government. So the seat of government is actually transferred to the Naadam stadium for a few days. These banners are white, and they switch to black ones during times of war. I don't think they've pulled those out for like 800 years. And then there was all this singing and orchestra-playing and narration and acrobatics and horse-riding and flag-waving and traditional-clothes-wearing and marching and general patriotism. And my butt got a little soggy but I had some nice greasy khuushur so it was all good. Then they conclude the ceremonies and start with the competitions.

Naadam is a celebration of the "three manly sports:" archery, horse-racing, and wrestling. "Three manly sports" is a little bit of a misnomer, 1. because a good portion of the contestants are women and children, and 2. because there are kind of four sports now that sheep anklebone-flicking has gained popularity (yes, you read that right: sheep anklebone-flicking). But regardless, every one of these sports is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.

Wrestling takes place in the stadium. Mongolian wrestling is awesome for many reasons. Everyone wears these ridiculous costumes and they all do this sort of soaring-eagle swagger ritual before and after the match. And there are no weight classes and they put the highest seeds against the lowest, so the very first matches are these little scrawny dudes getting walloped by these monsters. It's awesome. I have no idea why the little scrawny dudes even enter the competition, because they all get destroyed. It did not look like fun. Here's a video where you can see the banners and the goofy outfits and the soaring eagle dance.

Don't mess with her.

At this point I met up with the Swede who was feeling better, and we wandered out to see the archery competition. The contestants were a mix from young men to old grandmas who were out there whipping off these arrows. So I learned another lesson: do not mess with a Mongolian grandma. They shoot at these little targets on the ground from about 50 meters away, and there all these judges standing right around the targets with arrows whizzing in right at their feet, without looking the slightest bit concerned. And we were like, what? It was bizarre. But they were all incredibly accurate, so it seemed ok, until one arrow misfired and flew way over the judges' heads. Then we left.

The judges. Note the arrow at his feet.

We went next to the anklebone-flicking arena. When we got there we couldn't get in because President Elbegdorj and Prime Minister Bayar were in there observing. Apparently they are avid anklebone-flicking fans. But we got to see them, so that was pretty cool. After they had rolled out in their motorcade, we went into the arena. This has to be one of the most bizarre activities that exists. There's this incessant chanting/humming sort of thing going on in the building. Guys are on teams of four and the sit about 3 meters from the target, which are two little sheep anklebones. Other teams sit on each side of the target and watch and chant. The guys flicking sit there stoically with a little wooden slide

propped on their knee with another bone on it, and they line this thing up and flick the bone at the target. And they're incredibly accurate - I think they made like 10 in a row - flicking this little thing at this little target from 10 feet away. It's crazy.

A fearsome anklebone team.

The only sport I didn't see was horse-racing, which is supposedly the best. Now this is no Kentucky Derby. This is no race where so-and-so's horse with such-and-such an ironically clever name and such-and-such overpaid jockey hurt his poor little ankle so he can't run around in a circle for 30 seconds in front of a bunch of rich ladies in ugly hats. No. This is Mongolian horse racing, a grueling two hour race through the Mongolian steppe. The jockeys are kids from 4 to 10 years old, born and raised on the steppe. Many of the horses drop dead before or after the finish line and these little kids jump off and start kicking them to get them going again. This is real horse racing. Mongolia is PETA's nightmare, by the way.

But I didn't get to see that. After the anklebone-flicking, we wandered around the fairgrounds for a while, trying khuushuur at every place. Khuushuur is the most delicious food on earth. More on that in a future post. I think everyone in the city was at Naadam. It was really crazy. We had a good time, I had a bowl of airag which was ladled out from a dirty plastic barrel, and it was truly invigorating.

The next day we hung out with the U.S. ambassador. One of my friends and co-workers worked at the embassy last summer and the ambassador become somewhat of a friend and mentor to him, so he invited him, the Swede and I out to a cultural fair in the countryside. But we ended up having an even more Mongolian cultural experience by getting diverted to different routes three times trying to get out of the city and ending up stuck in traffic for an hour and a half. So we decided to turn around and head out the city to Terelj, a park outside the city in the other direction. But we were kind of hungry so we headed to the ambassador's house for a quick sandwich. This turned into a few hours and a four-course lunch, so by the time we were finished it was raining and too late to go to Terelj anyway. But it was still a good time, the ambassador is a great guy. very kind and hospitable (who would spend their holiday with three college kids?) and he promised us a trip to Terelj another time. That night we caught the closing ceremonies on TV, in which the winning jockeys are honored with a bowl of airag. They were still riding their winning steeds, who by this point looked envious of their fallen comrades. The wrestling finals were also on, this time with two behemoths. And to close they carried the nine standards back to the Parliament house.

My Mongolia experience has been enjoyable though not at all what I expected. I expect to come here and wrestle sheep and milk camels, but this was my Naadam: riding around in a hummer with hedge fund guys, riding around in an armored SUV and dining with the US ambassador, wandering around the Naadam stadium with a Swedish model. Who knew I had to come to Mongolia of all places to get away from such lowbrow company as I am usually surrounded with? Company like you, dear reader. Company like you.

Altan Urag

I saw these guys live last night (the band, not the Mongol hordes). They're called Altan Urag and they're really big here. They're called a folk rock band, so they use traditional Mongolian folk styles to play really thumping rock music. It's so sweet. The traditional Mongolian instrument is a two-stringed "horse-head fiddle," and the singing style is throat singing, which can produce multiple sounds and kind of sounds like a growl and a whistle. It can be really eerie, but also very cool. So these guys get up there wearing these black robes and just rock out. It was the biggest concert they've ever put on and there were thousands of people in this concert hall. At the beginning and end they were accompanied by an orchestra, and throughout the show they brought in singers from some really famous Mongolian bands and played their songs, at one point there were some beatboxers and then some monks (not quite sure why they were there). Their myspace has more of their music, if interested.

Here's some more traditional things that I found on youtube and thought were pretty good:

Here's a guy playing the horsehead fiddle and singing a traditional Mongolian song.

This guy is actually from Tuva, which is over the border in Russia. But it's a good example of throat singing.

(the movie clips in that first video are from Mongol, which is very good)

What exactly am I doing here?

I think this question deserves a reasonable answer, now that I've been here a month (a month? really? man time flies).

So I'm working for Asia Pacific Investment Partners. This is actually more exciting than it sounds. You can see our nice website if you click that link. One of my jobs is updating the website with up-to-date information and filling in gaps and stuff. The company has a variety of subsidiary companies, all of which we own a controlling or complete share in, which I guess makes us different from most investment companies. This also means that I, as an, intern for the APIP, am an intern for all those companies and have to do stuff for all of them. If you notice, there's sort of a theme going with the company's interests. They started out 7 years ago in real estate and property management, eventually building their own buildings to manage. And because Mongolian construction companies built shoddy buildings, APIP started its own construction copmany. And because the cement was expensive, they started their own cement company. And to fund everything they started up a brokerage firm. And so everything is more or less integrated.

My main task is setting up an NGO, The Mongolian Institute for Sustainable Economic Development. Basically, we're looking for feasible and profitable applications of sustainable technologies for Mongolia and are going to act in an advisory capacity to our own companies and others for a commission. So my job is to do a ton of research and start writing the Institute's founding document, which will be a comprehensive overview of everything environmental going on in Mongolia. It's stuff that's right up my alley. Mongolia has a ton of potential to implement this stuff, but for a variety of reasons ranging from laziness to corruption, very little has been done. I am also in charge of building the Institute's website, which you can see here. I am going for a clean, simple design, with an extraordinarily easy-to-use interface and effortless navigation. Let me know what you think so far.

And I do other various things, like picking up investors from the airport, picking up my boss's dry cleaning, and keeping lecherous Mongolians and lecherous investors away from our new intern, a very nice girl from Sweden who also happens to be a model. This last task, which basically consists of hanging out with a Swedish model, is, as you can imagine, very difficult.

Insider trading tip of the day: The Mongolian government is working on an agreement that will allow the Oyu Tolgoi mine to start production. It's a really freaking huge mine in the Gobi full of copper and gold. Ivanhoe Mines (IVN) is the company with the license. So if you're into the whole stock thing (cough, Fancy), check them out. It might be a little past the prime time to enter, but oh well. And you won't get in trouble for this because it's all over the news.

Mongolians Unknowingly Love Wisconsin

As they should.

At a restaurant I saw this guy trying to be hip wearing a Green Bay Packers t-shirt with a suitcoat over it. And then walking down the street I saw a guy with a UW sweatshirt with a big Bucky Badger on it. And just yesterday there was a girl in the department store with a trendy shirt that said "Property of Milwaukee College." I wonder if she's ever haunted by the fact that she's the property of a non-existent entity.

Holy Mountain 1: Chingeltei Uul

Ulaanbaatar is surrounded by 4 holy mountains, roughly in the compass directions (Mongolia's big on holy mountains, if you haven't noticed). So my goal is to hike them all. This weekend I hiked the first one, Chingeltei Uul, which lies to the north of the city. I found an intrepid hiking buddy, Kathryn, who's Canadian and is also working at an investment company and also likes to get out of the city whenever she can. And despite the mediocre weather on Sunday, we headed up to the mountains. We caught a cab and told the cabbie the name of the mountain and pointed north. He called up his buddy as we were driving and asked him where Chingeltei was, and every so often along the road would stop someone and say "Chingeltei?" And they'd say "Aah, Chingeltei," and kind of wave in its direction. So after about 10 minutes of winding through the ger districts, we ended up on this little mud road at the edge of the ger districts surrounded by ridges. Our cabbie didn't overcharge us too much, so we thanked him and wondered which one of the peaks on the ridge surrounding us was Chingeltei Uul. We weren't really sure where we were, so we figured if we just hiked along the ridge and hit every peak, we'd be sure to hit the holy one, even if we didn't know it at the time. So we just hiked up and started walking along the ridge. It was cold and windy at the top, and we figured the one peak that was higher than the others and surrounded by clouds was the one we were after.

There was a nice path through the woods that we followed and then a bunch of rocks to climb up, but when we reached the top, it was clear that this was the holy one because there were a ton of large ovoos. Ovoos are a Mongolian tradition. They're basically just piles of rocks, though the bigger and more important ones will have prayer flags and blue cloth too (blue is an important shamanistic color because of the sky). You find them on top of every mountain, no matter how small, on passes, and generally everywhere. When you come across them, the proper ritual is to place a rock on top and walk around it clockwise three times. Chingeltei Uul had about 10 large ovoos all with blue cloth streaming from them. In the fog it was really eerie. We performed the ovoo ritual and thanked the sky gods for letting us get there.

Then we decided we might as well hike the rest of the ridge so we did, encountering all sorts of livestock along the way. There were about a million ovoos and it got way too ridiculous to circle them all, so we skipped most of them. We reached a stupa at about the same time as a herd of goats. They all were grazing, but when they reached the stupa, they all went up to it and surrounded it. I was reminded of a Buddhism class I went to last week, where the monk said that the purpose of physical images and icons in the B

uddhist tradition, including stupas and images of Buddha, is not to worship something physical, but to have an image that other creatures can experience and have some cognizance of in other lives. These goats must have all been Buddhists in a previous life, because they all went up to this stupa and honored it.

We made our way back down and caught the bus back to town. On the ride back, something perfectly Mongolian happened. A set of traffic lights stopped working, so this intersection became the most convoluted mess in the world, with our bus caught right in the middle of it. Nobody could go anywhere because everyone was in everyone else's way. But everyone still kept trying to squeeze their way through. People were making left turns and right turns and it kept getting more and more tangled as they tried to slip by. There was a fire truck stuck in it with its sirens blaring away, but nothing could be done. We were stuck there for a good ten minutes before this one guy finally got out and started pushing cars out of the way to sort it out. When someone tried to rush into the space he cleared, he literally threw himself in front of their car and pushed them away. He deserves a medal. Our bus finally got through, and so did that guy's car, so he hopped in and drove away. Cars were backed up for about a quarter mile, so I'd hate to see what happened after we left.

Summer Reading

One of my goals in coming to Mongolia was to read a lot because I haven't read a book for fun in forever. I just finished War and Peace and it chaged my life. Everyone should read that book. Here is a list of books that were recommended to me by some of my esteemed colleagues at school. If you're looking for something to read, these might be some good ones. I would love it if you added any recommendations of your own to the list and I'll see if I can find them at the library here.

Once I can upload pictures again, I'll write some more posts. Get pumped for the homophone post.

The Inauguration

I saw a cool sight yesterday. We went up to check out the progress on a new luxury apartment that the company is building. And we climbed up to the 15th floor penthouse, which has balconies with 360 degree views of the city. It's really stunning. We reached the top at noon, and it so happened that the new president of Mongolia was being sworn in at 12:06 that day (1206 being the year Chinggis Khan was crowned, and so naturally a very lucky number in Mongolia).

We could see the crowd gathered on Sukhbaatar Square, in front of the new Parliament building built in 2006 (the 800th anniversary of 1206) and paid for by some Kuwaiti emir. They were flanked by two brand new office buildings, and behind them were the ger districts, slums which extend for miles up the valleys north of the city where the majority of the city's population lives. It was a perfectly symbolic image of modern Mongolia.

The crowd doesn't quite compare to January 20th on the National Mall, but oh well. Note the ger districts on the hills above.

As for Elbegdorj, the new president, people are pretty excited. He's part of the Democratic Party and is the first ever non-socialist president. Apparently the last guy was corrupt as can be, so people are glad to see him gone, but many are skeptical that this guy will be any different. Corruption is a huge problem, and most politicians are just in the game to make as much money as possible.

By the time we got down to the square, the important people were filing out, but we could see the statue of Chinggis looking down at his newest successor.

ps. If you or anyone you know is looking to make a profitable investment in a developing country, or just want a vacation spot on the other side of the world, try an apartment in the luxurious Regency Residence, conveniently located in downtown Ulaanbaatar! Buy one from me and I can make a juicy commission.

Appeasing the Mountain God

---Updated with pictures---

So I went to the steppes for the first time this weekend. It was pretty incredible. I'll try to get some pictures up but they certainly won't do it justice.

As we were sitting around, a van pulled up and out pops this investor, an eccentric millionaire from Kentucky living in Singapore. He had something in his hand and was waving it excitedly, and as he walked up, we saw that it was a thighbone of a horse. Everyone jumped up and yelled "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?" and so on. Turns out he was hiking around a sacred mountain, found this bone under a sacred thousand-limbed tree, and thought it was cool so he took it. But the last guy they knew who took a bone from a sacred mountain (a horse skull) was bucked off his horse fifteen minutes later, and on the way to the hospital, his ambulance got hit by a car. So you don't want to mess with the mountain gods. Everyone in Mongolia knows that.

So they gave him an endless amount of grief, avoided him for most of the day, and made him return this bone to the mountain god on the way back, and in my luck I had to ride in the car back with him. Having spun the prayer wheels the day before, I figured I had enough good karma to get me through the trip. We bumped and lurched down these dirt roads in a van packed with this guy's entourage of Mongolians, until we finally reached the sacred mountain. You could tell it was angry. We hurried up the mountain and he performed the bone-returning ritual, which involves putting back the bone, apologizing, and flicking three spoonfuls of vodka and three spoonfuls of milk onto the mountain, which represent your past bad actions and your future good actions. The mountain looked appeased as we piled back in the van, and a guy in the back seat started throat singing as we pulled away and bumped back to the city.

Apparently this is a typical day in the countryside.

Gandan Khiid

---Updated with Pictures---

I put the picture up on this blog before I got here, and it is so far a completely inaccurate depiction of my life in Mongolia. Hopefully I will go out into the countryside tomorrow, but so far I have only been in the city. Ulaanbaatar is dirty and busy. It feels very much like a Russian provincial city, due to the 70 years of Soviet influence. The architecture is all Soviet, and Mongolian uses the Cyrillic alphabet which enforces that feeling.

But the city is very cool. I wandered around today, up to the Gandan Khiid monastery, which is the largest remaining in the city. Nearly all the Buddhist monasteries were destroyed in the 30's by the communists, and tens of thousands of monks were murdered. Which is very sad, and as a result the country today has few of its Buddhist roots remaining. But this monastery was saved as a showpiece for foreign dignitaries, and became active again once democracy took over. 

The monastery is a complex of temples, and there were monks in many of them singing, praying, or texting on their cell phones. The largest temple is about 5 stories tall and is filled from ceiling to floor with a giant standing Buddha statue surrounded by prayer wheels. It was really an impressive sight. The faithful were doing the prayer wheel circuit, so I followed along, and definitely felt something special and magical.

Whoa Snap I'm in Mongolia

I got in after 23 hours of flying and promptly went to network with some bigwig millionaire European investors who are the Council of Advisors or something for the company which I'm working for, Asia Pacific Investment Partners, which is a non-banking financial institution. I don't know what that means, but they apparently do a lot of stuff. Non-banking finance is just as foreign to me as Mongolia itself, so this will be quite an adventure.

I'm settled in now, I have a nice Soviet-style apartment. There's no hot water, very few lightbulbs, and it smells kind of funny, but I got sheets today so that's a plus. I'm downtown, right between the circus building and the state department store. Traffic here is crazy. The number of cars in the city has tripled with no improvements made to roads. The drivers don't stop ever, they drive all over the road, and if they hit you, it's your fault. To cross the street, you have to play a game of Frogger. Apparently the best strategy is to shadow old ladies, because drivers usually avoid them.

Things I've learned so far: If you step on someone's foot, you must immediately shake their hand or they will beat you up. Genghis Khan is actually a Persian bastardization of the name: it's pronounced Chinggis Khan. Mutton dumplings are very greasy. More to come.