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.