After the long train ride and even
Guess which one is enlightened
longer border crossing in Russia(where Erin and I toasted our stay in Russia with a swig of cheap vodka) we got to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. UB, as the locals refer to it, is a strange place. It is by far the largest city in the country, but it still isn’t that big. The center of town looks sort of modern with tall buildings, a few museums, and a ton of construction going on, but the town is surrounded by “ger districts” on all sides. Gers are the traditional Mongol homes designed for a nomadic lifestyle that can be put up and pulled down in a few hours. These ger districts are full of extremely poor people and are basically slums. More on these later…
Our train arrived around 5 or so in the morning, and Erin and I set off to walk to our hostel (because the car that was supposed to pick us up wasn’t there) with about 10 or so other people who we met either on the train or in Ulan Ude, Russia that were also staying at our hostel. After a good hour long trail of tears, we finally made it. We had three days in the UB to explore and hang before our trip to the Mongolian country side. We spent this time checking out the National Museum of Mongolia (which had a pretty sweet Genghis Khan exhibit), Buddha Park (a park with a huge Buddha and sweet view point overlooking the city), a few Buddhist temples, and just walking around the city. The highlight of my time in Ulan Bator, however, occurred around two in the morning the Friday night we were there. I had pretty much come to terms with missing the 2011 college football season… that is until 2 days before the season started and I shelled out a hundred bucks and ordered a slingbox to my parent’s house. After my pops set it up the night before the game, I was in business. The slingbox is a little device you hook up to your TV and as long as you have a computer with an internet connection, you can watch that TV from anywhere. Once the time rolled around I was pretty excited. I had my 2 Tiger beers ready to be cracked and a little package of generic brand Pringles ready to go. While I was waiting around for the game to start I got to talking with a bunch of Australians who were sitting in the lobby of the hostel watching an Australian Rules Football playoff match. We tried to explain to one another the rules and pageantry of each other’s game. I’m pretty sure we walked away from each other confident that our own game was superior.
Again, guess which one is enlightened...
Following our few days in UB, Erin and I took a 4 day trip to the Mongolian countryside. The area we were staying was in the mountain steppe on the border of the Gobi Desert. We took a bus from UB to a remote village about 7 hours away where we met the brother a sister who would also be in our group. From here, a car picked us up and drove us another hour to the ger of the first family we would be staying with. The organization we booked our trip with was called Ger to Ger, and they offer trips all over Mongolia where you stay with families to see how nomads live and learn about their culture and lifestyle. We would be sleeping in the spare ger set up next door to the ger where the family would be sleeping. In all we would be staying with 3 separate families on our trip. Each family had literally hundreds of animals which they took care of and basically lived off of. They would have horses, cows, sheep, and goats. Being nomads, the families we stayed with didn’t really farm, so they lived primarily off of meat and dairy produced by their animals, which meant, not surprisingly, that’s what we would live off of for the next four days. We were treated to homemade noodles, rice, beef, horse meat, some sort of mystery meat which may or may not have been marmot (luckily we didn’t catch the bubonic plague which many unlucky wild Mongolian marmots suffer from), rock hard cheeses (these were mixed in with cookies, and unlucky cookie grabbers were in for a sour surprise), salted milk tea (the word tea could pretty much be omitted from the title of the drink, it was basically a cup of milk with 2 spoons of salt mixed in),
Erin playing with ankle bones
and fermented mare’s milk (that’s right, alcoholic milk from a horse). While definitely not the best cuisine, most of the food tasted much better than it sounds… although the rest was pretty much on par with what you would think. In our spare time with the families we would go for camel or horseback rides to local sites (we saw a holy Buddhist rock formation, a huge sand dune and lake, a secluded temple on top of a mountain, and a fake tombstone that was built for a movie about Mongolia that was filmed nearby), hike around, play with the kids in the families (they taught us a game where you roll handfuls of goat ankle bones, flick then at each other, and then collect the ones you hit… kind of like a slightly more morbid marbles), help the families with chores (I had to help an old man saw up firewood… which was nice because the other two families just used dried animal poop to heat/cook everything), or try to communicate with the adults in the families. Communicating was always fun as it seemed as though they knew about as much English as we did Mongolian. Luckily the company had provided us with a mini phrase book, so we were able to tell them our names and occupations and ask them how their summer was going. Beyond that, we stuck to hand motions and head nods. Every now and then someone would come over and grab the phrase
Pre-fall
book with an excited look on their face, but after flipping through it and not finding what they wanted to tell us would just sort of shrug and go on with what they were doing previously. Horseback riding with them was a blast, although their idea of teach you to ride a horse was to help you on to it, smack the horse on the ass, and letting you figure it out for yourself. There was one incident while we were riding horses from the second family’s ger to the third family’s ger. We were about half way there when we got to a super sand dried up river bed. Erin’s horse was dodling behind everyone (see how I blamed it on the horse… that’s marriage for you) so I was kind of goofing around and staying back with Erin then having the horse gallop up to everyone else, then turning around and going back to Erin. Well I guess at one point mid gallop the horse lost his footing in the deepish sand and went down, supermanning me over the top. Both the horse and I popped right back up, me laughing, both of us ok. I guess that although the sand caused the spill, it probably saved me from getting anything hurt, save my pride. It took a trip to Mongolia for me to say that I’ve literally fallen off the horse, and hopped right back on.
After the 4 days with the
Erin the Cowgirl
families we returned to UB. We had one day before our train to China, and Erin found an organization which would let us volunteer for a day. The organization was run by a husband and wife who were from Chicago, and the goal was to help the ultra-poor in the ger districts of Ulan Bator. The husband and wife had moved from their nice home in the Chicago suburbs to live with their 3 kids (18, 16, and 10) in the slums of UB. We got a chance to talk to all of them and the whole family was awesome. We participated in a full day “poverty workshop” with about 15 other volunteers where we helped deliver clean water to families, learned about the dire situation much of the families in the ger district faced, and participated in a brainstorming discussion session where ideas could be exchanged to improve the organization and come up with new ideas. The whole experience was fascinating and seeing how people lived in this part of the city was eye-opening.
Next up Beijing!!!
Tell everyone you know how awesome we are:
Read Full Post »
Runaway Bride... and Groom 