Trip to the Russian Border Park

Hello!  Сайна байна уу!  It is the last day in July, and I have been in Mongolia for over two months already!  The time has really flown by.  I have about a week and a half left of pre-service training and a language proficiency exam at the end of training.  Then, on August 12^th, I will leave my host family for the last time and return to Darkhan, where all of the incoming volunteers’ sites will be announced an we will have a week of site-specific training and preparation before all moving across the country.  This summer has been a wild ride of ups and downs, and I have made many great friends along the way.  It will be sad to say goodbye for now to Sukhbaatar and my host family, as well as my fellow Peace Corps trainees.  I will try to update you all when I learn my language proficiency score (we are supposed to reach a novice-high level, which is basically general introductory conversation skills and about a 100 word vocabulary) and my site placement.  I am so excited to find out where I will live and what organization I will work with for the next two years! 

But back to my current adventures.  This past weekend my family took a trip to a park at the Russian border, a favorite picnic and sightseeing location in the area.  The park is mostly on the cliffs at the edge of a plateau, and offers astounding views of the lower river valley, where the Orkhon and Selenge rivers join together before flowing north to Lake Baikal in Russia.  I have seen the point of these rivers before from a different angle, but the view of the entire valley from the park was beautiful.  

Here is a distant view of a road that illustrates how it is easy for one path to split into several, where drivers decide which path will be the smoothest, least damaging option.

A few days before going to the Russian park, we drove to an Ovoo (Buddhist shrine) on the top of a small mountain by Sukhbaatar.

The main path to the Russian Border: fairly nice for an unpaved road!

For some reason, driving on this precarious frontage road was the driver's choice.  You can see the main road off to the left, so it definitely still existed for this stretch....Some things about Mongolian driving I may never understand.

We arrived at the park, and started our climb up to the plateau edge, where the main section of the park is located.

Up and up!

A cliff that sort of looks like a face! People were climbing to the top as well, you can see one person on the top in this photo.

Chinggis Khaan and his wife!

A re-creation of what Chinggis Khaan's cave home could have been like.

Me, with Sukhbaatar (a great war hero from the 1920s), a gun, and a buddy of his.  The 'gun' was extremely heavy, because it is made out of steel and concrete!

A naked baby statue, where many people were taking pictures of the statue with their naked babies.  Therefore, I did not touch this statue when I took a picture with it!

My Mongolian host mom putting an offering on a large Ovoo at the park.

My host sister posing with the amazing view behind her--this picture is an amazing thing in itself, because my sister never wants to take pictures!

My family (according to my mother, Lorre is my little sister) at the edge of the cliff--we had to jump over a little space in the rocks to get to this ledge.

The view of the rivers joining from the Russian Border Park!

A panoramic of the great view.

Lorre was wearing a dress, and my sister thought it was hilarious when the wind blew her dress up and Lorre attempted, Marilyn Monroe style, to keep it down.

The second Mongolian horse I have 'ridden' since arriving!

This girl is sitting on a reindeer statue. There is a community far north in Mongolia that raises reindeer, and it is apparently an amazing place to visit.  I hope I have the chance while I am here!

My host brother with an awesome eagle statue in the background.  Eagles are used for hunting in the far west region of Mongolia, where most of the ethnic Kazakh Mongolians live.

My brother and sister playing a game where you get hit in the head with a bottle if you are incorrect--I refuse to play with my sister because she gets too excited/violent after a few rounds.  They kept it all in good fun this time around!

Me and the view!

I have a lot of assignments and studying to do before my language exam next week, so I probably will not post again until next Thursday or Friday.  Until then, I hope everyone is doing well!

For the first year in as long as I can remember, I am going to miss my county fair.  To everyone working at the Boone County Fair in Illinois this year, good luck!  I know it will be a hard week for me, even thinking about the fair makes me really homesick.  The fair is always a time to see everyone that you don't normally see, and it finishes up the summer with a finality that even my big transition can barely equal.  But most of all, it is about the family and friends that I get to spend an entire week hanging out with and working with.  Of course, I could really go for a taco from the stand by the Livestock Show Arena, some mozzarella sticks, and several ice cream sundaes.  You all will just have to enjoy them for me!

Until then, see you later!  Дараа Улзье!

Top Ten Mongolia Landscape Pictures (so far...)

This is my unbiased opinion of my best ten photos from  Mongolia, some of which you have seen before: 

A pretty picture of the sunset on one of my first days in Mongolia, at a tourist-y ger camp.

Sunset at a Buddha shrine in Darkhan.

A shrine on the road between Darkhan and Sukhbaatar.

A Buddha shrine on the mountain range just north of Sukhbaatar.

Another mountain scene near Sukhbaatar.

And again!

....and another Sukhbaatar mountain post!

A rainbow in my backyard!

The top of a hill near the point where two rivers meet, close to Sukhbaatar.

The two rivers joining together.

Mongolia is such a beautiful place, I hope to take many more pictures while I am here!

Naadam!

This past week was a major Mongolian holiday called Naadam.  It is their Independence celebration, and is basically a big festival honoring three Mongolian traditional sports: long distance horse racing, archery, and Mongolian wrestling.  Each town and province has their own 2-day celebration, culminating in the national celebration near the capital.

My Naadam was really great, and I had a lot of fun!  It would take ages to write about everything that happened, so I will try to give a good overview.

The first morning of Naadam, I woke up excited for a full day of Naadam festivities (and class in the afternoon which was pretty unfortunate).  I put on my Mongolian Deel (pronounced like "dell" in Wisconsin Dells) and my sister and brother and I took a taxi to our town's Naadam Stadium. 

Me in my deel in front of the stadium.  My deel is a more traditional deel, some of my friends have the shorter version of the deel dress, which you can see in later pictures.  

We walked around for a bit, going past the stadium to where there were Mongol tents (gers) set up.  We walked past 40 or 50 gers and stopped at my mom's family's ger. My mom and her two sisters were making and selling hoosher from their ger.  

My mom bringing out hoosher for some customers.  Hoosher is basically like a homemade hot pocket:  flour wrapped meat that is fried.  They are very delicious, and I ate pretty much only hoosher for two days straight during Naadam.

My sister selling hoosher! 

After staying at my family's ger for a while, my sister and I went to the stadium to watch the Naadam opening ceremonies.

A super cute kid in a wrestling costume (they look exactly like this, except on really big, fat Mongolian men) was sitting right in front of me!

Wrestlers and former wrestling champions walked around the stadium in men's traditional Deels.

These children are all carrying horse head fiddles, one of the unique Mongolian instruments.  It sounds really neat, and can make sounds like horses galloping and neighing.  These children all played together for a few songs in the opening ceremonies.

After the opening ceremonies, we walked around again for a bit.

I ran into one of my Mongolian language teachers!  Her name is Aagii, and she is super funny and a great teacher. 

After a full morning of Naadam festivities, the health group met up to go to our afternoon lesson.  We are grumbled about having to leave, but it gave us a reason to get a photo looking all snazzy together!

The health group from left to right: Cedell, Me, Ryan, Brittany, Jerome, Kelbe, Laura, and Sarah!

Class wasn't too bad, and I went to Naadam for a bit afterwards.  After a while, my sister and I went home, where my cousin (who is about the same age as my sister) was babysitting her three young siblings.  We had fun hanging out for a while, and my sister and I washed our hair.  At some point a drunk man I didn't know came over and was talking to my cousin.  Then he went outside and was lifting a weight bar that was in my yard for some reason.  My sister and cousin were telling him to stop because it looked like he might hurt himself, and so I think he got mad at them and started yelling to them in Mongolian.  I went to my room to stay out of it, but a few minutes later I heard him pick up the weight bar and use it to smash out two of the windows in my room, which were right in front of where the weight bar was laying.  

The aftermath.

This brings up a serious issue in Mongolia: alcoholism.  There are many belligerent drunk men at any time of the day, and from what I have seen this is even worse during holidays.  It is an issue that Mongolians are aware of and trying to deal with, but it is really unfortunate to see so many men here who do nothing much besides drink all the time.  

Having our windows smashed was of course traumatic for me and my family, and it definitely put a damper on the fun we had had at Naadam.  However, we cleaned up the broken glass, patched up the windows for the night, and the next morning we all headed back to the Naadam stadium. 

My second day of hoosher eating, plus today I had some carrot salad! Yay for vegetables!

This is the stove in the ger that my mother was cooking hoosher on.  It gets really hot, since it is right over the fire that keeps the whole ger warm in the winter!

The second morning, I got to 'ride' a horse.  Basically I sat on one of my family friend's horses and he led me around for a while, and everyone stared at the silly American on the horse.  It was still lots of fun though!

Then, I went to watch the end of a horse race.  Mongolian horse racing is long distance, so the races last for maybe an hour or so, and everyone gets ready at the finish line.  It is thought that the sweat from the winning horse will bring luck, so after the first horses arrived everyone rushed to the corral set up for the winners and tried to grab a sweaty cloth to wipe on their face.  Fortunately for me, my family that was with me wasn't into that, so I remained horse-sweat free!  The end of the race was really cool though, and there were lots of little kids who were competing.  Many boys spent all of their time at Naadam on horses, since almost everything was accessible from horseback.

I was back at our ger for a while.  My mom was really proud because I took a nap in the ger, she tells everyone that I slept in a ger now!

I went to the stadium to watch some wrestling.  It is really intense, but harder to see from farther away.  I think I like watching it on TV better, where you can see what is happening more up close.  

Hoosher being prepared.  It is so tasty!

My uncle or family friend (I'm not sure how he is related to me!) brought over some fruit called Cow's Eyes, and I ate a whole bunch of them.  They kind of taste like blueberries, and the trees they grow on are native to Mongolia.

My family dressed me up and had me shout in Mongolian, "come get hoosher!"  On accident, I kept saying, "Save the hoosher!" because the verbs sound really similar, and my family laughed at me a whole bunch.

My uncle/family friend/my new best friend.  He insisted we take this picture together.  He is super funny though, and put up with my broken Mongolian well.

The next day was Friday, the second day of national Naadam, which is a national holiday so everyone was off work and hanging out with their families.  My mom's sister's family before they headed back to Ulaanbaatar, where they live.  It was really great to meet them, and it was the first time in a while that I have lived with little kids.  That made me really grateful that my brother and sister are older!!

Shortly after this last photo was taken, I got violently sick. I was puking all over the place, and other unpleasant things I would rather not report in detail.  I was really sick until about 24 hours later, and didn't eat much for the whole weekend.  My family is now convinced that I lost all my fat (which makes no sense to me, I have shown them my pudgy parts but they are still not convinced), and so they have been feeding me extra to help me gain back my lost fat.  I appreciated the candy for breakfast, but I have to turn down large portions even more than before.  They are just watching out for me though, and its nice to know that if something happens they will be there for me!  In another post, I will tell you all about some of the Mongolian home medicine techniques I learned while I was sick!

For now, Баяртай! Дараа ульций! Goodbye!  See you later!