Brianna on a Camel?!?

6/21/09
One month down! Not that I’m totally counting down, but I do miss how easy everything is at home. The only thing that really bugs me now is all of the grocery stores, and not having a car. And if one grocery store had everything, then not having a car wouldn’t bug me as much either. I never realized before how much I take for granted just being able to run to Hy-Vee and get whatever I want. You don’t have to think about whether they carry that or not, and if they’ll have it in stock. Most of the stores here have a lot of things, but fruit and even milk that’s not expired can be fairly hard to come by.
Last Monday Altaa took me out for the afternoon. She took me out to lunch with her and some other people from work. Then we went to the Natural History Museum, and the Mongolian History Museum. They were both really neat to see, while not what you would expect from the Field Museum or the Museum of Science and Industry they were a lot better than the museum in Darkhan. At the Natural History Museum they had almost an entire floor of dinosaurs that have been dug up in the Gobi, along with a lot of dinosaur eggs, so that was neat to see. They also had pretty much any type of animal and flora that can be found in Monogolia on display, along with some from other parts of the world.
The Mongolian History Museum I thought was neater, just because I’m more interested in history than in plants and animals. There they had displays of all of the traditional outfits. I never realized that there are several (8, I think) ethnic groups within Mongolia. They all have little variations on their del’s that they wear. They also had a lot of artifacts at this museum from Mongolian history. Then they had kind of a timeline of Mongolian history in a series of rooms. This was interesting to me and I was glad that I had gone there with a Mongolian. I don’t remember all of the dates on everything, but basically the Mongolians were under attack by the Chinese at one point and went to the Russians for help and that is when they came under communist rule. Then in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s they broke their communist rule and became a democratic society. Altaa was very excited about this and was telling me about it from her perspective and pointing to pictures that she remembered happening. It was also neat to see how excited she was about Mongolia being a democracy. I really can see now how for granted we take our freedom in America and the choice that we have. We didn’t get to spend very long at the Mongolian History Museum because they were closing, so I will need to go back again sometime and see the rest of it, and really get a good look at everything.
This weekend I went out to Terelj with a group from the embassy. This was by far the best time that I have had yet while I have been here. On Saturday morning we left from Grace’s apartment complex and headed to Terelj. The ride wasn’t too bad, but the roads definitely are not in good condition, so it was an incredibly bumpy hour. On the way there we stopped by an Ovo and I was taught what to do. You pick up rocks and then walk around the Ovo three times and then throw your rocks onto the pile. If you’re on a journey it’s supposed to bring you good luck on your journey. After we got done with this we drove on down the road a little ways and I happened to see some camels sitting there. Well I mentioned to Tumii (our driver) that I wanted to ride a camel and no sooner had a I mentioned the words and I was on top of a camel.
It was an experience. First they stand up with their hind legs, so you feel like you’re going to go flying over the camel’s head, and after that it’s just kind of like riding a really tall horse. They were pretty ugly close up, and really calm. Mine kept making a weird noise and that kind of freaked me out, but I guess it was okay (or so I was told). Finally after that adventure we made it to our ger camp. Liz and Andy had brought a Frisbee, so we played that for awhile before lunch. After lunch we went out to learn how to set up a ger. For as simple as it was they are incredibly sturdy structures. It was kind of funny because initially everybody in our group was helping with the setting up, and by the end we were all just taking pictures of the guys that worked there finishing the ger. First you set up the walls, and then tie them to the door and then to eachother. Next you run a strap through all of the walls to hold them together even more snugly. Then you put together the ring in the middle with the posts that support it and have somebody hold that up. Next you run poles (an odd number always for luck) from the walls up to the center circle. I forgot my pamphlet with all of the Mongolian words for these things at Grace’s place, so when I get it I’ll post them for you. So after you have your poles in then you cover it with the felt. And you have your ger. They also used some other straps to tie down the felt and put a waterproof cover over theirs.
When this was all done we went for a hike. Hiking here is NOT like in America. At least not any hiking I’ve done. You basically go STRAIGHT up a hill, and then back down. I guess you could walk in the flat for a long time, but who wants to do that, right? Anyway, you don’t really crisscross the hill or anything, just go straight up it, why waste time. So we did that and saw some really amazing views. I was so mad, because my camera which told me it had a full battery at home ran out of power. But I’m going to steal everybody else’s pictures. When we got back it was time for dinner. Oh I almost forgot there was a Yak too!! We pestered the Yak for a little while before dinner, but he didn’t really like to be bugged. Anyway back to dinner. I ate a traditional Mongolian dish. I need to have somebody write down the names of all of the dishes too, because they all have different ones. It was some homemade noodles with mutton and it was actually quite good. Then they served us some Yak yogurt. This was okay, but it was pretty sour, and I’m not much of a yogurt eater anyway, so I just tried it. I also ended up drinking tea ALL weekend, but that was fine, they actually had some tea that I liked, so now I know what kind of tea to buy. After dinner Tumii took me down to visit a family who was staying near our ger camp. Their ger was really nice and cozy inside. All of the walls were lined with furniture with really no wasted space. They also had electricity and a TV in there. They must have had a generator somewhere because there were no power lines. I kind of liked how everything fit together really well, and while it was close quarters with the entire middle of the room open it seemed quite spacious inside. When we went back Liz and Andy had brought some games so I got to play a game of Carcassone which was super exciting.
That night it was FREEZING. We had our fire at the beginning of the night, but that went out after about an hour and it got cold. I had my sleeping bag, which I’m not really glad that I brought all the way to Mongolia with me. And even with a sleeping bag that’s rated to 20 degrees I was cold. So I threw another blanket over that and covered myself head to toe. I think I would have been fine then, except there was a dog barking that woke all of us up, and I almost fell off the bed once and got myself wedged between the bed and the side of the ger. In the morning Tumii had told us that we could go help to milk a yak, but they were already done milking them by the time I woke up at 6. I went back to bed, and when I got up at 8 Liz was riding the yak that we had pestered the day before. Apparently he is trained to pull a cart and be ridden, we just weren’t touching him hard enough the day before. I didn’t ride the yak, because Liz got all hairy doing it, and he was already to his pasture when I got over there.
After that we just ate breakfast and then packed up to head back to UB. Grace and I did a little bit of shopping, and then I came home. I hope that my adventures from here on out are as good as this weekend was!

Statue in Sukbatar Square
Bird (hawk?) that you could have sit on your arm (I passed on that one) that we stopped by on the way out to the ger camp
Ovo on the way to the ger camp
Grace and her camel
Me and my camel, can you tell I'm a little scared?
Getting on my camel
Trying not to fall off as the camel stands up, hind legs first.
Now things are better
Camel owner, love the KC hat, I guess he had it on last year when the people we were with were out here.
Arriving at our camp.
Building our ger






Tumi with the yak









Bold

Darkhan-More Pictures

The buddha statue in Darkhan





The bridge of death. For some reason the floor kept moving as we were walking across it, and scared the crap out of us.
Morin Khuur statue

Long time, No post, Sorry!

Our hike on Tuesday night. The view was amazing!




The dogs that came along on the hike
An ovo (sp?)
At the end of our hike we stumbled across this kind of randomly. It's a pair of pants, a femur (I think), and a beer can. Apparently you shouldn't drink and hike.
Some random vodka bottles we found stashed behind some rocks on the hike. The picnic on Friday and some of the people I worked with at the influenza lab

The train that we took to Darkhan
Little boy who sat across from us on the train to Darkhan
Our hotel room. Notice there is no bathroom. There was just a common bathroom across the hall, and no shower. I should have realized there wouldn't be a shower when the Lonely Planet mentioned that another hotel in town had a shower. Apparently they're optional here.


The monastery in Darkhan, it used to be a school.

Some pictures from our bus ride on the way home from Darkhan








A very appropriate cow's crossing the road sign

6/9/09
Tonight was really fun. Grace and I met up with the HASH group and we went for a hike south of the city. I was dying however, but Grace stayed back and hiked with me. We didn’t go nearly as far as the other group, and now I’m going to be hacking all night. The area that we went to was a park just outside the city with mountains and a river and some ger camps set up for tourists. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous. Grace took some pictures with her camera, so I’ll have to get those from her and post them when I can. The HASH group was very interesting. Brigitte the leader of it is an older woman from Germany who has lived all over the world, and she said that she speaks 8 different languages. Then there was another man from Germany who is living in UB, and a man from Italy, another woman from the US, and a couple from Switzerland who are going to ride their bikes around Mongolia for 2 months. Brigitte also had her super cute dog there, and the man from Italy had his 2 dogs along as well. The dogs were really enjoying being out and just running around everywhere. Afterwards there were refreshments and Brigitte had brought some Mongolian dish that I can’t remember the name of. It was like a pastry with mutton inside of it. So I have now officially eaten Mutton, and can say that I did not like it. It was super greasy and not all that tasteful.
6/14/09
What a weekend! So this weekend actually started on Friday afternoon for me. One of the people at the lab just had a baby and he was also leaving, plus another person from the lab just graduated from college, so they decided to have a party for them. I was told that this would involve going out to the countryside for lunch. Well…. At about noon the broke out sandwiches while we were still at work, and I was told to eat a small lunch before we headed out. Then we headed out at about 2PM for the countryside, first stopping to get some alcohol. We ended up going out by this hotel, and hanging out near the woods. Apparently if you just bring them food they’ll cook it for you for a small fee, so that’s what we did. I was told at around 3PM that the food would be ready in about 30min. I was keeping track of the time because I had also made dinner plans with Grace and some other people from the embassy at 6:30PM. Well our food wasn’t ready until about 7PM. So in the meantime we drank. At first I wasn’t drinking because I don’t drink beer and that’s what they had, but then I made the mistake of telling them that I do in fact drink, but not beer. I don’t think I have ever been so drunk at 5 in the afternoon before. Well we ended up getting back to UB at around 9PM, and luckily they were super nice and dropped me off at my apartment so I didn’t have to walk home in the dark. By that time I had totally missed my dinner plans however.
Saturday morning I got up early and Grace and I took off for Darkhan on the train at 10:30. The train ride ended up being 7 hours, which was quite long. We had taken the cheapest option “hard seats” which was about $2.50 each to get there. This ended up being a sleeper car with people packed in there sitting everywhere. Luckily some people got off along the way so we ended up each with a whole seat to ourselves by the end of the journey. We got a hotel room at the train station for $5 per night when we finally got there, and then went out to dinner. Apparently showers are an optional part of hotel rooms in Darkhan. Darkhan overall was pretty nice and it was good to get out of the city and be in a smaller town. There are about 70,000 people in Darkhan compared with UB’s million. On Sunday we slept in and then went and did everything that the lonely planet guide said there was to do in Darkhan, and that took us all of 4 hours.
We went to the monastery, but it was closed. We talked the guard into letting us take pictures of the outside really quickly though. Then we went to see the Buddha statue and another statue that’s right across the road from it. These were connected by what I will call the bridge of death. The bridge flooring kept moving and popping under your feet and scared the crap out of me. After that we actually spent 40 min looking for a place to eat lunch. The place that we had eaten dinner was good, but we wanted to try something different. On this part of our journey we ran into a woman who spoke English, but she was more interested in trying to recruit us for the foreign language school that had just opened than in telling us where to go eat. We ended up going to an Asian food restaurant and getting mutton hotdogs. Their entire menu was in Mongolian, so we just looked at what other people were ordering and lots of them seemed to be getting that. I really didn’t think they tasted that much like mutton, just weirdly seasoned hotdogs, and they didn’t seem to be the right color for mutton. But Grace insisted that they were mutton.
After that we went to the only museum in town and looked through it. It was very tiny so that didn’t take very long and it didn’t help that the explanations on the signs were all in Mongolian. They had the titles in English, but that was it. We then tried to go out to the Leather Factory, but it was closed. By this time it was only 3:00, and we weren’t supposed to leave on the train until midnight. So we discussed and thought that even though we had train tickets it would be nice to get home in the evening instead of at 6AM, and we didn’t know what we were going to do for the next 8 hours in Darkhan. So we ran over to figure out where the bus was, and then hurried back to the hotel to get our backpacks, and then caught the 5PM bus back to UB. The bus ride was only 4 hours, not 7, and was much nicer than the train. So now I’m home from my little adventure, what a weekend!