Christmas in Mongolia

Phew. The Christmas season in Ulaanbaatar has been surprisingly festive, and very busy.

On the musical side, the most popular song of the season is by far this annoying ditty by Abba. The "Happy New Year" part of the chorus must also be topping the ringtone charts, if my colleague's phones are anything to go by.

Around the start of December "New Year Trees" started popping up in front of the big stores, then in front of the bigger buildings, and then a huge one in the main square! "New Year" decorations, almost exactly the same as our christmas decorations, with the notable exception of anything christian, are everywhere.

Almost everything is exactly the same, but called "new year such and such" rather than "christmas such and such".

The undoubted highlight of the new year season is the work new year party. There is huge pressure on every female to be dressed to their absolute best for this occasion. In the early weeks of December office talk is dominated by what dress you are going to where, how you are going to do your hair and so on. It was made clear that anything other than a dress and some makeup would be totally unacceptable on my part, so I went with it and did my best to get into the festive spirit. The terrible task of shopping for a dress, in a foreign country where women are 90% the size of sticks and shop assistants are the opposite of helpful was put off a few times - until the Sunday before the party, the last possible day to find the dress. An awesome friend with great taste came along to help me out. Miraculously we found two dresses and couldn't pick between the two. Figuring I would not want to go dress shopping again for another 24 years I decided to get both.

Me with my team at the work party. Half these guys finished their contracts two days later :(

The two dress scenario worked out perfectly as the night after my epic work party was a fancy party for the aussie volunteers in town - so I ended up wearing a dress two nights in a row!

Me and some of the aussie volunteer crew.

What's left of my intake. Intake 30 started as 6 + one partner. Now we are two down, another has finished her assignment but staying around and it won't be long until the next one leaves. Farewells are the curse of the AYAD adventure.

These two parties were in the week before Christmas. Three days of this week were spent at work conference - around 100 staff, including all the guys who work in the field offices around the countryside, were bought together for various strategic discussions and updates etc. This was a good chance to evaluate how my assignment can fit in, meet some of the english speaking field staff and suss out some good provinces to try and get myself to in my last 14 weeks!!!!

So three days of conference, two bit parties, then Friday night was a latish night farewelling my colleagues whose contracts finished up...notably the team leader who had been at MCM for about 6 years. Although most of the conversation was in Mongolian it was a really pleasant night.

Which brings us to Christmas eve. My intake and our housemates had a late lunch at one of the fancier cafes in town, newly opened and exchanged secret santa gifts. We then moved to the ballet theatre to watch the aptly scheduled Nutcracker.

This was followed by mulled wine at one of the aussie's homes and then some essential ice-cream + ovaltine + christmas movies in a smaller group - Home Alone 2. Christmas day was going to bed super late after skyping home early in the morning before tales had to leave for work, sleeping in, rushing to church with some other volunteers then back home to get ready for a big lunch at my apartment. The invite said to start at 3pm.

This was taken pretty liberally by some and we didn't start eating until almost 6, but boy what a feast! A former chef prepared the most delicious roast beef and juus - the result of 6 months stock-collecting; there was mac and cheese, vegies, salad, bolognese, bruschetta and more...dessert featured a trifle, cakes and ice cream. Starts had included tasmanian cheese and pizza shapes smuggled in!

It was a beautiful meal with lots of friends - about 50 people over the course of the afternoon crammed into our apartment to share the day together. The night finished off with an essential Love Actually viewing and finally some sleep.

This was after spending two weeks out of three during december in the countryside. So a busy time...perhaps for the best, keeping busy helps you forget to remember what you're missing out on back home!

This week I am on holiday, although so far its been busy with cleaning and errands. Tomorrow I am off to Khentii - to a region close to the russian border (we needed to get border permits) where Chinggis Khan (Gengis) is believed to have been born. Today it is a region with buriat people - an ethnic group close to Mongolians, mostly found in Russia around Chita and Ulan Ude. More on that when I get back :)

One of Mercy Corps' projects brings US farmers to Mongolia for three weeks or so to share their knowledge and teach some new skills so farmers can diversify their activities.

Below is an interview with Greg Higgins who recently came to teach sausage making.

You can also check out the blog he kept while in Mongolia: Higgins in Mongolia Blog

Source: http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-18297-hotseat_greg_higgins.html

Chef Greg Higgins knows his way around a sausage. One of the forefathers of local, sustainable dining in Portland—which he has been dishing up at his eponymous downtown restaurant Higgins for almost 18 years—he was curing meat and serving up charcuterie plates when most of the city’s rock-star cooks were still in Pampers. But when aid agency Mercy Corps asked him to spend three weeks teaching sausage- and charcuterie-making to cooks in Mongolia, he didn’t know if he was up to the task. “Basically, there’s next to no pork over there,” Higgins says. “I was thinking, I’ve got an extensive background in real artisanal charcuterie—I’m not so sure how that’s going to work with the products they have.”

But to Mongolia he went, keeping an online diary for wweek.com along the way (you can read it all here). And after being regaled with Higgins’ tales of smoked camel hams, goat-meat hotdogs, battling antiquated Soviet equipment and downing large amounts of vodka for the past month, we had to sit down for a post-mortem on his travels.

WW: What were your expectations going into this project? Greg Higgins: Well, my expectations weren’t really high food-wise. Food there is OK, it’s nothing special. Very little seasoning—onion, salt, a little pepper—and the sausage tradition is really archaic, old Russian, so I didn’t feel it was going to be that hard to come up with [new] ideas.

You ended up having to substitute things like camel, yak and goat for pork in your sausages—what did they taste like? Really, really good. The reason pork is king in the world of sausage-making is that there are five categories of fat in any given pig, and those categories of fats have different applications, create different texture, etc. Within most other livestock—cow, sheep—there’s only one or two types of fat, and they don’t emulsify and don’t create the mouth feel you get out of pork fat. So that was my biggest fear: How was I going to get these fats to stay in suspension so it wasn’t that dry, drippy, grainy sausage that you don’t wanna have? But in reality there’s so much protein content, those animals are so healthy—I imagine the protein content in those animals is triple or quadruple even the pasture-raised meat I get here. So what that allowed us to do was achieve emulsions you couldn’t get with run-of-the-mill meat. So that meant the textures held and the flavors were really good…. The camel ham was absolutely delicious. Was it richer flavor? Sure, it didn’t taste like a cute little pig, but I think if you served that product here, people would love it.

Did people enjoy the new food you introduced them to? Oh yeah, I think it was pretty fun. And then some of the stuff was slapstick. The onion-ring thing [in this blog post, Higgins described making American food for his hosts], that was witch-doctor material. They were just absolutely flabbergasted by a commonplace ingredient—I went and bought some cornstarch, which is really the secret to a crispy batter. We made corn dogs and onion rings, and the locals were just ecstatic. Go figure.

And the meats? Do you think they will keep making them now that you’ve left? I’m absolutely certain the ham-curing and smoking process they’ll continue, because that’s very manageable. And in their world, they have a surplus of certain products. Fat—they don’t know what to do with all the fat. The idea that you would actually render all the fat and cook with it was radical. They have a lot of legs from goats and sheep they don’t know what to do with, ’cause it’s stronger-flavored meat, so I taught them to make hams with those and they were very excited. They have a lot of organ meat, so almost everywhere one of the requests was, “Can we put organ meat in it?”

Do you feel like ultimately you’ve achieved something? I’m sure we did. I achieved for myself, personally, learning what their challenges are, what their limitations are, and I’ve got a picture of what the potential is—I mean it’s immense, sitting on a resource like all that quality meat in that quantity…. So one of my projects is to put together a care package of products that should be available there in the form of small tools: good thermometers, simple brine injectors, the proper cure salts…. I think the tradition of the meats is so strong that I can’t see it going away. And I can only see that as people do better economically, there will be a point where it’ll differentiate—someone will make better stuff and someone will say, “Their stuff is better. Why is that better?”

The Future of Mongolia

There's plenty of potential for Mongolians to achieve great things...unfortunately currently corruption and a lack of leadership are holding the country back.

Pollution is a major problem - not just in the capital Ulaanbaatar, where it ranks second in the world, but now increasingly in rural towns where populations are growing and governments buy old power stations from neighbouring countries, cause they're cheap. They're cheap for a reason!

3 Words: Michael Jackson Medley

The Morin Khuur is the most famous traditional Mongolian instrument. A two stringed violin, with a carved horse shape head - the name literally means horse head fiddle. It is amazing the sounds these guys get from these two strings.

On Friday night I went to a special concert by the National Morin Khuur Ensemble. As we found our seats and turned out eyes to our programmes there was a collective gasp of excitement. Well, more staggered gasps of excitement and sharing with the person sitting next to you the finale: Michael Jackson Medley.

The concert was fantastic, probably aided by the building suspense of what this Michael Jackson medley would be! The program was a tribute to north and south american composers - a typically Mongolian stroke of randomness. Seeing the Mongolian instruments playing these familiar, and some not so familiar, but definitely foreign pieces was amazing.

At one point there was a special performance by a famous 'Pop Diva'. This woman always wears sunglasses and appears at special events...while popular among Mongolians, most foreigners get the feeling they're not quite getting the point of her presence...

And then finally it was time for the anticipated Jackson Medley - it didn't disappoint! The band were amazing, the received a rousing applause and many standing ovations - sparking an encore - in which they played the jackson medley again! This time there was a full standing ovation.

Arkhangai Province Work Trip

Last week I went on a work trip with my counterpart B to Arkhangai province (or Arkhangai aimag, in Mongolian). http://mercycorps.org.mn/images/Arkhangai.gif The province (aimag) is the highlighted area, the main city ('aimag centre') - Tsesterleg - being about 6 hours drive west of the capital, Ulaanbaatar (the black circle).

This region is famous for the best dairy products and having lots and lots of trees - a rarity in Mongolia. There was a very noticable presence of wooden buildings - homes and sheds in the countryside and oddly a lot of basketball hoops and goal posts dotted across now empty valleys - I'm guessing families must move to these locations in the summer. The aimag is well developed thanks to its proximity to UB (Ulaanbaatar). There is now paved road all the way from UB to the aimag centre - an amazing blessing.

On the way to the aimag centre we stopped in the ancient capital of Kharkhorum. There isn't much here now: grand plans of relocating the capital back here, a shiny new museum and a reconstructed temple - plus lots of tourists hoping to find more in summer, keep the economy buzzing. There are also a couple of ancient turtle rocks, and a very realistic phallic rock - popular with tourists.

The plan was to get some lunch (we had tsuivan - a mongolian noodle dish) and visit a Mongol Derby funded project. The wonder of modern technology meant that the project leader's phone couldn't be reached, so we had a brief stop at the ancient temple and continued on our journey.

Some pictures from the temple:

The next day we set off on a 4 hour drive to an isolated "soum centre" called Kharkhan - population 2000. Aimag is equivalent to a state or province, they have an "aimag centre" or largish town of population somewhere from 10,000 to 40,000. Below this the aimags/provinces are divided up into "soums" which have a "soum centre" - or town - with populations of a few thousand. Below the soum are "baghs" - or communities/villages - which will be literally a single building in the middle of nowhere where community forums are held every few months, herders come to vote and that's about it.

The project here is a felt making business. The family make the large felt covers for gers - important for insulating the gers in winter. The owner of the business makes these in summer in an old factory building. He wanted something to do in winter so applied for a grant to buy some processing equipment to make smaller felt items - specifically felt boot linings herders wear in winter.

At some stage a frozen wolf appeared. This was very very popular with the men around, including our driver. Numerous pictures were taken in all kinds of poses. Great care was taken to adjust the animals ears and get everything just right. Apparently 'chinese' will pay alot for an intact animal like this.

Day three we visited a bakery that has employed 6 new people as part of a project called Social Safety Nets addressing people displaced by natural disaster and global financial crisis. The products were delicious - a rarity in Mongolia.

This bakery is famous for making a special kind of fried big biscuit that is arranged in layers for Mongolia's lunar new year celebrations called Tsagaan Tsaar, and used at special occasions like weddings, funerals and hair cutting ceremonies (when children, particularly boys, are a certain age their hair is cut for the first time in a special family ceremony - different reports say 2 or 4 years old).

The biscuits are arranged in odd-numbered layers - even numbered layers are very bad. The layers represent different kinds of positive things- eg. happiness. Older people have more layers.

In the afternoon we visited three groups - a carpenter, a sewing cooperative and a massage centre for people with disabilities and the elderly.

Day four was time to come home. My colleague's son had become unwell and needed some kind of small surgery while we were away, so of course she was in a hurry to get back and pretty stressed out. During the day she heard that the surgery was done and all was good.

We were ready to leave at 7am - pitch black. The early start heading east was a great idea - we were driving into the sunrise which was amazingly beautiful. We stopped in Kharkhorum again, this time we were able to visit two projects - a dairy production business and a sewing group.

The dairy business purchased equipment to hygienically process and package milk to sell in their region. The owner runs a few small shops in the town and sells his milk in these outlets along with another shop he has a contract for.

He explained that there is little milk around in winter, Mongolian cows only calve in the spring - so there is lots of milk and lots competition to sell it in the summer - but its very hot and not very hygienic.

In winter herders freeze their milk to use at the lunar new year celebration (Tsaagan Tsaar) in February.

The sewing business us run by a lady called Dumaa - a very sweet, gentle lady. They make gorgeous felt items like hats, bags, boots. There is a popular felt shop in UB called Tsagaan Alt, frequented by my crowd of volunteers - we found out Dumaa sells her items to this shop.

The cooperative shares a building with the local World Vision office. I found it interesting to hear that in the summer world vision repainted the outside but since the cooperative had a sign up saying they had received a grant from a rival development agency - Mercy Corps - they didn't paint the cooperative's half of the building!

Back in the Big Smoke

Ulaanbaatar isn't the prettiest city, or the biggest city, or the coolest city. It is really barely a city by world standards; but never has the term 'big smoke' more applied to a city than here. Mongolia has the honour of having the second most polluted air in the world- and not by much.

Never before has tiny Mongolia stood out so much on a world map - you'll have no trouble spotting this little country with its contrasting red on this world air pollution map The Herald put together:

Link to Map

Click on the map then hover over Mongolia for a second and you'll see that figure of 279. Hover over Australia and you'll see 13. That's quite a difference!

This is the measurement of PM10 particles - the tiny particles that lodge in your lungs and cause all kinds of health problems..many of which aren't really known yet as this air pollution is a new problem for the world, relatively speaking.

Why this whinge again?

I got back from a fantastic trip to the countryside yesterday. The pollution starts to be visible about an hour out of the city. As you hit the city you enter this big grey cloud where you can't see more than about 200 metres ahead. Then your perception changes and it seems to get better...but your eyes get a bit watery, and your throat gets a bit scratchy. And you can smell smoke everywhere - not just in bars! (And you have plenty of time to observe these reactions as you're stopped in traffic!).

The least densely populated country in the world, with the most pristine environment and a culture that relies extraordinarily on nature has (almost) the most polluted air. Who would've thought?

Thanksgiving

There's been plenty of firsts during my time in Mongolia, including my first American Thanksgiving.

Our apartment played host to an epic feast of yummy food and good company. We managed to prepare a perfect turkey, a first for everyone involved, along with a heap of great savouries - 'beets' aka beetroot, carrots, vegies, salads and dessert featured an aussie style trifle alongside more traditional american pumpkin pie, and a selection of cakes and sweet things

Here's a peek at the chaos when the food was finally ready:

The spread rivaled any I've experienced before - this thanksgiving idea is a great way to kick off the festive season with some feasting and giving of thanks.

Today has a definite boxing day feel - lots of left overs to nibble on, very relaxed and sport playing on the TV - special wrestling competition to celebrate Mongolian Independance Day!

Adventures in Ulgii

 

To make the most of our last week with my leaving housemate 4 of us aussie volunteers set off for an adventure in Mongolia’s far-west.  I had been here on a work trip but didn’t get to see the big draw-cards, including climbing to a glacier at Mongolia’s highest peak – Tavan Bogd.

Sally had seen the north, the south and the east. Obviously she needed to see the west before she left.  So I organised an exciting itinerary with all the things I had missed and that anyone should see when they come to Ulgii.

As it turned out we didn’t see many of those things…a dodgy van and half-frozen rivers got in the way of that.

But we had a fantastic time. This region is mostly populated by Kazakh-Mongols, famous for their hospitality.  Both our arranged hosts and the families we intruded on when our car broke down didn’t disappoint in this aspect.  Our impromptu visits gave a real insight into the different lives people live out here…some were very poor, some had gorgeous 2 year old children stuck inside due to winter in a house with an entire space smaller than my lounge-room back home. 

We also experienced first-hand the absolute necessity of this ‘open-door’ policy – when its –20 outside you rely on some shelter to survive, and saw the social aspect of people just popping in during the day for some warm tea and a laugh in between herding animals in the snow.

Here is some of the highlights of the trip in pictures….

Stunning Views

The view from the small brick/wooden home of our hosts near Tavan Bogd:

       

 Food

Lots of car breakdowns meant lots of visiting total strangers.

A spread similar to this is always on hand in any Mongolian home – similar to a cuppa and some biscuits at any Aussie house. 

The big bowl in the middle has bread type stuff – fried in fat and fairly stale. Each person is handed a bowl of salty milk tea. You dip the bread in the tea to make it chewable, and eat along with fresh cream (bowl top left with spoon), butter (just right of the bread), cheese (the yellow strips below the butter), dried curds – the brown stuff at the bottom of the pic.

In our home-stay we were served the famous kazakh dish “Five Fingers”. The first night was delicious – the dish features meat, vegies and 4-inch square strips of pasta type stuff, eaten with your hands.

The second night we were treated to a freshly prepared goat – head, liver, intestines, stomach – the best parts our hosts would argue.  Luckily for us foreigners there were potatoes and carrots too.

This was a lunch, made from the same goat – lots of fat, some decent flesh parts of the animals and potato.

 

Back in town we enjoyed the yummy food of the Turkish restaurant.

 

 

 

New Friends

    

 

 

 

 

Old Friends

Car Troubles

Bogged on the way to Tavan Bogd

Bogged in a not-quite-frozen river for an entire day. The Ranger came to help after lunch and got bogged too!

We tried everything. Absolutely everything – even jumping on the back of the car, because maybe….well, we had no idea what that could possibly achieve.

The good news of our “bogged on the way to Tavan Bogd” story is that the weather was perfect – almost no wind, except when we tried a picnic lunch, and maybe about –10 temps with clear blue skies and a stunning backdrop of mountains, along with a good foot of gorgeous, powdery snow made for fun day of frollicking in the snow…for about 6 hours – then we started to get a bit worried.

We were taking no chances with frozen rivers after our day stuck the day before. The driver skidded the car successfully across the near frozen river while we watched with bated breaths and half-closed eyes, and then found our own way across.

About 40km from town our back wheel decided it had had enough and just came off.

Right when the sun was setting and temperature plummeting.

Ulaanbaatar in Autumn

The month since I have returned to Mongolia from a brief visit back home has seen the landscape rapidly, but gradually, change from spring to autumn and now with some strong hints that a typically cold winter is on the way. As one expects in Autumn, the leaves turned - the range of colours in the leaves has been stunning - especially considering the few trees there are in this barren country.

The grass on the vast, endless hills and mountains began showing small sprouts of brown amidst the lush green. This has dulled to an almost uniform brown now. The weather has been kind - daily highs of 10 degrees, and some even higher, is very generous for this time of year. The kind of zero-ish temperatures we should be expecting hit last week. The nights are very cold -15, and the days are chilly at around zero, maybe reaching 5 degrees for what seems like 5 minutes!

It's also a time of change in other areas. A new group of AYADs arrived this week. It seems like only a few weeks ago the last "New AYADs" arrive - but it was three months ago. Now my intake are well and truly the old guys - which means the time for goodbyes is imminent. Very imminent in fact. Our group of six is saying it's first goodbye to one of our own on Saturday week. Living in a place like UB means there are frequent hellos and goodbyes - or housewarming and farewell events - which gets pretty disheartening, and it's even worse when it's your housemate that's leaving.

On the positive side we've got a new AYAD replacing the leaving AYAD in our apartment. And before we say goodbye a group of 4 of us are heading out, including our departing AYAD, to Bayan-Ulgii for a week - this is the Kazakh region in far-western Mongolia. I went here for work and loved it so much I wanted to go back as a tourist. We are going to see kazakh eagle-hunters, hear traditional throat singing, see ancient petroglyphs visit the highest peak in Mongolia and walk up to a glacier - which means we are more than likely going to freeze, spend most of the week without showering, being offered lots of salty milk tea and mutton. Good times!

This week I spent a few hours driving through suburban parts of town I had never been to before - in search of newly built ramps and universal access features (access for all people including those with a disability) such as a paths and curb ramps. We didn't find much, there are only a handful of usable ramps around - a little while ago Mercy Corps had a project that successfully had standards for universal access passed into national legislation. Now the project has been renewed for a phase 2 that will see promotion of the standards to actually be put into practice in new buildings and added to existing civic buildings.

Here are a few pictures from driving around town. It's such a cool place...snow covered mountains in the background, with modern buildings, buddhist temples and gers all mixed in. Hummers drive alongside ancient Russian trucks. Stores for designer clothes are next to stores for coal and wood to burn in gers (yurts).

Possibly the best part of winter is the star suits that babies/toddlers are dressed in.

The C is the equivalent of an L in Australia. My boss at work recently took a leave of absence. She told me that a month of this was spent learning to drive. In soviet times, when she was young, very few people had cars so learning to drive was totally unheard of. Now plenty of people drive without a license or get illegal licenses - but some people are honest. The honest ones, like my boss, spend a month in a car with 3 other learners. They spend the whole day taking turns at driving the group, along with an instructor.

Soviet-style apartments. These guys look identical for blocks on end. No idea how people know which one is there's!

Wood and coal for sale for the fires that keep gers warm.