Life In The City (Ulaanbaatar)

Can you believe I have school on Saturday; it’s like I’m in some foreign country or something. Three more language sessions were only tolerable because tomorrow is a free day. After class Chris and I went to this French Bakery he found while he was here the week before the program started (I think he was fly fishing). The café had wifi and some delicious pastries, but my surge protector took out all the power in the dining room when I plugged in my computer. I guess I won’t try that again. After sending out an e-mail or seven, I bought a beer for one of my other roommates, Mark. Now when I say a beer, I mean a two liter plastic bottle filled with the Mongolian equivalent of Natural Light. It was sort of a dare; needless to say Mark had a fun night. In fact several of us got drunk and went to this club down the street from the hostel called Ismuss. The land lady, who sits at the door (they have someone 24/7 to slide a metal bar behind the door as a lock, did not want to let us leave because it was late. After a strange game of charades and a few choice Mongolian words, we were out the door and on to Ismuss. What a place! They had a 15 foot tall statue of Lenin on the dance floor with laser lights flashing out from behind his giant head (the statue used to be in front of the state library during the socialist era). We danced the night away and made friends with some kids from Inner Mongolia (that’s actually in northern China) and Japan. I slept well and didn’t get out until 10:45am.

Sunday was our free day. Several members of the group got up at 6am and hiked the hills south of town. I decided to spend the day walking around the city hitting up museums and wandering around. Seven and a half hours of walking later, I was really tired but I had managed to cover about 50% of the city on foot including three museums and three monasteries. The first museum was actually just a house turned memorial and museum to the victims of the purges of the early socialist era. About 30,000 people were killed and over 700,000 disappeared (that’s a huge percentage of the population) during the purges. The memorial was downstairs and the museum was upstairs with gruesome artistic representations and old military paraphernalia as well as pictures of those killed for leading a revolt. The most shocking moment was when I hit the top of the stairs and took a left into the first room, which had a display just below eye-level with about 15 human skulls. Yes, these were actually excavated bones of those who had been purged now on display in a very blunt manner. Every single skull had a visible bullet hole in it.

Anyways, moving on to happier things, I went to the Wedding Palace next, which is where many people in UB get married. They were setting up for a wedding while I was there and everyone was dressed in their finest deels (pronounced dell-like the computer), which are traditional Mongolian robes for men and women especially in the country. I actually getting one in a few days, tailored for me. I went to the National History Museum next, where Mongolians trace their heritage from the Stone Age all the way to present day in a linear timeline straight through the museum. The petro glyphs and deer stones (sacred carved stones all over the country) were absolutely amazing and in great condition and there was one room with all of the different traditional clothing from the 20 or so ethnic groups in Mongolia. The museum was very modern and well done and must have been built recently along with the new government building. There is even a section dedicated to George W. Bush because of his historic visit to Mongolia (he’s the first U.S. President to travel to Mongolia, and it’s a huge deal here). There was also practically a shrine to Genghis Khan, and that’s to be expected especially since there is a statue of him equivalent in size to Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in front of the new government building.

After the museum I stopped and had a cheeseburger (I know), I was o.k. I visited a small market and several shops as I pushed toward the Ger districts, the ghettos of Ulaanbaatar, but really just where rural families have moved to be close to the city (UB’s population has tripled in the last eight years). I went into the Monastic School of UB and walked around the temple while the 10 year old monks-in-training made fun of me (I think) until their teacher came and one almost forcibly removed me. The monks themselves do not appear to like westerners, at least that has been the pattern with my encounters, which are rather cold and uncomfortable. I will keep my distance for a while. The next two monasteries were packed with people waiting to pray with the monks in traditional Buddhist temple buildings as well as special religious gers. I wanted to go in and pray too for the full experience and any extra help I can get, but I decided to climb a prayer hill instead. The hill was north of the last temple and overlooked the ger districts. There was and ovoo, a sacred mound of rocks that you walk around three times and add a rock to, at the top of the hill and a woman offering flavored water to whatever is out there.

My long journey back to the hostel took me to what I think is the only movie theater in the entire country (2 screens/now showing: Hellboy II and the Mummy III), an arcade, a music store (where I bought some great Mongolian pop music and the movie Rent in Mongolian-not as entertaining as I hoped), and the State Department Store. This store was the Mongolian State (during the socialist era) store where you pretty much had to buy everything. The store is now more like a giant Macy’s with an entire floor devoted to souvenirs. It was a great place to hide indoors when a freak shower passed over the city. Most rainstorms here either last the entire day or just a few minutes, either way in that few minutes the temperature literally dropped thirty degrees and then bounced back after the cloud passed. I ended my free day with an excellent cold beef and pepper salad with a sweet mayo sauce (yeah I don’t know why I tried it either, but it turned out to be one of the best things I’ve had here so far).

Monday morning we met in Sukhbaatar square (in the middle of the city where the government building is; Sukhbaatar was the national hero that led the revolution against Chinese rule in at the beginning of the twentieth century) and headed out to the mountains to the south. We climbed to the top of the closest mountain where a monument to the soviet soldier stands, a relic that tells the history of socialism in mosaic form. Highlights of that trip though are the guy with the eagle on the stairs leading to the top (beautiful bird with a huge four-foot wingspan) and the view of Ulaanbaatar from above. Unfortunately, obstructing a clearer view was an enormous cloud of dust and pollution that lingers over the city pretty much all the time. I’m told that in a few weeks when the winter normally starts the pollution is ten times worse (which I can’t imagine since it seems so bad already) because of the coal plants providing heat and all the gers burning wood, dung, and trash to keep warm. Well, I was not exactly thrilled to go back into the city after what I had just witnessed, but we had a scavenger hunt assignment that had to be done. My group was sent to the Natural History Museum, which houses all of the fantastic mineral and animal wealth of Mongolia.

However, the museum is a little old and the animal taxidermy jobs are pretty unique. The animals all look a bit to shocked and there intense stares make them all look like there on drugs. My personal favorites were the snow leopards that looked like they were on an acid trip and the praying bear that was standing tall with his paws together and a heavenly look towards the sky. The museum did have a great dinosaur collection with lots of woolly rhinoceros (I had never seen one before and the museum had three whole skeletons), most of it coming from the Gobi, but some of the dinosaurs were not properly put together (mismatch dinosaurs are both hilarious and somewhat sad). The coolest thing though is that they have a case with a raptor fighting a miniature triceratops (another dinosaur I had never seen that had almost exclusively been found in Mongolia). Apparently the two were fighting when a sand dune collapse on top of them preserving them mid fight. I’ve never seen anything like it. After the museum we tried to find lunch, which proved to be difficult because today was the first day of school and the streets were flooded at lunch time with students who had returned from surrounding areas for school. School for me today consisted of more language class. Dinner was fabulous, a few of us went out to and Indian food restaurant that was so good. Angela, one of my group members, ordered her dish with 65% spice on a 100 scale and no one at the table could take more than a small bite without tearing up and reaching for a drink.

Tuesday is traditionally a bad luck day in Mongolia; you are not supposed to travel or get your hair cut. Superstition? Not likely, Tuesday ended up being a terrible day for everyone in the group for one reason or another. My day began with a hopeless search for a laundry place; I walked around for two hours only to realize there was a place right around the corner from my hostel that did laundry. Unfortunately, they, like most other places in this city, open several hours late, so I had to go to class with my laundry still in tow. I didn’t get it done until the next day because the place was closed by the time I got off of school. At school I did get my first home stay family assignment (assuming they have not moved, which is apparently quite common and would leave me with a backup family). I will be residing with Purev, my host father, and his family. Purev is 50 and his wife Naran is 49; they have six children (yep, I got the largest family) though only three of them, two boys my age and one really cute five year old girl, will be there with me because most of the children are at school. My host family has all five major types of animals in Mongolia: sheep, cows, goats, horses, and camels. As an added bonus my host father apparently owns reindeer farther north in the country. I really want to ride a camel, and I’m already riding a horse to and from my home stay (it is the major mode of transportation in that area).

Getting information on my family was really exciting and frightening all at the same time because I am literally riding out to some camp miles away from any other westerners and am going to be immersed in a language that I can’t even count to ten in for about eight day. Now it really sinks in that I’m here. Well, my unlucky Tuesday continued that evening when a few of us went back to the State Department store for some supplies. While shopping the building lost power on the third floor, and only the third floor, so we went up to the fifth floor to shop while the computers rebooted on the third floor when power was restored. While on the fifth floor power went out on that floor. We gave up and went to dinner, which was trying because lots of shops and restaurants in the area were without power; the funny thing, though, was that the shops without power were sort of randomly scattered all over a four block radius as if the power grid just randomly ran through shops without any cohesive city planning scheme (seems to fit the lack of infrastructure in this country). We did get to see this armature girl rock group sing classic rock music at the pub we went to for dinner and that did brighten our spirits at the end of the evening.

Wednesday was just a day of language classes (3 back to back to back) and our bags were picked up to be driven to the north. Thursday was much more interesting because we had a blessing ceremony where three Buddhist monks camp to our educational building and preformed a 45 minute ritual. They chanted and burned incense (that we all passed around, sniffed, and rotated around our bodies three times. They also created a small mandala out of rice, beans and beads. After the ceremony we asked questions and everyone passed the snuff bottle around (everyone in Mongolia has one of these things—they are for religious use), and we all snorted a little stuff and per the ritual. The highlight of the afternoon though was when a cell phone went off in the middle of our questioning and the biggest monk just pulled his cell phone out of his deel and had a conversation in the middle of our conversation. The thing about this scene is that this monk actually received several calls and answered them all.

While it is taboo to answer your phone during presentations, class, and meetings in the U.S., in Mongolia cell phone culture has not shunned the answering of phone calls during these events. My teachers at school will answer their phones all the time in the middle of calls, and we heard stories of high-level officials stopping in the middle of presentations in front of hundreds of people to hold a cell phone conversation. Switching back to monks, in Mongolia they are yellow hat Buddhist (versus red hat), which is a liberal sect that allows it’s monks to get married and apparently be part of this crazy cell phone culture (they probably would be anyway).