Homestay in the City

Saturday morning, we packed up and went to school another language class before we met our families and went home with them. I live about a mile from school in the shadier part of town. Some of the students live on the far west side of town (opposite side of the city from me), and a few lucky ones are centrally located. The apartment I am in is a small two room apartment with a tiny kitchen; they cook with two hot plates instead of a stove. My host cousin had to run home the first night to visit his mother (why he does not live with her I do not know). I went to the Gandan Monastery with my host sister. This is the biggest monastery in UB and the only one I had not visited yet. The main building is amazing. Inside is a 65+ foot statue of Buddha made of copper and gilded in gold. It is surrounded by about 200 prayer wheels and probably over 1000 smaller Buddha statues lining three walls. It was an awe-inspiring place. When we returned to the apartment my host mother had returned. As I learned, she actually only resides in the apartment on weekends and spends nights at relatives who she babysits for during the week. My host cousin and host sister also make extra money by painting the basement of the building they are living in.

Sunday was a fast day, I went to a café for a while and checked my email, went back to the apartment for lunch and then went to the Mormon church to set up an interview for my independent study project. The project is a month-long research study of a topic of my choosing where I can go anywhere in the country. I have chosen to study western Christian religions and how they are currently functioning and clashing with Mongolian government, society, and traditions. So I set up a meeting with Elder Neilsen of the LDS church before heading back to the apartment for dinner.

On Monday morning, Bold, my host cousin, accompanied me to school to make sure I made it. We took a microbus, which is essentially a large minivan that seats nine but regularly holds twelve passengers. We had three lectures to start off our week of religion and culture. This is great for me since I decided to do my independent study project on the religious environment in Mongolia specifically toward Christian groups. I can pretty much use the lectures from this week for my final paper; thus I am not going to detail the talks here. The first lecture was by an American Buddhist Monk, who is the only western monastic in all of Mongolia. His talk was an overview of Buddhist history and belief. Our second speaker talked about shamanism and spiritual possession, which he has studied extensively in Mongolia and best describes as likening to the movie Ghost. Our third speaker was at the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (a branch of Buddhism). He was a truly drugged out hippy from the 60’s and 70’s on New Zealand (drugs got him that spiritual high and also led him to Buddhism). After a full day of lectures I proceeded to one of the many local Mormon temples and conducted my interview with Elder Neilsen.

The next day I had back to back language classes before hearing from a Mongolian evangelical preacher who also ran a bible school that was translating numerous bibles and texts into Mongolia. In language class, they handed out the questions for the oral part of the language exam (they apparently do this every year, but it was prefaced with the statement that we were the farthest behind in language of any group to ever do the program). After school I went to the American embassy and voted for the president. It’s not likely that my vote will count unless the election is close because I did not send it in early enough, but I did it. At home, I my host cousin Bold and I used his phone to text “Sweet Home Alabama” (my choice) to the local phone in television show, which is one of the most popular stations (actually there are 4 different stations that use this format). They never played the song, but it was a good time. Later I went with my host sister to her friend’s birthday, which was a great time. The birthday girl had a beautiful Siamese cat that I played with most of the time until we started drinking. There were six of us, three girls and three boys, and three glasses of wine were poured for the women, while the men received three glasses of vodka. The best was the birthday mix, which included Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, and the song “Un-break my heart” while we were singing “happy birthday”.
On the 22nd, we visited the large Catholic cathedral, and Father Patrick from Cameroon, on the edge of town (the building is a cross with a ger built on top). The building was deemed unstable by Mongolian inspectors because the large main room had no interior supports (the design was fine, but no building in Mongolia had this design), so the inspectors forced the church to build 4 supports for the inside of the church. Then we heard the second part of our talk on spirits and possession. The last stop of the day was at the Russian Orthodox Church where we got to see the finishing touches on their paintings in their new temple. At home I wrote my ISP proposal and called it a night.

On the 23rd, I skipped the second half of our lecture on symbolism in Mongolia and the first half of our lecture on ancient Mongol script, which they are trying to reintegrate into popular use, to conduct an interview with the director of operations for the ASIA Foundation in Mongolia. I also interviewed a former director of the Foundation who is still in Mongolia later that afternoon and then wrote my NGO paper on the two interviews. After already traveling across town several times today I walked an hour south to meet my host sister at Reiki practice, which is held in the basement of the museum of traditional medicine and is guarded by a statue of a rabbit of uncanny resemblance to the one in Donnie Darko. The museum also had a DVD for sale that was just labeled “secret” unfortunately I did not have the four dollars to find out the secret.
Friday ended the week with a lecture on the horse-head fiddle, the traditional instrument of Mongolia, and throat-singing. We also got the most amazing performance from the national ensemble; one guy could throat sing through his nose and it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. The afternoon proved to be interesting as I met crazy Congo guy, which is how everyone refers to him because of his work in the Congo, but this guy is an independent journalist who views the world through a white supremacist colored lenses, which means he believes all problems in the world are cause by white people to keep everyone else down, a very narrow view and he’s an extremely self-righteous white guy. When I got home I realized that I did not have the code to the apartment building I live in, so I had to throw rocks at the window of the second-story apartment until my host sister realized I was stuck outside. After dinner, I met some people from the group and we went out to karaoke and then to the Smirnoff party at a local club, where we rubbed elbows with Miss Mongolia, several Mongol pop stars, and the boxing silver medalist from the Olympics. I sort of got assaulted by overzealous taxi drivers who thought I was really drunk, I wasn’t and I lived within walking distance. I got away and made it home safely.

The next morning we met at the train station at 9:00am to go to Khamrin Khiid, a world energy center, in the south Gobi desert.