Yesterday I was told that Mongolia had just started their White Moon Festival, a holiday that lasts several days. The White Moon Festival was established as a way to celebrate the beginning of a new cycle in the lunar calendar, much like the Chinese New Year. But in practice, it is a chance for Mongolians to take time off work and visit family. The first night, last night, is the big feast night celebrated within the home with your immediate family. A huge meal is shared but the staple dish is mutton dumplings. And they make festival cakes made with layered loaves of bread, each layer either signifying happiness or sadness (each cake always has an odd number of layers so that the top and bottom layers are happiness), and the top layer creates a basin filled with candy and other Mongolian sweets (including curd, which I tried today, not bad). You are supposed to touch the bottom of the cake, and take a sweet. The subsequent days of the festival are spent traveling to visit relatives and share a meal of mutton dumplings with them (and lots and lots of Mongolian vodka). The first day is reserved to visit grandparents, the other days to visit the rest of your friends and family members. And this festival is the big one for the year. So every Mongolian treats it seriously and this is why no one works these days (the few days I'm in UB). Everything is closed.
I figured this out yesterday though. So when I heard my hostel mate, Nilika, was off to see the orphanage that is associated with the hostel, I figured that would be a great day trip and authentic way to see Mongolia and learn about the festival.
I woke up later than I had intended. It was around half past 9, I had just gotten out of the shower when a Mongolian girl burst through the hostel door (remember, there are no staff members here - in fact I still haven't met anyone to whom I can pay for the room...) and went poking around each room of the hostel. Finding only me she asked if I had seen Nilika. I said no, but that she had probably gone for coffee. She looked frustrated and out of breath. She walked out the main door and ran into Nilika on the steps of the apartment building, they exchanged some words, and then left. A few moments later, Nilika found me and said, "Our cab is waiting."
So I quickly got dressed, gathered my things, and hopped in the cab. We drove for about 30 minutes out of the city into the surrounding hill communities. Mongolia looks like the biggest place on the planet which is an odd way to say that. It's just that you can see so far off in every direction and over the horizon you also see these towering, sugar-coated mountains straight out of candyland. There is nothing harsh or jagged about the mountains here, just tall, rising, rounded off hills coated in soft snow, glistening in the sunlight. The plains that stretch to the mountains are so vast they make the country look endless from the ground. And UB as a city is a small, dense pocket of a community located within these plains. You can see the plains sprawl away from the city limits.
The oprhanage is located in a small village in a small valley. Our cab driver had to risk the snow bank as there was little in the way of roads out in the village. But we made it. The orphanage is located on a large plot of land, fenced in, on a low slope that meets the side of a mountain. It is spread over a small collection of buildings, most are dormitories, one kitchen and dining hall, one office/library, and one play/meeting hall. We found a bunch of kids out front sledding on one of the hills near the meeting hall. One woman looked at us and correctly assuming we were visitors and probably looking for Didi, led us into the meeting hall. Didi, an Australian, is the founder of this orphanage and she has been in UB running the place for over 20 years. She has a full time staff of about six employees and several volunteers. The staff is a mix of Mongolians and foreigners, British, French, Dutch, etc.
As soon as we walked through the door we were greeted by dozens of screaming Mongolian kids, all of them excited to see us. All of the kids had sticky fingers and dripping noses and were full of energy. The place was lively. I was immediately approached by a 15 year old girl named Buren who taught me some handshakes she knew and showed off some of her taikwando skills. Then a bunch of the boys tackled me, proving to me they knew how to wrestle. Wrestling is the country's national sport. All boys learn to wrestle. The Mongolian spirit is wild and nomadic and they have these very strong, macho personalities. The boys are like bears. They see you and want to tackle you to the ground and then say hello. And they know how. Even these boys, some of them 5 or 6 years old clearly knew how to properly tackle me to the ground and would have if I wasn't 12 times their size. In Mongolian wrestling, there are no weight classes and no time limit and no rules. You just sign up and fight until someone loses. Its beastly and awesome.
So I spent most of the day getting tackled. The kids learn English as a part of their schooling so they could speak some broken English with me (even the really young kids - I was very impressed) and this is thanks to the foreign staff here which come for a few years at a time.
We played with the kids for the rest of the morning and then went to the dining hall to eat. It was a special, festival meal of pasta with potatoes and vegetables and tofu, and vegetarian dumplings. One quirk Didi has is that she is vegetarian and founded the orphanage as a vegetarian one. So the kids are too. The tables were set with each seat being supplied with a plate of pasta, a cup of berry tea, and access to other vegetable dishes. Some of the kids helping out the cooking staff walked around with platters of dumpings and potato salad. And the main table, the one I was sitting at, had the big festival cake I described earlier.
The kids sang a song that had repeating lyrics and they sang the song until everyone was finally sat down and ready to eat. So the song went on awhile. Then we ate. The meal was delicious. Usually, the cooking staff are comprised of full time, adult Mongolians but since this was the festival, Didi gave them the day off to go be with their families. So the meal was prepared entirely by the kids. A few of them were learning to be cooks and so this was their day to show off the skills they had been acquiring from the full time staff. They did an excellent job.
After the meal was finished, we all moved into the play hall where gifts were exchanged. Every kid received one gift, all mailed in from their sponsors. Their sponsors were from all over the world (I saw the list). All the kids received age appropriate gifts: jewelry, remote control cars, puzzles, dolls, etc. One little girl got a kid's doctor kit which was quite popular and all the kids started taking our temperatures and listening to our heart beat. My favorite gift though was given to a 12 year old boy who had earlier told me he loved Michael Jackson and proved it to me by doing the moonwalk. He asked me, "Michael Jackson is from America, right? And he died, right? And his face was black and then it was white, right? I love Michael Jackson", and then giggling, ran away. He must have also shared this with his sponsor because later, when he opened his gift, he found the DVD version of "This is it", Michael Jackson's big production that was cut short due to his untimely death and later turned into a documentary about his final days. I've seen it - it's good. And he guarded this DVD like it was gold - showing everyone his gift and then hugging it close to his heart so that he wouldn't lose it.
I spent the rest of the day playing with the kids. One of the staff workers, Anna, a young girl from Birmingham, England, helped us find the main road that could get us back to UB. We walked through the village, a beautiful place, as the sun was setting over the mountains. The village is made up with sparse homes (of the European style - not Chinese style) and some gers, and a lot of cows roaming about the hills. We went to the main crossroad in the village and waited for the bus to take us back into town. I slept the whole ride into the city.
Tomorrow I will walk around the city and see what I can. I've heard the monastery is still open (it is an active monastery that is host to a school for monks so it shouldn't be touristy - there is no entrance fee). Most of the Buddhist monasteries (and monks for that matter) were destroyed in the Soviet days in the name of Communism. But this monastery was preserved. Apparently, decades ago, an American diplomat was making a trip to Mongolia during the Communist days and the Mongolian officials asked him what he wanted to see while he was there. The diplomat had never been to Mongolia before and knew little about the culture or its current events. So he said, "Well, how about a monastery?" thinking that that would be a good choice. The government then spared one monastery in order to use it to host this American diplomat and then ever since used it to entertain foreign dignitaries. So, it's in fine shape. There are also some good statues of Chingis Khan I want to find.
I think it is time to sample some Mongolian vodka. Do as the locals do!
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| White Moon Festival cake |
I woke up later than I had intended. It was around half past 9, I had just gotten out of the shower when a Mongolian girl burst through the hostel door (remember, there are no staff members here - in fact I still haven't met anyone to whom I can pay for the room...) and went poking around each room of the hostel. Finding only me she asked if I had seen Nilika. I said no, but that she had probably gone for coffee. She looked frustrated and out of breath. She walked out the main door and ran into Nilika on the steps of the apartment building, they exchanged some words, and then left. A few moments later, Nilika found me and said, "Our cab is waiting."
So I quickly got dressed, gathered my things, and hopped in the cab. We drove for about 30 minutes out of the city into the surrounding hill communities. Mongolia looks like the biggest place on the planet which is an odd way to say that. It's just that you can see so far off in every direction and over the horizon you also see these towering, sugar-coated mountains straight out of candyland. There is nothing harsh or jagged about the mountains here, just tall, rising, rounded off hills coated in soft snow, glistening in the sunlight. The plains that stretch to the mountains are so vast they make the country look endless from the ground. And UB as a city is a small, dense pocket of a community located within these plains. You can see the plains sprawl away from the city limits.
The oprhanage is located in a small village in a small valley. Our cab driver had to risk the snow bank as there was little in the way of roads out in the village. But we made it. The orphanage is located on a large plot of land, fenced in, on a low slope that meets the side of a mountain. It is spread over a small collection of buildings, most are dormitories, one kitchen and dining hall, one office/library, and one play/meeting hall. We found a bunch of kids out front sledding on one of the hills near the meeting hall. One woman looked at us and correctly assuming we were visitors and probably looking for Didi, led us into the meeting hall. Didi, an Australian, is the founder of this orphanage and she has been in UB running the place for over 20 years. She has a full time staff of about six employees and several volunteers. The staff is a mix of Mongolians and foreigners, British, French, Dutch, etc.
 |
| Didi and her kids |
So I spent most of the day getting tackled. The kids learn English as a part of their schooling so they could speak some broken English with me (even the really young kids - I was very impressed) and this is thanks to the foreign staff here which come for a few years at a time.
We played with the kids for the rest of the morning and then went to the dining hall to eat. It was a special, festival meal of pasta with potatoes and vegetables and tofu, and vegetarian dumplings. One quirk Didi has is that she is vegetarian and founded the orphanage as a vegetarian one. So the kids are too. The tables were set with each seat being supplied with a plate of pasta, a cup of berry tea, and access to other vegetable dishes. Some of the kids helping out the cooking staff walked around with platters of dumpings and potato salad. And the main table, the one I was sitting at, had the big festival cake I described earlier.
The kids sang a song that had repeating lyrics and they sang the song until everyone was finally sat down and ready to eat. So the song went on awhile. Then we ate. The meal was delicious. Usually, the cooking staff are comprised of full time, adult Mongolians but since this was the festival, Didi gave them the day off to go be with their families. So the meal was prepared entirely by the kids. A few of them were learning to be cooks and so this was their day to show off the skills they had been acquiring from the full time staff. They did an excellent job.
 |
| Kids singing a festival song before mealtime |
I spent the rest of the day playing with the kids. One of the staff workers, Anna, a young girl from Birmingham, England, helped us find the main road that could get us back to UB. We walked through the village, a beautiful place, as the sun was setting over the mountains. The village is made up with sparse homes (of the European style - not Chinese style) and some gers, and a lot of cows roaming about the hills. We went to the main crossroad in the village and waited for the bus to take us back into town. I slept the whole ride into the city.
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| Village road to the orphanage |
I think it is time to sample some Mongolian vodka. Do as the locals do!
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