This past week has been a nice change of pace. We had our Mid-LPI on Tuesday, which went really well for me, and really for all of us who are training in Sukhbaatar. Then Wednesday we left for Darkhan for mid-center days. It was the 4th, so that evening we had a basketball game between the trainees and the current PCV’s who were in town, then they had a dinner for us of pizza, hot dogs and watermelon. It was great! The pizza was kind of the Mongolian take on pizza, and the hotdogs were a little different, but it was so nice to eat semi-American food! All the trainees were in Darkhan, and we had a nice celebration of America’s birthday, including a singing of the national anthem. :) There were plans to make our own impromptu fireworks out of toilet paper, but that never materialized, which is probably a good thing.
It was really good to see all the trainees who are in different towns! We hadn’t seen each other in almost a month. We were only in Darkhan for two nights though, and pretty much all day the three days we were there we had training sessions. Some of them were pretty entertaining (such as the hour and a half long session on condom safety during which we did skits where we all had to display our competence in putting a condom on a plastic penis, those were quite entertaining!) , but some were really freaking boring (such as the “grammar hammer” an hour and a half of extremely dry English grammar). It may have been made worse by the fact that it was really hot and we all partied pretty hard both nights so the early morning sessions were a little rough… I had kind of a scary experience one of the nights. We were down in the hotel bar and I went to use the bathroom. There are two toilets in the bathroom, each behind its own door, but only one of them is ever really used. The other one doesn’t have a light and seems more like where they store buckets and stuff. But I really had to pee and the good one was taken. So after waiting a few minutes I decided to brave the other one. So I went in and closed the door, and then when I tried to come back out I realized that there was no door knob on the inside… I didn’t close it all the way, but doors in Mongolia don’t always function quite like they should. So there I was trying to pry the door open from the top where it wasn’t shut all the way, but I guess I had pushed it closed a little more firmly than I should have, because I could NOT get it open!! After prying on it for a few minutes I decided I would just bang on it and someone would be bound to come along at some point and hear me, which eventually they did. Unfortunately I hadn’t quite thought ahead enough to not have my head directly in front of said door, so when Justin came along and saved me he pushed the door into my head. Two days later and I still have a bit of a bump on my forehead… but at least I wasn’t stuck in the bathroom of the Darkhan Hotel bar all night!
This week is Nadaam. I’m a little disappointed because Monday and Tuesday are the Sukhbaatar Nadaam, and we have some class. Today we only had language class from 8-9:30, and we are free the rest of the day so we can watch wrestling and then the horse races in the afternoon. My family said that we are all going out to Bagh 5 for the horse racing at 2. They have races all day long, and they divide them up into age groups. I'm not exactly sure how it works, there is some sort of track, but I think it's more of a cross-country race. Tuya said this morning that at 4 there is a race that "comes in" and one that "goes out" and the one that goes out at 4 comes back at 6. Two hours seems like an awfully long race...
Yesterday evening I went over to Solomon’s host family’s house where they were blow-torching a goat. They had slaughtered it and then they put hot stones and some onions and stuff inside it and then blow-torched it for like 4 hours. I didn’t get to see them slaughter it, but the whole blow-torching thing was interesting. Then when it was “done” they took the rocks out and passed them around. I’m not sure what the significance of that is, but you just take it and kind of “hot-potato” it between your hands, and then the Mongolians licked their hands after the rocks were cool. Then they took the innards out and ladled out the juice that had accumulated, put it in bowls and passed it around. It tasted like watery grease. I left before they got to passing around the innards and eating the rest of it. (Luckily, because Solomon was late for class today because he ate some goat and then spent a lot of time in the outhouse this morning...) I really have no interest in eating innards, and I also wasn’t too interested in eating propane saturated goat skin and fat. I think that is the true “Mongolian BBQ,” during the summer they cook a lot of animals by blow-torch. Goats, sheep and marmots.
I finally did get a key to my house last Tuesday! When I came home from going to lunch with Cady and going to the internet, Undarmaa sullenly handed me a key. I would love to know where that key came from, because last Monday my mom was pretty adamant that they didn’t have one for me, and she would have to go to Russia or UB to get one because there is nowhere in the Selenge Aimeg to get a key made (something I find slightly hard to believe…). But at least I no longer have to worry about being locked out of the house!
No comments:
Post a Comment