Goat Horhog

Sunday 19th August
Having spent so much time being rattled around in vans but having had such a wonderful time in Kharkhorin and the neighbourhood, we decided to postpone our return to UB for one more day's rattle. Enkhbold drove us by Russian jeep to Ugiin Nuur - Lake Ugiin which, although 90-odd km off, had a good road all the way.

We stopped firstly at the ger of Enkhbold's father, Peljee, a herder who lives a short way out of Kharkhorin. I was very excited when, after entering, Peljee and one of his other sons got out their snuff bottles, so that I was able to get out my own and exchange bottles in the traditional manner with my host. Each person holds their bottle (with the top slightly opened) resting between the four fingers of their right hand, this is then passed into the palm of the other, as their bottle is received in your palm. As with offering anything in Mongolia, the left hand also supports the right arm, as giving is always done two-handedly. You take a pinch of their tobacco or just sniff at the open lid if you prefer (which I opted for, not wishing to blow my cool by sneezing) and then the bottle is handed back, again with the top partly open. Well, it was a proud moment for me, anyhow, only marred by having taken my bottle out of a plastic bag rather than an embroidered pouch.

We were treated to milk tea, of course, and also a big pan of clotted cream to spread on bread, which was very good indeed. We then said our 'daraa ulzii's with the promise to return for goat horhog that evening.

En route for the lake we also stopped to visit a site where I neglected to take any notice of the fairly wordy signs erected by a joint Turkish-Mongolian project - as a result I am not sure if what we visited was the site of the Bugut stone - sort of the 'Rosetta Stone' of the Turkic-Mongol period, or if it wa just a replica, or indeed something else. It doesn't look much like the photos on this informative webpage, so is either a replica or a very sorry job of reconstruction. The area does look like a burial site, although is presently a building site, with a wall in construction around it to make for a visitor centre/pilgrimage site. If this is the site of the Bugut stone, a very important historical artifact, then it's frankly a mess, but it may well be that it's something else.

Ugiin Nuur is big and broad, and we arrived in perfect summer weather for a swim, which I did alone as most Mongolians don't. The water is very pure, and is filled with fish. It seems to be a popular spot on tour itineries, probably owing to the good road from Kharkhorin and the novelty of open water in Mongolia. After the journey from UB to Kharkhorin I'm distinctly less inclined to head out to Lake Hovsgul next week, as it would be torture to endure days of jolting bus travel for only a few days visit.

Refreshed by a swim, we now headed back to Peljee's ger. We stopped on the way to visit cousins of Enkhbold, who of course served us milk tea and let me ride one of their horses. This was my first experience of a real Mongolian saddle, not as uncomfortable as I'd feared, although ten minutes in it hardly leaves me fit to make any judgement. The stirrups were left high as usual, which made them very high for me, and I would not have been comfortable at a canter to say the least.

We were greeted very warmly on our return to Peljee's with another Mongolian cream tea, served with hard scones this time - jam would have completed the experience. Peljee was also very happy to serve me a glass of real Mongolian 'vodka' - a wine-strength clear drink made from cows milk boiled with yoghurt. It looks and tastes pretty much like water, but has a reputation for leaving your head clear whilst getting your legs drunk: everything is fine until you stand up. It's a shame really that Mongolians acquired a taste for the stronger stuff, I think a lot less damage would have been done to society here if people had stuck to the milk vodka.

Various sons, daughters, husbands, wives and grandchildren were also visiting, and everyone helped with preparation for the evening feast. Even me - I walked out and helped to herd up the flock of sheep and goats and drive them from where they were grazing on the open plain half a kilometre away back towards the ger. Once we'd got the flock back they were allowed to wander off again - except for one unfortunate healthy fellow, who was very deftly separated from his fellows. Peljee wrestled the goat firmly onto plastic sheeting on the ground by the ger, turned the animal over and pinned down its rear legs with a leg of his own while his son Enkhbold held its head and forelegs. It let out one long, unnervingly human groan of despair, but that was all. Once restrained Peljee took out his knife and made a short neat cut in the goat's belly. I was curious because I had expected the animal to be despatched with a hammer blow or something, as all I knew about animal slaughter in Mongolia was that they don't cut the throat - traditionally they don't spill the animal's blood. Indeed, no blood was spilled here, Peljee thrust his hand into the goat's insides, and with a look of concentration felt around, I guess until he found the goat's heart and stopped the flow of blood. Throughout this the goat became increasingly relaxed, but it was some minutes before it died. The heart or something was removed and left exposed on the beast's belly, and it no longer needed restraining for its final moments.

I can well understand people who become vegetarians after watching the proceedings in a slaughterhouse, but I wonder if anyone could be persuaded the other way on witnessing this approach? Mongolians are pretty much the polar opposites of vegans, the diet being almost entirely milk and dairy, but the traditional way of life here has such an affinity with the livestock, which live such a free life until they're needed in the pot. As I have previously remarked, Mongolians are repulsed by the notion of eating lamb or any baby animal.

Anyhow, such thoughts turning in my mind, I took up the invitation to borrow Peljee's horse and ride out onto the plain, which being my first time alone on a horse I enjoyed a lot, even though the plain was too big and night too close to do anything more than go out and come back. I did get to make my way, or rather make the horse make its way, over a ditch twice, which felt like an achievement.

Back at the ger night began to fall, and from nowhere a strong wind blew up. Two of Peljee's grandsons were outside butchering the goat and had to transfer their operations indoors. Before too long there were nearly twenty people in the ger, a small 'four wall' ger, but with plenty of room for the party, which became very close and convivial. Peljee remained sat on the floor and was the very paternal focus of the evening, telling humorous tales and explaining for me via my wife various Mongolian traditions.

The storm quickly developed, rain lashed down and thunder and lightning played. Through the open door of the ger this was very dramatic - and using the open toilet facilities some way from the ger this was very dramatic indeed. Inside the butchering was eventually finished, and the horhog was prepared. Stones had been placed in the stove fire which had been stoked up high, these were now taken out and, red-hot, placed with tongs in a tall pressure cooker. In the bottom were a few pints of water, so steam quickly rose, and more stones and the whole of the goat flesh were added. Meanwhile the intestines were being filled with blood for sausages to be enjoyed on some future occasion. Once the pot was full it was placed on top of the stove, to cook for about an hour. Meantime, Peljee entertained us with a story of how a cooker had once exploded when he was making horhog, but that the burns on his leg had been healed by applying dog's blood, on the advice of an old woman. I would have prefered to hear this story sat further away from the stove, or at least wearing trousers rather than shorts.

We each took a turn singing a song, for which the reward was a shot of vodka. As always, and particularly in the warm and crowded ger, the Mongolian singing was deeply moving.

At last the food was ready. A few burnt bits of meat were at the top, but the rest seemed perfectly cooked. It was piled high on a big metal tray, and the greasy hot stones placed aside to be picked up and thrown from hand to hand, and held under armpits and against the brow for as long as we were able, for the well-regarded health benefits of this treatment. It is invigorating, and also a good way to acquire eau de goat.

The soup was served after the stones had cooled beyond efficacy, and was absolutely delicious - very rich and with a slight burnt taste that didn't detract from the flavour. The wife and I also got to eat most of the half dozen or so potatoes that'd been included with the goat, before taking the meat itself. It was very good, didn't quite drop off the bone the way the beef horhog I'd eaten way back in the winter did, but was very fine nonetheless, and even I managed to find the fat tasty.

A few more vodka toasts were drunk, and I promised to return one winter, when Peljee has promised me we will hunt wolf. We left under the most incredible night sky I have ever seen - clear overhead, with the milky way showing a thick, billowing band across a studded vault of stars, and yet on three quarters of the horizon lightning still flashing every few seconds from dark, distant clouds.

More photos at Flickr

Vodka Camp, Sheep Gizzards

On Friday I went with the rest of my colleagues from the Vodka factory to spend a night and the following day at a pleasant ger camp tucked away in hills a few hours West of Ulaanbaatar. I managed to survive the night, aided no doubt by a very fortifying plate of boiled sheep's stomach, intestines, liver, kidneys and black pudding.

Women's Day

Thursday 8th March
In Mongolia, and I am also assuming throughout the former Soviet Union, today is Women’s Day. This means that there is no school today - yet another holiday which I only found out about at the beginning of the week - a pleasant surprise which has occurred frequently enough to leave me a little disappointed on those Mondays when I discover that I'm expected to put in a full week’s work. Today men and children will do the housework and the chores. Since most other holidays in Mongolia involve throwing a party for which the women have to cater, this might be considered to be the only day’s rest for women in the entire calendar.

Yesterday, my friend and colleague Ganaa suggested that we put on a small party, at my apartment, for the women in the English department. Ganaa is pretty good at coming up with such ideas; they are preceded by him spending some time dropping heavy hints at me to try and get me to suggest what he is thinking. I will do my best not to be corralled in this way, but inevitably I succumb to his charming persistence.

The women were planning on going out to take advantage of the 50% off happy hour(s) at the Rendez-vous restaurant, but were very happy to accept Ganaa and my invitation for ‘afternoon tea’ to start their evening. Ganaa and I slipped out of school early (we didn’t have any lessons anyway) and hurried off to make preparations. For a total cost of about 30,000 T (£14+/-) we were able to serve up a big bowl of sangria (made with red wine, orange juice and a lot of ice and fresh fruit), vodka (of course), some cheap and slightly unpleasant chocolates, a few russian beers, bread, jam, cold sausage, green tea and English tea, and biscuits. The main course was the pride (and absolute limit) of my culinary skills, learnt from my dear friend Rossella in Calabria: spaghetti ‘aglio e olio’ (with olive oil and garlic). It takes about 10 minutes to prepare but is, for all its simplicity, deeply satisfying. There’s some kind of cheese I buy here which is very like Italian Pecorino and goes very well with pasta. Incidentally, there is very little dairy produce in the supermarkets, which runs contrary to what I had expected; perhaps this will change in the summer, or maybe people get their dairy goods from country cousins.

The ladies were very impressed. Initially they were very suspicious of the punch, but I managed to convince them that Ganaa had had no part in its preparation.

We were asked to sing some songs for women. Ganaa did a very good job with two hearty traditional Mongolian tunes. I sang the old English ballad (about the faithlessness of men) ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens’ and then, feeling on a roll, sang a song I wrote myself the other week. Admittedly, the song is a bit on the maudlin side, but I felt the inevitable requests for the deeply dreary ‘Yesterday’ surely justified my trying out, for the first time, a song of my own composition. I’ve sang a lot of old traditional songs, many of which have pretty lame lyrics, and a very large number of which concern the death of parents, etc. Nonetheless, this was the first time that I can recall that a song I’ve sung has provoked a comment about the content. During the song: one of the teachers loudly remarked “What terrible lyrics.” Kind of off-putting, but fair comment perhaps.

Our efforts were well-received: I had to hand it to Ganaa, that in spite of my initial reluctance, he’d had a very good idea. Furthermore, as Men’s Day (well, actually, it’s Soldier’s Day) is only a week off, we have thrown down the gauntlet and feel fairly confident that our generosity will be handsomely repaid.

After the meal Ganaa and I were invited along to join the women teachers at Rendez-Vous. Eating and drinking there was followed by a trip to a nightclub somewhere for dancing and a Mongolian rock band whose name I didn’t learn, but whose songs I’ve heard on the radio, and who were pretty good. All this was courtesy of our principal, who is scrupulous about making sure that the teachers at the school feel valued on these occasions.

I think that slowly I’m getting along better with my colleagues, which is a very happy situation to be in. There are a lot of factors that can create awkwardness between the foreign and Mongolian teachers - not least the huge discrepancy in pay (as I have remarked, I believe that we are paid about four times more than our colleagues) which, however inevitable given the economical incentive needed to attract native speakers, can be a bit of an embarassment. I have discussed it with my colleagues, who certainly don’t express any resentment of the situation. I feebly try to justify it to myself by remembering that I’m losing money by being here - my bills in the UK still need to be paid - but I still feel a bit guilty about the quality of life I’m able to lead (ie - I can eat out whenever I want, buy any of the groceries I feel like getting, etc).

I've had a slow and lazy start to the day, but have at least cleaned up the carnage from yesterday's gathering. Ganaa had offered to send some women round to do the tidying for me, but, given the occasion, I felt that this somehow would not be right.

Chicken, Cossackbilly

Saturday 3rd March
Mongolians do not eat a lot of chicken. I have been asking about this, and one possible explanation may be related to the Mongolian taboo against eating young animals. Being informed that in England we almost exclusively eat lamb rather than mutton, Mongolians tend to adopt a rather dismayed and disapproving expression, which is somewhat touching coming from such a legendarily blood-thirsty people. "We do not eat baby animals," I am informed. Certainly, fond memories aside of tender cutlets and chops served by barbecuiste extraordinaire Graham 'Little Blue Boat' Stopforth on the Weaver last summer, I could happily forgo lamb for mutton: mutton does not taste so bad. As far as chicken goes, I am not yet won over. From the few leathery scraps of stewed bird I've eaten in the school canteen, it seems that the Mongolian taboo also applies to poultry, and a hen that has lived a full and productive life gets thrown into the pot only when it has died peacefully in its sleep from extreme age. Unfortunately, they do not make great eating.


It’s semi-official (ie, not official) folks: Bluegrass music now has a home in Mongolia, at the Meal Ody (wonderful pun) Jazz Club and Restaurant. Resident jazz combo 'U Bop' have for some mysterious and possibly sinister reason encouraged me to provide some musical contrast either between or before their Friday night set and I am very happy to oblige. Last night they played another blistering set, of which it was somewhat daunting to step up on stage during the interval. I was joined by a very amiable Ukrainian fellow, Vadik, on the harmonica. Vadik had borrowed a friend’s harmonica, which was happily a C harp (ie, perfect for blues in G). I played “Fireball Mail” and he got straight in there with some great bluesy blowing, and a very entertaining Cossack interpretation of flat-footing. Vadik carried on to hold “Mountain Dew” together whilst I bellowed the song at the clientele - making the most of the initial shock-factor that my particular approach to singing tends to create. Being on a roll, I then demonstrated my versatility and range by singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (which of course shares the same chord structure and has mostly the same melody as “Mountain Dew”). We then quit while we were ahead and let the musicians get back to work, whilst we proceeded to celebrate our success somewhat disproportionately to our achievement.

Tsagaan Sar, Darkhan, Mealody

Monday 26th February 2007
I apologise for not reporting sooner on Tsagaan Sar - the Mongolian New Year. One problem has been that it is impossible to write about Tsagaan Sar without writing about buuz and, now that the festival is over, I don't find my mind (or my stomach, more to the point) returning to the subject of buuz with much enthusiasm.

Tsagaan Sar - either 'White Moon' or 'White Month' - is the most important festival on the Mongolian calendar. The practise and traditions go back a long way, and strongly reflect the nomadic culture. During Tsagaan Sar people visit the homes of their relatives and friends, greet each other with a special embrace that shows deference to the older party, and eat buuz. Each home, for the 3 main days of the festival has its dining table loaded with food: a boov: stacked layers of a special kind of bread (one layer for each decade of the senior member of the household) on which are piled sweets; and a lot of cold mutton - traditionally a whole sheep is cooked for Tsagaan Sar. In the houses of the older people I visited there was always the back and ribs of a sheep, in the houses of younger people there was simply a huge bowl with various cuts of mutton in.

White Moon is very much a family occasion, but, hospitality being a deeply ingrained tradition, foreigners are invariably invited to spend Tsagaan Sar with a surrogate family for the weekend. I travelled up to Darkhan with Ganaa, one of my fellow to teachers, to visit with his family there. We caught a taxi there on Sunday evening, along with Ganaa's girlfriend and his brother, who was returning home from work in Korea (there are a lot of Mongolians working in Korea - I heard an estimate of 20,000 workers, from Mongolia's population of 2 million). Darkhan is about a 4 hour drive in a taxi, on what must be a pretty good road by Mongolian standards: single-lane and pot-holed, of course, and also fairly busy with traffic that . I couldn't see much of the countryside in the darkness, but when we made a brief relief stop I stepped off the road into a deep drift of snow. The stars were fantastically bright and clear above - such a profusion of stars that the constellations were almost lost amongst them.

Although we arrived very late, we were still able to visit three homes At each one making the traditional Tsagaan Sar greeting, drinking milk tea, followed by vodka; meanwhile, a big pan of buuz would be boiled. Buuz are boiled dumplings - balls of beef wrapped in dough. They don't taste at all bad, but it is kind of disheartening to be faced by a plate piled with 20 or 30 of the things, accompanied by nothing but cold mutton and maybe potato salad. Small gifts would be given by the host to the guests. More vodka was then drunk, accompanied by a round songs, one from each guest. More milk tea and then vodka - and then suddenly, everybody was putting on their coats to leave, we all piled into a car and slowly drove to the next home, where the whole process began again. From apartment to apartment, to a ger in the old town, back to another apartment in the new - it all becomes a bit of a blur.

There are many small ceremonial civilities that make up the festival, which, broadly speaking, is about reaffirming the bonds of family and friendship. Men exchange snuff bottles with a special open handed gesture. The bottle is always left slightly open, and returned to the giver that way. One of my fourth graders, dressed in the traditional deel, passed me a bottle for a snort at a class on the Friday before Tsagaan Sar.

Monday we saw the sights of Darkhan before beginning the circuit of calling on relatives again. With a population of 100,000 Darkhan is Mongolia's second city. The sights include Mongolia's Tallest Building (a 14 or so storey tower block which I am pretty sure is smaller than the Ulaanbaatar Bank building and numerous new apartment blocks in the capital) and the view of the old and new town from the top of the low hill between the two. Old Darkhan is wooden houses and ger; new Darkhan is a lot of crumbling tower blocks built in the 1980s. The graffiti painted on the wall outside Ganaa's brother's home included Take That and East 17.

It isn't such a pretty city, but the people are certainly friendly, to judge by Ganaa's relatives, and I was made to feel very welcome. By Monday evening, however, I was quite ready to head back home. Vodka-fueled 'negotiations' from my hosts regarding taxi fares finally secured us seats in a Micro Bus headed back to Ulaanbaatar at about 10pm. For the next four and a half hours I did my best to doze - my skull being cracked at every pot-hole along the way. I didn't exactly feel great at school the following morning, but pretty much everyone had a buuz-glazed look to their eyes.



It took me the remainder of the week to recover. By Friday, I was ready to head out in search of Mealody - a small jazz club/restaurant somewhere in the University district. I'd tried to find it the previous week, as Chuluun, the Inner Mongolian musician who played some Monrin Khuur and sang Khoomei at my apartment, had urged me to go and see his friend's band. Unfortunately, I'd gone to a place called Blue Melody, where a girl punk band were playing, not the jazz-fusion I'd been lead to expect. I'd then spent more than half an hour walking up and down (passing Mealody three times as it happens) looking for the place, before finally retreating home with the excuse, at least, that I would have died of exposure had I spent any further time searching. This time I phoned in advance to clarify the location.

Mealody is a very pleasant, cosy little place, and I'm very glad to have found it this time round. Furthermore, the band were phenomenal. The jazz was less experimental than I guess I had feared - it was just good, exciting, entertaining music. 'U-Bop' (I must say that Ulaanbaatar's name really lends itself to musical puns) are an English guy on piano (Steve Tromans), a Mongolian drummer (N. Ganbat) and an American Double Bass player (Andrew Colwell). They play original music, arrangements of popular Mongolian songs and jazz standards. Throughout their playing is characterised by energy, enthusiasm, and sheer talent - they are a bloody good band. For a centrepiece they played a wonderful, moody tune, in which Andrew sings Khoomei - tri-tone ‘throat singing’ - which you should listen to on the JazzMongolia MySpace site to get some idea of (the site’s shared with other bands so I’m not sure who’s doing the singing on it). It was a wonderful evening.

Furthermore, the band very generously allowed me to take things down a notch or two in terms of musical sophistication and play ‘Cumberland Gap’, ‘Down the Road’ and a few others in the break. I’d missed an earlier set by a Japanese player of the Cavalkino (I’m not sure of the spelling, but as all those who attended the Grapes bluegrass jam will remember, it’s the Brazilian cousin of the ukulele), but we chatted and hope to get a chance to jam together in a few weeks’ time.

Full English, White Moon, Abraham Lincoln's Vices

Thursday 25th January
Without the chaotic pressure of school, the past week has been quite relaxing. I am ashamed to report that I haven't been out to the mountains, hunted any wolves or ridden any horses during my holiday. My excuse is that I have kept myself quite busy by teaching two conversation classes each day. I am enjoying teaching the conversation classes, largely because it has been made very clear that my duty there consists of chatting amiably and encouraging my students to do so.

One frequent subject of my conversations with students has been the upcoming festival of 'White Moon' - which, being the Mongolian new year, is second only to the summer Nadaam Festival. The festival, which I believe falls on the 18th of February this year, is a time that Mongolians traditionally spend with their family doing three things - drinking milk tea, vodka and eating 'buuz'. Buuz are boiled meat dumplings, and I am repeatedly assured that that nothing but buuz are eaten throughout the festival. As with Nadaam, there will also be wrestling and horse-racing: as everybody knows, the horse-racing is done by children in Mongolia, and promises to be an interesting spectacle. The reigning champion of Sumo in Japan is a Mongolian, Asashoryu, and by all accounts he is having another very promising year so far. Last night a Mongolian friend told me that Asashoryu's brother won the Nadaam wrestling bout last year. He also told me that Asashoryu was sent to Japan to compete in Sumo by his father in hopes that the traditions of the Japanese sport would help to improve his son's temper and undisciplined character. Asashoryu is a much beloved character in Mongolia, I have heard numerous stories of how he is liable to punch in the face anyone who doesn't show him enough respect, and then consider that person to be honoured to be felled by such a legendary fist. The Speyside distillery have recently begun marketing Yokozuna whisky in Mongolia in honour of the great man - Yokozuna being the highest ranking in Sumo. This week's edition of the UB Post informs me that Asashoryu has won this his 20th 'Basho' and is now ranked as the 5th greatest Sumo wrestler of all time.

For the time being I have transferred my bibulary loyalties from the Grand Khan Irish Pub to Dave's Place English Pub. Cornering the proprietor (Dave, of course) late on Saturday night whilst he was engaged in a merry game of Jenga with some of his regulars quite happily acquiesced to my playing some banjo at the bar on Sunday evening. A proportion of vodka in his veins at the time may have been responsible for his carefree decision - certainly when I arrived at the pub on Sunday morning for a Full English breakfast he seemed a bit apprehensive about any details that might have been agreed to in regard to my playing. I hastened to reassure Dave that nothing had been promised, only that he had agreed that I might come down and play that evening and 'see how things go.' When I returned to the bar as arranged at 7pm to pick, Dave happened to be absent on business elsewhere. The various customers who left as I played were careful to express their gratitude for my performance as they passed me on their way out.

Dave's Full English and his meat pie and chips are very good. There is something very reassuring in knowing that there is no corner of the globe where an Englishman cannot begin his day with fried eggs, bread, mushrooms, bacon, sausage and tomato, accompanied by toast and baked beans. Here in Ulaanbaatar that can only be achieved satisfactorily on a Sunday morning, if Dave's confident dismissal of the Grand Khan's Full English is to be credited: but I think once a week is enough. Afterall, I don't want to be thouht of as a xenophobic, homesick ex-Pat, railing about the indignity of being forced to eat all this foreign muck, and not being able to get a decent pint of bitter and people not knowing how to queue properly.

Abraham Lincoln was inordinately fond of telling raucous and rough-hewn tales, at the slightest provocation and particularly to illustrate his point in an argument. Gore Vidal's excellent biographical novel 'Lincoln' illustrates this side of Lincoln's character very strikingly throughout. Doubtless one important source for Vidal was "Lincoln's Yarns and Stories" by Colonel Alexander McClure, a very lengthy collection of hundreds of Lincoln's annecdotes - some, no doubt, apocryphal, but most as reported by this or that person and covering Lincoln's life from his early days as an Illinois lawyer to the long and difficult years of the Civil War. The book is an extremely entertaining oral history, possibly of wider interest than to Civil War obsessives like myself, and is my recommendation for the week from the Project Gutenberg free e-book website. My favourite quote isn't from one of Lincoln's stories, but from one of the editor's introductions to a tall-tale:

It is true that Lincoln did not drink, never swore, was a
stranger to smoking and lived a moral life generally, but he did
like horse-racing and chicken fighting.

Television, Inertia

Thursday 4th January 2007
I’m told that we’ve been having an exceptionally mild winter. There were only a handful of days it snowed through December, and the temperature usually remained above -20c during the day. It has snowed all day today - a very light and powdery snow, as previously, but the constant fall has led now to a little over a half inch on the ground; for what may be the first time in my month here there are irregular little gusts of wind. Winter may be coming on.

School continues fine, ups and downs, but continues, and behaviour has improved immensely. Sadly, the students are starting to make salient criticisms of my teaching methods and pertinent suggestions, forcing me to pay more attention to them and their needs. Sigh.

Today we had fish for lunch! Rather than adapting to the diet I’ve been getting fussier and fussier over my eating at school. I just can’t work up an appetite for a mound of meat and rice, in very much a natural gravy, accompanied by three or four slices of carrot - day in and day out. The dinner ladies don’t seem to be able to overcome the instinct to give me manly-sized servings - possibly because I always do my best to prevent them from seeing how much I am throwing away at the end of every lunch

I continue to face unanticipated requests to do additional work: this week, to produce 6 exam papers by Monday (so far managed to do about a quarter of one), which I agreed to without any thought about how difficult it is to write a balanced test paper. I suppose I will have to write six deeply unbalanced papers instead. What I did whinge about was being asked to teach 4 additional hours of lessons for a month to coach 6 leading students for an upcoming inter-school English ‘Olympiad’. A - I need those four hours to prepare for (and, more importantly, recover from) my scheduled lessons. B - If the students did a fraction of the work expected of them, maybe they wouldn’t need additional coaching? And if they do need coaching then why don’t their wealthy parents pay for it? Graciously, I agreed to do it.

Later in the day a Turkish part-time teacher asked whether I might be interested in any work at his English language school - so I’ll be meeting with him after school Monday. Which reminds me that I’d promised to volunteer my greatly-in-demand teaching abilities to the CNCF this week - must give them a call again tomorrow.

The question now is whether I can fit all these commitments into my busy schedule. I have become a bit of a TV addict since finding my way about the schedules. Other than The Simpsons, Arrested Development, The Office (American version - which, dare I say, is fresher and funnier than the original -sorry) and Seinfeld, the Korean KBS World channel usually has English subtitles has some great soap operas and historical dramas; there’s a Japanese channel which doesn’t have subtitles but an excellent sci-fi kung-fu series which seems to be on all the time, and is maybe about a group of hot young women and cool dudes half of whom have been brainwashed into hunting down the others (I think); Russian TV has a lot of slapstick comedy programs which are pretty easy to follow - the main comedian in a sketch show bears an uncanny resemblance to Vic Reeves, with blond hair and a tash. Sadly the dozens of Mongolian channels are less than compelling on the whole - although there’s always a music video worth catching on some time - I saw the ‘Beer Band’ on one channel recently, with my good friend Lhagvaa (or Ganko, I’m still unclear on the name) on vocals. Unfortunately I don’t get the Knowledge Channel - a Mongolian channel which shows BBC DVDs (‘Life of Plants’, ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’, etc) all day (at the end of the program a blue ‘DVD Eject’ screen comes up, followed by ‘DVD Loading’ and ‘Play’). I can always catch a Premiership game if I want to see the footy - pirated from Sky Sports or Setanta. I don’t think much attention is paid to international copyright here yet. It doesn’t appear to be possible anywhere in the country to buy CDs or DVDs that aren’t Chinese copies (and on the whole very high quality copies too, except of latest releases, which are usually video-cammed).

I am ashamed to admit that I have so far made no attempt to find out where I can catch some traditional Mongolian music, which I hope to rectify soon. Not that I’m not getting enough culture, as you can well see. Fortunately, I have run out of the delicious bubble-and-squeak type concoction that my cleaner knocked up for me from the odds and ends in my fridge, and which I’ve been living off for a week (supplemented by a more than adequate carrot and potato soup which I cooked myself) - so I may possibly be able to save ‘Snakes on a Plane’ for another evening, and to brave the elements and get myself out of my cosy apartment to a restaurant to eat this evening. Damn, Seinfeld’s started, and I’ve only seen this episode a few times before - I’ll head out to Los Bandidos curry house just as soon as it’s over. And if I’m not back in time for The Office, well, so be it. I can buy the whole season from the video store for about a fiver anyhow.

China's WTO Membership, Generosity, Serious Discipline Issues

Tuesday 19th December
Yesterday I went for a meal at a Chinese restaurant with one of the school’s Chinese teachers, Yuan Yuan, and her friend. On Friday Yuan Yuan had asked if I could help her friend by checking over her dissertation for her Masters degree. I would be very happy to help, I said, but it might take some time to check through it all. Oh, that was not a problem, her friend had “19 day” before she had to hand the work in. “19 days to do the work?” I asked. “No, 19 day, 12 month,” Yuan replied with a smile. “The 19th of December?” I asked, reluctant to hear the reply. Yuan smiled again and nodded: “Yes, 19 December.” “Next Tuesday, the 19th of December?” although by now the question was purely rhetorical. “Yes.”

The dissertation turned out to be 50 turgid pages of economics; the subject being the advantages and benefits of China’s membership of the WTO. Most of the english was passable, however there was a slight problem with inconsistencies in the text. I made a brief check on the internet and confirmed that China has been a member of the WTO since 2001; all the material that the student had lifted from the internet spoke of China’s future membership: almost the entire paper was written about possible outcomes of something that had already happened. I spent a good four hours of Friday night drinking vodka and orange and changing the tense of what seemed to be every sentence in the paper - and resisting the temptation to spice up the dissertation by turning it into a reckless argument in favour of democracy sprinkled with a few choice phrases about the beloved Chairman Mao or the ideological bankruptcy of the ruling Communist regime.

Anyhow, as thanks for my selfless generosity, Yuan and her friend treated me to a meal at one of their favourite restaurants. It was 10 minutes walk from school in the opposite direction from my apartment; just next-door to the Wrestling Palace. Disappointingly, no be-diapered Mongolian wrestlers were catching a quick snack between bouts - maybe next time. The food was very nice - Szechuan, I believe, and a welcome relief from the school meals and my own uninspired cooking ; which are between them now starting to grind me down a little. Not nearly as good as Beijing, of course, but far closer to Beijing than Chinese food in the UK. I have no idea how much it cost because I didn’t make even a token suggestion that I pay anything. During the meal (and very happily after we had already been served) I had the excitement of experiencing my first Ulaanbaatar power-outage. It seems that it was only our building affected as light still came in from the street, and in about 15 minutes the power was back on. Yuan Yuan also kindly taught me essential Mongolian taxi driver speak (if memory serves me correctly): “tsu “(left), “balong”(right) and tchigili (straight on). I now have about a half dozen things I can say, which at this rate I should have the vocabulary of an underachieving dullard by the end of my stay.


While we're on the subject of my selfless generosity, I somehow neglected to boast that after being paid Friday (joy), I took a walk down to the old State Department Store and bought my two very good friends and helpers (whose names I still don’t know - must remember to learn how to ask) from the apartment building a colouring book and pencils each - which I was able to give them when they called round early that evening to see if I needed any chores doing. I took a photograph as evidence of my joy-bringing generosity, which, while it may know bounds, is at any rate now proven.

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Genghis Khan, Horse Belly, Old MacDonald Had a Ger

Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th December
Thursday and Friday I suffered with a very heavy cold, still making it to school and heroically managing my enormous workload of classes. Happily, I managed to recover most of my strength by the weekend. The Mongolian family I know had invited me to join them on a visit to their relatives in Baganuur, a town some 75 miles from Ulaanbaatar - which meant that I would make my first journey through the Mongolian countryside. The family - husband and wife Tso and Shinee and their daughter Misheel - arrived to pick me up around 8am on Saturday morning: we were leaving early to catch the sunrise. The outskirts of Ulaanbaatar as we headed East took us through crowded Ger districts, where the smoke was thickly rising from chimneys: picturesque, but also a considerable contribution to UB’s air pollution problem. The road itself was cracked and broken, filled with craterous pot holes. The scenery, however is quite spectacular - the mountains surrounding UB are part of one of the country’s longest-established national parks - and before too long the charming grime of the capital was left behind, and we were passing herds of sheep, goats and horses, where the ger now belonged to livestock herders. Everything was dusted with snow, though happily for the grazing animals the tops of the grass still shows brownly through. Sunrise was quick and dazzling, and brought with it the unearthly blue skies that had greeted me to Mongolia two weeks ago, and the memory of which had been a little lost in Ulaanbaatar’s grimy haze. Happily for the top of my skull and any eventual long-term effect on the roof of the car, the road surface improved too. Considering that this was the only road East out of UB (as far as I can gather) we met precious little traffic coming in to the home of half the nation’s population; such traffic as was largely consisted of big green trucks overloaded with furs and hides.


Our first stop was to see a forty foot tall shining steel representation of old Genghis himself, sat astride a Horse and glowering out over distant mountains and grasslands. This statue, The Chinggis Khaan Monument, is quite an awe-inspiring sight: it’s also somewhat surreal in its present state as the statue has been built, but not the base - so it is currently supported about 15 feet above the ground on iron girders, and a giant crane stands beside the fierce father (both figuratively and, statistically speaking, literally) of the nation.

Shortly afterwards we stopped for breakfast: tea, ham and gherkins. My companions introduced me to another Mongolian culinary delight - they dropped slices of ham into their tea (which was English Breakfast tea, for your information). I decided not to join them in this.

Shinee’s younger brother lives in the residential district of Baganuur. The town entirely consists of the familiar concrete soviet architecture: the lack of the bumper to bumper (and too often closer) traffic of UB made a welcome change. As in the capital though, the streets were full of people wrapped up well but otherwise ignoring the chill and passing the time of day in a very cheery manner. Our host’s apartment was in a building even closer to disintegration than mine; the apartment itself, of course, was very comfortable, modern and clean - in complete contrast to my own.

We were treated to our second breakfast of the day: tea, sweet pastries, some chopped ham and gherkins and an enormous bowl of cold horse meat. Tso very enthusiastically tucked into the horse meat, and carved me off a big piece. Of course it tasted very good. I asked what the large and less than appetising thing was in the middle of the bowl and was not surprised to learn that it was the stomach. Tso sliced off a piece that I was surprised to see him manage to fit in his mouth and laughed as he insisted that I try some. The verdict? Well, certainly chewy, with an interesting texture. I am sure that it has many beneficial properties.

Eating was not entirely the business of the day, but the rest served only as interludes. We paid a brief visit to the town square, where there is a monument to the town’s favourite son: a greatly admired early 20th century poet and writer and general champion of the Mongolian language.

For the afternoon, now accompanied by two of Shinee’s brothers and their wives, we drove out into the countryside along a frozen mud track for several miles, to a Ger camp: one of the many tourist camps in the country, which do not only serve as an attraction for foreign visitors, but which are a convenient way for town and city dwelling Mongolians to stay in touch with their nomadic roots. I don’t know the figures, but I imagine that the majority of Mongolians are now apartment dwellers - nonetheless, only going back as far as their grandparents’ lives must probably take the overwhelming majority of Mongolians back to the Ger.

We had to wait about half an hour in a small restaurant building whilst the stove was lit in our ger. Once it was ready the party tramped over to it through the crisp snow. First, however, I paid a visit to the ger where our evening meal was being prepared by two cooks. As soon as I stepped inside the heat enveloped me. The stove in this ger had been burning for hours and the entire place was as warm as you could possibly want it. My attention was occupied by the stove, in which the fire was burning fiercely. A round lid had been removed from the top and in it a large pressure-cooking pan was placed. There was an inch or two of fiercely boiling water in the bottom of the pan. One of the cooks used tongs to remove red-hot stones from within the stove; these were then dropped hissing into the pan. Next, a layer of meat - large chunks of red beef on the bone - were pressed down onto the stones. This was followed by another layer of stones and another of beef, until the pan was almost filled. Finally, a packet of chopped herbs was sprinkled liberally in and what little space remained at the top of the pan was filled with peeled potatoes, carrots and swedes. The steam and odours arising from the pan were already pretty enticing. The lid was fitted and the pan left on the heat of the stove (although with the hole in the stove top re-covered too): I was told that it would be left to cook for half an hour.

Our own ger was not as hot as the kitchen ger, but was certainly warm enough. The atmosphere was very convivial; the ger was prettily decorated by the hand painted wooden furniture - chests doubling as beds around the side of the ger and a a big table doubling as a chest in the middle. I warmed myself by the stove until Shinee told me that the men’s side of the ger was across the table on the far side from the stove, to which I reluctantly but manfully retired. Touching the woollen sides of the ger I was surprised that I felt no chill at all. The camp is by a frozen river and it must easily have been past -20c outside.

Whilst we waited for our food there was a round of shots of Chinggis Vodka accompanied by toasts of very high-minded sentiment. There were a good few of these. Finally, the pressure cooker was brought in and the lid removed, issuing gouts of rich-smelling steam . I was served with a sizeable piece of backbone, and we all ate heartily with our hands, exactly as I had previously only seen in cartoons and Robin Hood movies. The result was extremely good - the meat wonderfully well cooked and seared by the hot stones. I ate the marrow or whatever the buttery stuff is in the middle of the vertebrae - very tasty. After eating, we took up the hot stones and juggled them from hand to hand - this being good for the circulation, apparently. Then more Vodka.

I went out into the starry night to slide around on the frozen river for ten minutes or so with the kids. Damn cold outside but a very suitable after dinner pastime. Back in the ger my banjo had been got out for me and left to warm up on a bed at the back. I very happily repaid the hospitality of my hosts by playing through a good number of tunes and singing as well as the vodka had left me able. 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm' is definitely going down well here. Apparently the song is known to Mongolian kids with lyrics in their own language. They only get animal noises at the end of verses rather than throughout, however. Tso and the kids had earlier taught me a melody to a very popular Mongolian nursery rhyme, which I fully intend to keep playing.

Either the stove was burning low or my enthusiasm for the banjo was not shared as much as the vodka gave me to imagine: at any road, it was soon enough time to clear out and head home. The ger had got somewhat colder once we’d stopped feeding the fire: I was left to imagine how cold it would get overnight as we travelled back to the fully central-heated apartment in town. The road presented no problems in spite of the ice: there was no other traffic and I am thinking that the breathalyser is yet to be introduced to rural Mongolia. Once home, there was time for my kind hosts to prepare one last meat-focused meal (beef dumplings), to be washed down with beer and then bed.

The sky was overcast once more as we drove back to Ulaanbaatar this afternoon. Approaching the Genghis statue we stopped as a horseman herded his shaggy-coated, short, stocky horses across the road. The rider, thickly wrapped up against the cold, was the first horseman I had seen in Mongolia. He seemed to look at me with equal curiosity as we passed.

UB Banjo Debut, and Hypocrisy

Wednesday 13th December
Drinking a can of Hite beer with a picture of a fearsome looking rap group/ overweight boy band called ‘guys666’ on it. They appear to mean business.

There’s an acoustic guitar in the staff room which one of the Mongolian teachers gets down and strums on from time to time. He strums through Beatles songs or 12 bar blues and indicated that I should bring my banjo in to school today (by pointing at me with a nod, miming strumming and asking “Yes?”). I did so, and we had a pretty good pick together in one of our free periods, he had no problem with the 'Worried Man Blues' and another teacher asked for 'Country Roads,' which impressed no end. I managed to fall in on a Mongolian song in A minor and we played a few others. I then proceeded to start teaching him 'Duelling Banjos,' which entirely undermines the past four years of my complaining about having to play it - but now I have it in mind to impress drunk American businessmen in the Great Khan. All very promising.

Earlier, in the first of my 4th grade classes I managed to last 10 minutes of trying to teach a very reluctant to study class, before offering that if they finished the present piece of work I would sing them a few songs. I guess it shows how much I am pining for an audience that I had to resort to bullying a bunch of 9 year olds into demanding that I play for them. I left the room for a minute to get the banjo and they were all, as threatened, sat quietly for my return. Gave them a brief history of the instrument of course and a run through ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown,’ my playing given an extra bit of sparkle by the certain knowledge that this was the finest bit of banjo-picking they’d ever seen. Followed with ‘Oh Susanna,’ to which I chalked up the words on the blackboard. Of course, it was all part of a structured lesson plan: in the previous class we’d done the weather (“Yesterday it was snowing. It was very cold.”) so ‘The sun so hot I froze to death,’ was a great lyric to have the class sing along to. I say sing along - I considered changing key to suiting their voices etc., likewise the tempo to make it easier for them to follow the words, but decided that that would compromise the performance too much. Anyway, they enjoyed it, and I did too. I did get the class to help me write another nonsense weather verse, which I won’t reproduce here for copyright reasons. If only I could record them singing it, overdub some sleigh bells and release it in time for the Xmas no.1 spot. We even went on past the lunch bell without the kids scrambling for the door.

Later in the day I had a second 4th grade class. Some of them actually already knew the words to ‘Oh Susanna,’ or close enough to the words for Mongolia. Somehow though, I didn’t get the same buzz - until I got a request for ‘Old Macdonald Had A Farm’- which has a fine bluegrass pedigree, having been recorded by Flatt & Scruggs on their Carnegie Hall album. I undermined two weeks of building a stern disciplinarian persona for the class by jumping up and down and making farmyard noises to a host of animals/verses shouted out by the kids. Another teacher walked in at the end of the lesson and I made such a good impression that I was required to sing her a bunch of songs too.

At the end of school there was an English Department staff meeting. We had it whilst sat on the kiddie stools in the Disney Room. If that room is chosen to keep the meeting from running on and on then I’m glad we were only in there for two bloody hours. The subject was discipline in class; I suspect that the reason for the meaning was not so much to placate us non-Mongolian teachers regarding our concerns, but to make us consider not saying anything and just getting on with things in the future. It was most probably the meeting with the highest ‘number of things written on a blackboard’ to ‘actual decisions made or any kind of meaningful conclusion’ reached ratio discrepancy I have ever sat through. The gist was: just deal with it. I did manage to have a good say on the subject of discouraging the younger kids from associating the foreign teachers’ lessons with ‘having fun:’ a sad failing of so many of my predecessors, which has been a foundation of many of the problems later teachers have experienced. One thing about teaching, which anyone who knows me will have gathered from my tedious list of unacceptable behaviour in the classroom, is that I am really, really enjoying being an unashamed hypocrite. On which subject, I don’t allow my students to use “really, really” because “it’s crass.” Red line though the second "really" and a snidey comment every time.

Mongolian Hospitality, Black Market, Big Buddha and the War Memorial

Sunday 11th December 2006
Today was gloriously sunny. Pottered around in the morning and had a fairly long bath. Downloaded a Today program piece about the 'Special Relationship' mainly out of Radio 4-longing . Need to get a little radio so I can hunt for the World Service.


The daughter of the building supervisor does not ever seem to be off duty herself. She knocked on my door to indicate that she needed me to turn on the light outside my flat. Then she very conscientiously scrubbed the floor outside my flat; following which she also started to wash the metal security door to my flat. I felt pretty guilty about this and eventually managed to persuade her to stop. Played her 'Blackberry Blossom' on the banjo in a very feeble attempt to compensate her for her troubles without getting into the awkward territory of paying her any cash. She smiled and at least allowed me to think that I had somehow repaid her hard graft. Resolved to buy her some colouring books or something.

Around 2pm I was collected by the one Mongolian family I know, who very kindly took me to their home for a Sunday roast. They live further out of town, and the mountains loom massive over their home. Their apartment is very nice but also very small: thye are waiting on a bigger apartment that they hope to get early next year. Between their home and the mountains is a settlement of ger, from which smoke curled up very picturesquely. My students largely blame the air pollution on people living in ger and burning anything they can get their hands on as fuel - which undoubtedly contributes to the problem, but here the air was noticeably cleaner. The dinner was wonderful - mutton, rice, roast potatoes and carrots and a lot more. The family apologised that they had run out of the Bisto gravy granules that they'd bought in England, so I'd had to make do with real gravy made from the mutton fat and absolutely delicious. Far too much dessert - including the discovery for me that the things that they sell in the supermarket that look like bags of miniature cream horns are miniature cream horns. I crammed in as many as I could.


As the family had very kindly promised me, I was taken, as the sun set behind the mountains, to Narantuul, the famous 'Black Market', which is close to their home. I know that a lot of this blog has so far been about how I bought this for 30p or that for £1 - frankly, an obsession for me, but I do hope to get onto other subjects about this fascinating country. Please indulge me one further time at least, or skip to the next entry.

The Market is definitely one of the must-sees for any tourist visiting UB - I am very happy to have had a guide, though. Nonetheless, the sheer number of vendors there mean that if you can resist being wheedled into making a purchase you will be certain of getting yourself a good price (i.e. not the tourist rate, as it were) on whatever you buy. The market is huge: conveniently, traders seem to be located together - so that you get rows of coats here, jeans there, boot-makers together, etc. Stalls are neatly laid out, and in general resemble a UK knock-off gear market - one nice forrin touch being that all traders keep the goods not on display in giant wooden chests. The aisles are narrow, and the ground was frozen so there was a considerable hazard from the people busily pushing past.

I would heartily recommend the clothing that I brought out with me to anyone visiting a similar climate to Mongolia who would prefer to travel light. Good quality but cheap canvas hiking boots provide ample insulation from the ground; M&S merino longjohns beneath hiking trousers; thermal long-sleeved vest topped by one top, over which a body warmer and a gore-tex jacket; ski gloves and a hat that covers as much of the face as possible: this is all plenty warm enough for -25c, I believe would stand up well to wind chill (with a scarf) and importantly is all very breathable so allows you to move about plenty. The moving about plenty could well be part of it - I don't know how well it would suit shooting the breeze in the middle of Sukhbaatar Square. So I felt that I needed to get some gear more in line with what I see worn about me - something a bit more substantial.

I looked somewhat boggled at the endless ranks of coats - determined to find a decent parka to wear into school (meaning that I'd like to get something more traditional, but don't want the kids laughing at me). Settled on a huge Diesel 'Canada -Style' parka for a princely 45,000, or around £20. It certainly seems to be the real thing but curiously none of the labels say
Made in China - but maybe they leave those off for the domestic/semi-domestic market.

I had a pretty good time amongst the boot stalls. Every cobbler insisted on me trying their boots. By and large they were in no way big enough to fit me, but of course they all insisted that the leather would stretch, etc, and I couldn't possibly find anything any bigger. As I was about to give up hope (or take up one of the offers to have a pair made for me for next week) an old lady ran up with a very sizeable looking pair. They are hand-made Mongolian boots - in less of a traditional style - basically resembling biker's boots, tan in colour. They fit like a dream - a good shape, with a bit of room enabling me to wear an inner 'sock' for the winter or stuff in an extre insole. Sadly, the same lady also offered me another pair for only a little more, these others didn't fit quite as well. It was a shame because, as my friend translated, these were made with "real dog fur" inside. "But I like dogs!" I had her translate, "not wear, I like them." Everyone found this very funny. They were very cosy boots, but as I said, sadly did not quite fit. Stuck with the biker boots: T35,000, or around £15.

I bought one or two other things, shirts etc, but topped it all off with a delightfully revolting chinese padded dressing gown in gold and brown. It is a little on the small side but will do until I find something a bit bigger - whereupon I can sell this one to a fancy dress shop.


After the market, the family drove me up to Ulaanbaatar war memorial, the Zaysan Tolgoy, where I got to tramp around at night in the snow in my new boots and parka, which was very pleasing. The memorial is just outside the city on top of a col at the foot of the mountains. At the bottom of the hill there's a 20 foot or so golden buddha I am told was built in the last couple of years. To one side is a giant temple bell and on the other a drum. These can be rung or beat upon to your heart's content; the vibrations as they reverberate are incredible.

Once I'd tired of banging away like a school kid we drove halfway up to the monument then walked the remainder of the way. It must be an impressive sight by day - with the mountains behind, that were now shrouded in darkness. At night it has an utterly impressive character, though. The memorial, built by the soviets, is on the top of a very conical hill. It's a viewing platform maybe 50 feet or more in diameter. There's a wall around it about four foot high, into which there's one entrance - and then, from a pillar at the front of the memorial (which seems to be a stylized soviet soldier unfurling a flag) a band of concrete encircles the platform from aboev. This turns the whole surrounding landscape into a diorama , with the stars forming the ceiling. Somewhat difficult to describe, but utterly awe-inspiring. Inside the higher band we have a representation of the history of communism from Russia to Mongolia, that can be dimly made out in the dark.

We'd climbed the hill for the view of Ulaanbaatar. At night, it is a bunch of lights - and not that many. I think in the UK or America you'd be moved to say "Is there a town over there?" Must get there in the day some time, so as to get a photo of the monument and see the UB smog as a whole.

Home, I decided against/chickened out of walking over to the Great Khan yet again. Some instinct told me that there was a distinct possibility that any banjo picking was not guaranteed, and I now no longer have the money left to buy a pint. Will think about it again once I have a few Torogs in my pocket.

School, Taxi, Food (Meat), Audition Nerves

Monday 4th December 2006
Either I slept through my alarm or it didn’t go off. So I didn’t get up until well after eight and was barely ready for school until 9am - shortly before which the sun had risen, a deathly red crescent over the vaporous horizon. Today was probably another overcast day - but I didn’t see much of it. Took a brisk walk to the school, toting the banjer so’s to be off for the Great Khan Irish Pub straight after work. As I’d be spending the day indoors I had dispensed with the thermals, and my legs felt the chill. I made every effort to combat the pollution by breathing through my nose - nature’s filter mask. I was rewarded a little later in the day with a nose bleed.

The next eight hours were pretty much occupied by the same task, which, surprisingly enough I found to be quite engaging. Namely, I sat on a kiddie stool and marked English essay questions for the 8th, 9th and 10th grades. Uniformly pretty bad as far as content and grammar, but the spelling I am sure was above the UK average. I scored very strictly and left snidey but hopefully also mildly encouraging comments. The essays about ‘What makes a successful school’ were often quite entertaining and witty - the essays about 'The problems Mongolia faces' predictable and dull - but some nationalistic responses were quite enlightening (“We are the sons of Chinggis. Think - only think!!” after lamenting that once other nations were "scare of Mongolia, now Mongolia is scare of other Nations.”) Lots of students wrote of the national characteristic being laziness - curiously, all students whose work displayed more than a fair share of the alleged Mongolian national character...

I didn’t manage to get away from exam marking until 5.45pm. Fellow teachers said a taxi to the pub shouldn’t cost more than T700 and no one offered me a lift, so I headed out into the freezing cold and before too long a cab stopped. The driver, a burly fellow, did not seem overjoyed (altho was by no means antagonistic) at my lack of Mongolian language. I repeated "Irish Pub" in as Mongolian an accent as I could manage and tried pronouncing the name of the central square (Sukhbaatar) a few times, all to much shaking of his head as we weaved through the traffic. It was, at least, warm in the cab. We passed what I was pretty sure should be the turn off for the centre - the driver indicated I was not to worry. He pulled over the cab and started bellowing out to passing students - presumably saying "Can anyone find out where it is this foreign fuckwit wants to go so I can get on with my job?” He was mostly ignored. Eventually a few students came over, but they also seemed to have trouble understanding me, even though I kept pointing at my map of UB. Finally, he drove on further round what proved to be the Baga Toiru - an inner-ring road (it actually turned out that my sense of direction had proven pretty good, in conjunction with the map and I had a fairly good idea where we were). Well, a bunch of students at the Uni understoond and explained and off we roared, changing lanes alarmingly to rush through junctions. There was heavy traffic at the centre so the driver and I were able to nod confirmingly to each other as we approached the Grand Khan. I paid magnaminously with T2000 largely out of guilt at having failed to learn enough Mongolian to give simple directions, and was rewarded by surprised gratitude.

In the Grand Khan Irish Pub of course I was an hour late for my appointment with the manager/band leader. Feeling foolish and out of place I asked if he might still be around and was told that he could be summoned in 10 minutes. Sat there feeling rather nervous , overawed by the sheer size of the place, and the many tables of well dressed young people and wealthy American businessmen. I rehearsed suggesting that it might be more appropriate for me to come back on Sunday afternoon, or when I’ve got a bit of a band together. However, the manager proved to be happily unconcerned about hearing me play tonight - we chatted a bit and he suggested I come down tomorrow at 10.30pm when his band would be playing. I said that would be great.

Lured by enticing aromas I decided I would get some food - ordered a burger and fries that I’d seen someone else get and was rewarded with an (inevitably) monstrously meaty burger and delicious but few fries. Amazingly, the meat all vanished - possibly, as with the school meal, because I have somehow hypnotised myself into believing that the cold means my cells are just absorbing the stuff up.

Then met up with a Mongolian family I knew from Liverpool. They chastised me for having already eaten but I gamely volunteered to try and cram in a bit more so they drove us to an upmarket traditional Mongolian restaurant, called Modern Nomads. The food was great - I had a selection plate from the children’s menu which was very substantial - meat and veg boiled dumplings, miniature fried meat pasties, little meat pastry balls, oh, and a bit of meat. There may have been more meat - there was also a bit of salty chopped carrot.

They drove me home and the family became the first guests in my humble apartment for a pot of tea. Fond farewells and, falling asleep as I tried to write up this blog entry, I got to bed about 10pm. 1am I woke up, somewhat having difficulty with digestion, but not quite enough to warrant raiding my heartburn pills and, my mind turning with this and that, did not fall back to sleep until after 3am.

Banks, Banjo, Beef Stew and Beer

Saturday 2nd December 2006
Spent much of my day tramping back and forth across UB spending a lot of time waiting in banks to find I couldn’t use a card and also being directed to ATMs that only take VISA. Discovered a curious Mongolian approach to queueing in the banks. People form a neat orderly line, or something close to that, and then one after another people come into the bank and go straight to the front of the queue without so much as an 'excuse me.' It was later explained to me that these people are 'in a hurry.' Found a ramshackle market area fascinating: men in traditional dress tramping about, three dogs taking the sun at the edge of their hole into the underground pipe network. My eyes are swimming, either from fatigue or the polluted air.

Outside a bank just off UB's main square a large number of the employees were putting up a Christmas tree, of which I snapped the pleasant photo at the top. I understand that Christmas is a fairly new concept to Mongolians, which is being heartily embraced in a city that loves to shop.

At the State Department Store bought a teapot and knife fork and spoon for approx 3000T and a stack of traditional watercolours and oil paintings which I was blown away by for 44000T. The paintings inevitably display variations on the same scene: steppe, mountains in the background, a ger, and horsemen leading herds of horses. Some shows camels and sand dunes. The brush strokes are deft and the choices of colour very pleasing.

Arriving back at the apartment block with a big bag of groceries, a small girl came out of what I assume to be the building supervisor’s room. She smiled and held up 6 fingers and I nodded and said, “Yes, six,” then she, with another smaller girl ran ahead and called the lift. She pressed the floor button for me and they followed me to the door. I had some trouble with the luck and so put my groceries down - when I opened the door the girl carried my bag across the threshold. Felt confused as to whether it would be appropriate to tip say 100T (I had, I’m afraid, given 500T to a young boy begging in the centre - there was no one around to see. He very politely said thankyou) but as she didn’t ask I didn’t and nodded and thanked her a few times - in English of course as I have yet dared to try any Mongolian.

Cooked a very passable beef stew (using some of the pound of prime beef I bought today at the supermarket in the State Department store - unless I'm very much mistaken it cost about 25p)[Edit - I was very much mistaken. It probably cost about £1] and settled down to some Mongolian TV. On a music channel was somewhat surprised to see a very slickly produced Mongolian rap video by some feller called Golog, featuring Mongolians in Nazi uniform, living a sort of gangsta rap lifestyle in beerhalls with fur and jewelry-wearing women draped over them. I am later informed that young Mongolians find the swastika (which I believe, in common with many cultures, to be a symbol of ancient usage in Mongolia) and Nazi uniforms 'cool' and assuredly don't mean anything ominous or racist by it. Hmm. Actually, the comparison between the 'cool' use of Nazi and pimp imagery is worth considering.

Sunday 3rd December 2007
Didn’t get up until nearly 11 and after breakfast practised some Banjo in the kitchen, which, being in the middle of the flat I figured to be least likely to cause annoyance. Got a bit carried away with my picking and there was a pretty loud tapping (I won’t say banging) from the floor above, which was a bit embarassing. Stuffed teatowel under bridge and carried on pickless for a while, but felt guilty and self conscious.

Walked the long way into town, along a frozen river. The day was overcast and seemed considerably warmer than the previous days. People appeared to be using generators in some capacity to draw water from a deep hole in the ice, or into the earth beneath the ice, as it doesn’t look like much of a river, tho hard to tell in its present state. There was also a wall built of cut slabs of ice across the river - for what purpose if any I could not fathom. Bought 5 hand painted Christmas cards (Mongolian horsemen crossing snowy steppes) from a pleasant old feller in the street. He may have overcharged me at 1000T a card but its hard to haggle when something is so fine and so cheap already.

At first I walked past and then went back and in to the “Grand Khan Irish Pub” - a very smart joint near the central square. I asked about the possibility of playing there and was told to come back tomorrow before 5pm to see some guy who may be the owner or a performer. Anyhow, they were polite and encouraging so I’ll give it a go. Explained I’d be teaching at school but would get there as close to 5pm as possible.

Walking home I also stopped at the "Bavarian Bar", enticed by the advertised Happy Hour and Chinggis Beer at 1800T a 1/2l - served cold in a thick tankard the beer was extremely refreshing. The bar not remotely Mongolian in appearance although also not much like the beer keller it strove to be - the only other customers in the bar were a young couple at a table together. Tipped the guy 200T which seemed fair and well received. Bed as early as I could make it under circumstances I had 15 years ago thought never to be in again: school tomorrow. Groan.

Arriving in Ulaanbaatar

Friday 1st December 2006
I landed in Ulaanbaatar (henceforth, following standard practice, in the main referred to as UB) around noon. It being a beautiful cloudless day, the flight provided compelling window-gazing: looking down after take off from Beijing almost the first thing I saw, with a leap of excitement (such as is possible strapped into an airline seat) was the Great Wall as it zigzagged crazily over a ridge in a sea of mountains. Much of the Gobi was dusted in snow: I could make out the spokes of tracks made by horses and herds centring on gers; then gentler mountains, forested on their shaded sides, and, as the plane circled round to land, Ulaanbaatar: tower blocks dimly visible in a haze of smog. The contrast with the wild beauty of the landscape was staggeringly emphasised by the cooling towers and one enormous chimney of a power station belching out smoke and vapour in the foreground. An ominous sight, although perhaps coloured by my optimism it also had the look of a frontier town: a colony on a near virgin planet, poisoning its own air but as yet unspoiling the vast beauty around it.

I was very much arriving to the unknown. For the next 6 months I'll be living in UB and teaching English and as much as possible playing and teaching Bluegrass banjo. It is understood that I have zero experience teaching English. As for what I have to expect I know very little except that I'll be teaching full-time and that as far as my accommodation goes I "don't even have to bring a spoon"

Smart black uniformed guards, both women and men, in the tunnel connecting the plane to the airport had perhaps been selected for their posts for their powerful, broad mongolian features - skin flawless, dark, calm eyes, assured and competent expressions. And in that tunnel (which had twee carriage-style lamps on the wall) a first touch of the frigid chill outside, which the pilot informed us was 15 below zero under the dazzling midday sun.

No hassles, thank God, at immigration; no eyebrows raised at my ticking the ‘work’ box of my entry card and my final apprehensions vanished when on walking out into the arrival lounge a tall dark woman approached me and asked “Mr Fallows?” (I was disappointed, though, very disappointed, that she had not seen fit to stand there with a card with my name , which I have always seen as an essential part of the (however sterile) romance of airports. My contact from the school introduced me to an older, short and broad fur-hatted gentleman whose name and position I did not catch, and we left the terminal.

Walking out of the building - seen framed there in the doorway as I approached - stepping out into that bright sun and cold air, there was what I swear seemed to be a wolf (and so I like to think must at the very least have been a dog with some wolf in it), watching me calmly.

We walked to the car.

My hosts drove me through the city for my first look at my future place of employment. It was cheerfully explained that most of the pupils were from well-off backgrounds, spoiled and entirely unmotivated to learn. The school - closer to UB’s centre than I had expected - stands out as being a very flashily modern building, but was much smaller than I’d imagined from the pictures I'd seen. I didn’t seem to elicit more than the occasional curious glance from pupils, who were obviously quite used to seeing westerners about the place. I was introduced to the staff in the staff room - who again happily appeared to be the best sort of run-down, get-through-the-day teachers on the whole and who all spoke English, mostly pretty well too.

Dinner was a compartmented tray with four hand made burgers oozing grease on a bed of pasta and soggy chips that could have acchieved English canteen standards - also a purple-coloured side-helping of pickled beetroot, potato and peas. A small hundreds-and-thousands topped piece of cake and a cup of sweet tea to wash it all down. I actually managed to eat most of mine (left the chips) and can in theory see how the fatty meat is suited to the climate, but I cannot hide the disappointment to have gone from the best Chinese food I ever et in Beijing to school-bloody-dinners. Well, they made me a cup of lemon tea and most importantly of course it was free - a perk of the job.

As I asked for it I got approximately five minute of introduction to the course I’ll be teaching from Monday (the course proper may start a week on as next week is an ‘English Olympics’, whatever that means) - once I’m settled in I’m to teach literature however the hell I please and of course there's my afterschool Bluegrass class too. I was told that I’m to set homework ‘at least weekly’. Will try and have a good look at the course books on Monday.
Having had a chance to send a few emails I was summoned to go and see my new home, which (forbodingly) up to this point had ‘not been quite ready’. It seemed and indeed surely was even colder when we stepped out of the school than earlier at the airport, causing genuine relief once shut into the car. The cold is certainly invigorating.

The apartment (see charming photo at the top of the page - my apartment is close to the centre of the picture, four floors down from the top) turned out to be very close to the school - 5 minutes walk, in fact. My heart rose with delight on turning into the giant frozen mud courtyard overshadowed by our building: having been alarmed last night on finding on-line dreary pine and chrome ‘luxury apartments’ for rent in UB, I was pleasantly relieved to see a crumbling concrete relic of socialism. We entered a narrow yellowed hallway and found the creaky lift, which I intend to avoid using as much as I can. A second guess on the unmarked buttons found my flat on floor 6. The landlady was inside: on seeing the living room I thought for a moment that I would be living as a guest, but no, the whole apartment is mine and yes, it seems that the school are paying. The kitchen has a painted Mongolian dresser; there’s a Russian Doll, a puppy emerging from a barrel, two Chinese tigers and countless other bits of charmingly revolting tat in the front room's enormous wall cabinet. A 3-piece suite (altho it appears that the Mongolians don’t bellieve in slouching - the backs are certainly going to do my posture a bit of good); the bedroom has a carpet on the wall and a traditional Mongolian style of wooden bedstead; there’s a balcony between the kitchen and living room for drying clothes and I guess summer use; bright, ill fitting carpets and plenty of heat but it’s by no means stifling. I love it. Mountains visible towering over the city (and later, the sun setting red over the power station I’d seen earlier from the airport, lighting it redly afire).

No spoons though.

I felt a twinge of a tear when I was left there alone, suddenly a resident of this crazy post-soviet city on the far side of the world. I unpacked and then (around 2.45pm) resolved to go out and change my last Y100 note to get some groceries in. Wrapped up plenty before going out, but resolved to skip a few layers so as to guage what’s suited and also so as to be able to upgrade my cladding. So: t-shirt, cotton sweater, fleece, berghaus, boxers, socks, jeans, hiking boots, gloves and lastly, me hat.

Needed 'em - the cold was biting where my face was exposed. but without the wind and wet, by no means unendurable if I kept walking. And in the bright sun, amongst bustling bodies it was exciting - again, the most apt word I can find is exhilerating. Saw a young man emerge from beneath boards at the foot of a building, maybe a street kid, and later a young man with flowing black hair and tall leather boots striding puposefully and warriorlike. The traffic honking and people laughing and shouting at each other - mini vans pulled up outside cigarette kiosks calling out some kind of trade (I later read that these are unofficial taxis, shouting out a destination for any takers [Edit - wrong! They were licensed 'Micro-buses' - the unofficial taxis are literally any car that stops]) - dozens of little internet cafes, bars, saunas, phonecard booths: all with grimy neon plastic signs in garish script and illustration. The air sadly had me choking on the fumes, possibly owing to a contrast between an inherent clean quality not fully mixed with the auto poison, probably in reality just very unhealthily polluted.

At the Khaan Bank I changed my Yuen for crisp new Mongolian notes. I found that I can live cheap here if I can avoid being tempted by baubles and fripperies. Just round the corner from my flat there's a supermarket, where I was happy to be able to find ample groceries to suit my tastes. For T12000 (£5?) I bought:

1 small (250ml) bottle vodka
1l orange juice
1l milk
1/2l cooking oil
1 loaf (delicious) bread
1 tub butter/marg
2 onions
6 carrots
1 bag beansprouts
1 jar chilli sauce
small bag washing powder
small bottle washing up liquid
1 jar strawberry jam
2 2l bottles drinking water.

I cooked myself a passable stir-fry once home, followed by bread and jam. Ran myself a bath of passably hot water. Poured myself a congratulatory vodka and orange. And so to bed.