Mongolian customs

Here are a few Mongolian customs we have studied in the past couple days at language school. This is my rough translation for Mongolian, so there are bound to be some errors, but I think I’m generally pretty close.

1. The best food and drink is given to the head of the house. If the head of the house is gone, his plate is traditionally filled with the best food.
2. If you are offered tea or snacks and don’t want to eat them, don’t say so. You begin by tasting some of the cream from the white foods plate.
3. Don’t leave dregs in your cup; drink everything.
4. Don’t eat with one chopstick.
5. Before you go out, sit and eat your tea and food.
6. Don’t give a knife, fork or other sharp object with the pointed part facing out.
7. Don’t put water on top of milk. You can put milk on top of water.
8. Don’t throw things from the whetstone. Give things with the right hand.
9. Put meat, fat, oil, cream, and butter in the fire. Don’t put milk, water or soup. Old people say these will blind the fire’s eye. Don’t put bad things in the fire.
10. Men don’t dump the dirty water or trash.
11. When you enter a house, the lady of the house should fling the best tea upwards.
12. Don’t enter a ger with a gun, whip or shovel. Put them on top of the ger.
13. When you enter a ger, step with your right foot first. Sit where the head of the house tells you to sit. Stand up when older people enter the ger.
14. The older person should enter the ger first. The younger person should sit to the lower side of them. In western Mongolia, the people entering the ger traditionally bow to each of the people in the ger.
15. Listen to people first; don’t interrupt.
16. Don’t put your hands behind your back in the ger.
17. Don’t grab or lean on the support poles in a ger.
18. Don’t sing or cry in your bed. If you’re happy, don’t sing in your bed. If you’re sad, don’t cry in your bed.
19. Don’t point at people with one finger; use your right hand palm up to point.
20. Don’t kiss babies too much. Kiss babies on top of the foot. Don’t praise babies as “beautiful,” “smart” or “nice.” If you praise them, they will have a “white tongue and mouth.” When children play outside at night, put soot on their nose. When children don’t say “thank you,” say “Grow up.”
21. Don’t walk in front of a pregnant person. You need to respect her child.
22. When you are going on a trip, if you meet a wolf, it’s a good omen. If you meet a fox, it’s a bad omen. You need to go back and start again.
23. When you go to the countryside, if you encounter an ovoo, place 3 rocks and walk around it clockwise three times. While you are walking, say “The ovoo becomes big, and I become lucky. The ovoo becomes tall, and I become lucky.”
24. Don’t let your shadow fall on a bird’s egg.
25. When you give a gift to someone, say, “We’ll hold one thing for you.” Say, “Let’s hold one small gift. Give cups, shoes, pants, etc., because something that has an opening to the top is a good omen.
26. When you step on someone’s foot, say “Please forgive me” and take their hand.
27. Mongolians say that 7 is an unlucky number; 9 is a lucky number.
28. Don’t block the door. Don’t step on the threshold.
29. When people go to a far place, kiss them on the right cheek. Stroke them gently on the left cheek and say, “When you come back, I’ll kiss you.”
30. In the daytime, walk behind teachers and older people. Don’t go ahead of them or walk beside them. At night, you must walk in front of them.

Mongolian food wrap-up

Just a short note to wrap up our discussion of Mongolian food.

But first, the word for the day is буу (bo), which means “gun.” It came up because my teachers always ask me to share a news story, and I shared Dwain’s story of a drive-by shooting in Athens.

We haven’t eaten enough Mongolian food to really have an opinion on it, but most of what we’ve had has been good. We have stopped into a few tea shops or “eating-places” and just ordered randomly off of the menu. We’ve developed a good appreciation for tsuivan, which is a pile of noodles with hunks of fatty mutton in it. It’s greasy but tasty. I’ve ordered the “bishteks” before, which is basically Salisbury steak with a fried egg on top. Last night, we stopped at an eating-place to try their piroshkis, which are basically Russian empanadas. I loved them! We also tried a few buuz, which is the national food of Mongolia, I would say. It’s a few hunks of mutton wrapped in a pastry shell and steamed. It’s very edible although it will probably never be a favorite. Next week is the lunar new year in Mongolia, and most housewives are busy right now making hundreds of buuz for the visitors who will drop by their homes.

Our drink last night was probably one of the most common ones: milk tea. As I understand it, they boil a few tea leaves in salt water and then dump in a bunch of milk. The result is not very tea-like; it’s more like drinking hot, salty milk. That sounds pretty nasty, and it is a bit of an acquired taste but it’s not really too bad. The complaint I hear most often about Mongolian cuisine is the lack of variety. In the countryside, that would be a bigger problem, but here in Ulaanbaatar, there are lots of restaurants with many types of cuisines, so we’re not sweating it too badly at the present.

Where’s the Beef?

Naturally, Mongolians eat more than just white foods. After our introduction to all things dairy, we filed into another room to be introduced to all the parts of the sheep that you never wanted to see.

One of the teachers was cooking up a soup with lots of scrumptious innards, but he was kindly passing plates around so that we could sample each organ before it went into the stew.

Here, he is serving up some lovely slices of sheep stomach. Okay, in fairness we didn’t eat the stomach or the intestines. No, we ate the blood that was cooked inside the stomach and intestines. The liver tasted like, well, liver. The heart tasted pretty good at first; then it tasted like liver. I don’t think I’ll ever be a big sheep guts guy.

For the rest of the morning, students presented dishes from their (or random) countries. A couple of the Korean students made yummy little bacon wraps, and another Korean student made sweet filled pancakes. The Japanese student made something like hash browns on seaweed with bacon (I’m sure that wasn’t the actual title). The Americans didn’t work quite as hard. One student made barbecue beef sandwiches, another couple made ice cream floats, and we made refried beans. Pretty much everything was delicious.

Oh, I almost forgot. The word for the day is хонины мах (hoe-knee mach), which is literally “sheep’s meat,” AKA “mutton.”

Food of Many Nations day

Today’s Mongolian word is actually a phrase: Цаг хэд болж байна вэ? (Tsog head bolj ban way?) Literally, it means “Hour how many becoming is?” which naturally means “What time is it?”

I promised that I would blog a little about the food here. At this point, I am hardly an expert, since I have eaten very little Mongolian food. However, we did have a Foods of Many Nations day at language school the other day. I forgot to take a camera, but my friend Chris brought his, and he was kind enough to share some pictures with me.

  

We started out by learning about white foods. One of the central elements of the Mongolian diet is dairy. We were amazed by the astounding variety of foods that are made from milk and milk products.

They helpfully made flow charts and arrows to show all of the various things that can be made from various dairy products. We got to taste a lot of them and they varied extremely in taste, although most of them were quite good.

This one was a cheese that had been aged for about a year. It had a sharp but good taste.

In my next post, I’ll share some pictures of the “meat” we sampled that day.