Homeschool update

Today, in history class, we began studying the Chinese, specifically the Ming dynasty. We looked on the internet for some good pictures of the Forbidden City. There used to be a site that gave 360-degree views from various points in the city, but it didn’t seem to be working today, so we just Googled images of the city. We went to Explore Cool Places to find out the secret code embroidered into the emperors’ robes. And we also did a little reading about the porcelain that we now call china at Ceramics-C is for China. We finished this evening by heading out to Sansar Asian Food for a Chinese dinner and tea.

Tiffany and Elijah eating lemon chicken

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.

at the tea house and Independence Day

It’s been so long since I blogged that I hardly know what to write about. I think I’ll give a little snapshot of an experience I had earlier this week. I have language classes every morning from 9:00 to 12:15. One day this week, though, my 9:00 teacher asked if I could move my first morning lesson to 1:30. Rather than going home between my morning lesson and my afternoon lesson, I decided to dive into a local guanz for lunch. A guanz is roughly the equivalent of a “greasy spoon” restaurant in the US. It’s not fast food, exactly, but you can get Mongolian fare relatively quickly there.

I slid into a seat at an empty table, took a quick glance at the menu and hollered to the waitress/cashier/bartender/owner that I would like a plate of tsuivan and a cup of Lipton tea (to distinguish it from milk tea). She brought me a beer stein of hot water, a tea bag and two sugar cubes. While I waited for my meal and for my tea to brew, I had nothing to do but look at the other patrons. Directly in front of me were two men at a table. They were enjoying a liquid lunch, literally. They had their beer steins on their plates and kept refilling them from bottles on the table. One man was wearing dress clothes with sandals. The other man had his t-shirt pulled up above his belly and his pants unsnapped and completely unzipped. Eventually, he zipped his pants up, they finished off their beers and left the premises.

Then all I had to look at was the mirrored wall behind their table. In the mirror, I could see the owner behind me. She was sitting at a table with a handful of paper napkins and a pair of scissors. I didn’t have to look too closely to see what she was doing; I’ve seen it before at other restaurants. She was cutting single-fold, 1-ply napkins in half. The napkins are almost useless to begin with, but we must economize. I glanced back at my table and noticed the two cloth napkins lying there and wondered why on earth they were even using paper napkins. I looked back up at the mirror; the owner’s husband had joined her and was folding the paper napkins into triangles.

Finally, my meal was ready and the owner brought it out to me, along with two paper napkins. Yes, that’s right. They took a napkin, cut it in half, folded each half and then gave me both. Mystifying!

Anyway… a belated Independence Day to my American readers. We had an Independence Day celebration yesterday with the other American expats. It was, in fact, a strange gathering. I would guess that there were about 400 people present. Maybe 300 of them were Mormons. This gathering had a restriction that each person could bring one and only one non-American with them if they liked. I think all the American Mormons brought Mongolian Mormons with them. I don’t know why Mongolian Mormons would want to celebrate American Independence, but they seemed to be having a good time. The rest of the crowd was made up of diplomats, missionaries, tourists, mining company workers, etc. They served hamburgers, hot dogs, homemade bratwurst, roasted pigs, potato salad and baked beans. It was quite a feast.

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.