Tsagaan Sar

Tsagaan Sar, literally translated to "white moon," is also known as Mongolian Lunar New Year, the first day of the year for the Mongolian calendar. The days that Mongolians celebrate Tsagaan Sar each year vary because the celebration is based on the lunar cycle; this year they celebrated it Feb. 11th and 12th.

It is one of the most important and most expensive (for the younger peopole) Mongolian holidays. For two or three days, everything shuts down in the city and no one works so that they can visit friends and family, eat a TON of food and drink a TON of vodka (see pictures below), and exchange gifts. It not uncommon to spend over $1000. The younger Mongolians prepare food (cow chests,literally thousands of buuz [Matt's Mongolian teacher said she made 10,000 over the course of several weeks!], and various other delicacies), and give gifts to their guests and the people they visit (money is commonly given to the elders). Pictured below is the spread at Matt's coworker Bayarmaa's house, where we visited on the third day. We drank a lot (Rochelle passed up some of the vodka and so it was Matt's responsibility to drink it) and ate tons of buuz and bansh and lots of side dishes. The tower in the background is a bunch of baked pastries called uul boov or "sole cookies" because they look like feet. This was more for decoration during the holiday, but they eat it afterward (Bayarmaa brought lots of it to work).

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Tower o' cookies (uul boov)

Small dumplings (bansh), potato salad, carrots with vinegar

Cow chest (like 3 feet long!)

More bansh (buuz look similar but are larger). These are filled with greasy mutton. Matt loves these things!

Chinggis vodka. We think there are many brands here all with this name. We gave the one on the right to Bayarmaa and family (husband and adorable 3-year-old daughter-- who loves drinking vodka!! j/k) as a gift. It has a light stuck to the bottom that you can turn on with a button to make it glow! The vodka here is quite tasty. It also dominates -- the liquor isles at stores are like 95% vodka and 5% various imported liquor which is really expensive.

Matt, Rochelle, and Chinggis Khaan, hangin' out.

Here is wikipedia' description of the greeting rituals:

Many people will be dressed in full garment of national Mongol costumes. When greeting their elders during the White Moon festival, Mongols perform the zolgokh greeting, grasping them by their elbows to show support for them. The eldest receives greetings from each member of the family except for his/her spouse. During the greeting ceremony, family members hold long, typically blue, silk cloths called a khadag.

Matt's teacher taught him some formal greetings which he got to use to greet Bayarmaa's mother-in-law, and gave her a 5,000 tugrug bill (about $3.50). There is the basic greeting with the elbow grasping, and then apparently there are many other different sayings that can be exchanged, often snuff bottles are exchanged (that is popular in Mongolia). They like to do lots of them in the countryside but the city folk don't really have time for all of them so they just do a few of the most important. We didn't get to experience a lot of the more elaborate rituals this year. We saw lots of families out walking during these days in traditional clothing, called "deel" which is a long thick robe often very colorful with beautiful patterns. Lots of kids were wearing these too, so cute! Plenty of people wear these even during normal times, and they are pretty universal in the countryside, but in UB during Tsagaan Sar everyone is dressed up. Here's some people we saw while taking a stroll in the ger district:

~Matt

More city exploring

Here are some interesting facts about Mongolia and its capital city, Ulaanbaatar:

Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the entire world! The country holds only about 3 million people; this is about how many people are in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area! Ulaanbaatar, the city that Matt and I live in, is by far the largest city in the country and holds about 1/3 of the entire country's population!!! Here is a map of where our city is in relation to other parts in Mongolia:

We did some more UB exploration last month:

Here is a park near our apartment. Looks like a great picnic spot come summer! There are many interesting children's' parks around the city. I will take more pictures so that you can see the wide variety of park equipment they play on.

Here is a view of some of the city and some of the vehicles we often see. People have a huge variety of cars here, and we get a first hand experience with that when we ride in the taxis. Here's something I really enjoy about UB: taking a taxi is cheap, quick, and warm. Anyone can be a taxi driver and most of them just use their own car and they charge about $2.50 to get halfway across town. All you have to do to get a taxi is hold out your hand (palm down) and a taxi will pick you up usually in less than a minute! And when its very frigid out, taxis provide a comfortable and cozy atmosphere to get to the apartment. It's also very interesting to see how they decorate their car (lots of dangling things from the mirror and various Buddhist relics) and what music they listen to; it is usually either traditional Mongolian or American or Mongolian pop. There are official taxis with specific taxi logos on the car, but they are sometimes more expensive and not as numerous; we usually don't take those. One time that we did ride in one, the front seat had a T.V. built into it, but there was only one commercial that played over and over again.

You can see the Blue Sky Tower (the sail shaped building, the tallest in Mongolia) on the left.

There is a large staircase leading up to a ger district near our house and we thought it might give us a better view of the city. I guess this street pup had the same idea! You can see Gandan monastery sticking out on the left side of the picture, I think I read somewhere that it is the largest monastery in Mongolia. It's a fun place to hang out, more pictures there later! This also gives a good sense of what the traffic is like here.

I discovered that I already had a program on my computer that can stitch together panoramic photos! Here is a great view of the city (you may need to scroll over to the right a bit). If you notice how many cars appear multiple times in a row, this is because the same car is moving along as I took many pictures. Don't worry, identical cars don't travel in packs here!

Here is what we found on the top of the stairs. I think this is a type of open sewer system for the outhouses; it smelled pretty nasty. It might also be from the bathwater. You can see liquid had flowed from the fence into the sewer and then froze.

I look a little snoopy in this picture. I hope no one saw me trying to peek into their yard! :) 

We decided to enter the ger district. We were wandering around during the Tsagaan Sar holiday and got to encounter many people dressed in traditional clothing called "deel". More about the holiday and clothing later.

 This might be a ovoo, which is present on the top of basically every mountain or hill. It is a place where the earth and sky meet. Some people stop and walk around these and leave offerings of milk or vodka or other things for good luck.

 We came across this sign and Matt was able to read it with his mad Mongolian skillz (after we got home). It reads something like: main water source is contained inside
It was attached to this barbed wire fence, so we were very curious as to what lies within this protected area.

 Here is me after I climbed over the fence! Just kidding!!

 There are a lot of colorful sunsets here, most likely because of the pollution.

About the weather here:
I was pretty nervous about the seemingly frigid weather I was going to encounter when I decided to come here in January, but I got lucky! Many people have said that we had a very mild winter, and even when the temperature on the internet showed that it should be -20 F outside, I would usually break a sweat when taking a walk around the city! Of course I came well prepared with many wool socks, shirts, sweaters, and pants, but I tend to wear one layer of thick wool leggings and they keep me comfortably warm when walking outside! We think it isn't as cold as the temperature reads because it's very sunny almost every day here which helps to warm your body up and the elevation is at 4,300 ft (so the sun is even more powerful) (Minneapolis is at about 900 ft). Its also very dry here and we don't have the terrible wind chill that MN experiences. One thing I do miss about winter in MN is the major snow days! It barely snows here, and if it does, it snows just enough to dust the ground and when people walk and drive over it, it compacts it into ice making for a slippery walking experience!

Back at home, we decided that our blanket was in need of a good wash. Unfortunately, (or maybe fortunately because of how fun this was!) the blanket is much too large for our tiny wash machine! Matt, with his zest for adventure and his proactive nature, jumped right in to the bathtub to become his own wash machine to "get er done". He's even wearing the embroidered cat sweater I made for him, what a dream boat!!!

In more recent news, Matt is working on memorizing two VERY different types of Mongolian songs! One is an easier to sing Mongolian song:

The other is a pretty risque, but very catchy, club dance hit:

He is focusing on his tenor vocals right now! :) Which do you like better?!
Hopefully Matt will have these down the next time we go to karaoke!