Celebrating Nadaam

Without that glove on my right hand, that nice bird would have clawed me quite severely.

Before I get into this past week's Nadaam festivities, I want to describe a day trip we took on this my second week in Mongolia. (For a description of my first week and why I am in Mongolia, please scroll back to last week's blog entry. Anyway, we (my hosts Yanjmaa and her husband, Khudree and I) had just pulled out of Nalaikh, a mining (coal) town of about 70,000 when we saw someone standing to the side of the road with a few eagles perched on stands and some two-humped Bactrian camels lounging around. Of course we had to pile out and I was persuaded to jump on the camel. It wasn't bad, actually. The real challenge was holding that heavy eagle on one arm, which I was too weak to do for long.

Unfortunately, Yanjmaa and Khudree’s faces are shaded, but the view in back of them says it all. They are standing on land that someday will be a retreat center, if the necessary funds come in.

Then we drove to the Genghis Kahn statue, an immense silver monument that one takes an elevator to get to the top. The Chinese tourists who got in the way of my taking photos were a total pain, plus foreigners were charged 30,000 turks (Mongolian currency) whereas the locals only paid 10,000. Which is about $13 vs $4. Then we drove to some nearby land that Khudree had purchased years ago at a discount that faces west toward the mountains of Gorkhi-Terelj National Park. The view was simply gorgeous and Yanjmaa and Khudree hope to have a retreat center there some day. We prayed over the property (dodging the mosquitos), then drove back toward Nalaikh where we ate dinner at Orgno Kitchen Factory Store. It looked like a dive of a chicken grill from the road but turned out to be a westernized and quite pleasant open-air chicken BBQ place.

These stately visitors from inner Mongolia were just some of the wildly colorful people on Sukhbaatar Square on Thursday.

Things were warming up in downtown Ulaanbaatar (UB for short) for the annual Nadaam festival, a kind of Mongolian Olympics. Wednesday'shighlight was watching the ‘deel parade’ on in Sukhbataar Square, the central plaza in UB. "Deels" are the romantic-looking traditional robes that Mongolians wear. People from all over the country literally paraded around the square in their deels while all of us tourists gawked and took photos. After that came this fashion show of traditional garb, which was jaw-dropping in terms of the sheer number colorful silks, brocades and headgear, especially that worn by the women. Many women had pearls dripping from both sides of their heads or foot-high “bogtag” hats symbolizing 13th century royalty. Back then, a royal woman's braids fanned out from both sides of her head, then were held in place by pearl clips. The music was haunting and the modeling was done by professionals, who half danced their way down the runway, swirling their robes behind them, striking several poses, then gliding backstage. Some of the models, all in very high heels, were simply gorgeous as they strutted around the stage. I videoed what I could. Later in the presentation were visitors from inner Mongolia, which is in China. The men, posing as warriors and lords, looked like they were from Central Casting. I was there for hours soaking it in. That was the same day that I finally figured out the town's bus system - at least the bus that would get me in and out of town without my hosts having to pick me up all the time.

Me in a very warm deel that helped me fit right in with the locals.

On Thursday the 11th, the official start of Nadaam, I showed up at Yanjmaa's apartment where she gifted me with a pretty beige deel to wear. She also had pulled some strings to miraculously get us tickets to the opening ceremony. My deel was pretty warm, as it had long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt and the weather grew hotter by the moment.

They didn’t open the gates until 10, so to get out of the heat, we sat in a white snack tent. Yanjmaa snacked on some khuushuur, which is dumplings deep fried in mutton fat. Every traditional Mongolian meal seems to include this.

We finally took our seats in a section that thankfully was in the shade. The seats were horribly cramped and it was near impossible for people to walk by us. But everything started right on time at 11 and the resulting 90-minute+ ceremony was beyond lovely. First, a troupe of horses mounted by soldiers in red-and-blue outfits out of the 19th century rode around the track to a thrilling score from some movie about Genghis Khan. There was the speech by the president and then a presentation that resembled the opening ceremonies in the Olympics with a cast of thousands of dancers, horseback riders and stage hands. It was also a history of Mongolia starting with actors in prehistoric costumes thatquickly advanced to the 13th century when the Mongols ruled much of the world. (There is a lot of channeling of the spirit of Genghis Khan here.) Wild-looking men in golden robes out of some movie set toted huge horns; there were throat singers in there somewhere plus an opera singer or two; dancers in medieval robes doing stately waltzes; girls with long braids doing something that looked like a Maypole adventure and oddly - to illustrate the 70 years Mongolia was under Communism - goose-stepping Soviet soldiers. All this was mashed together in this pageant that was all totally new to me, so I made bunches of videos.

This is as close as they’ll get to an official Nadaam family photo: From left, Dash, 16; Deane, 10; Momo, 6, Khudree, Yanjmaa and Hash, 13.

It’s hard to capture the pageantry of the Nadaam ceremonies with a still photograph but here’s a shot of some of the cast of thousands who took part.

Afterwards, we repaired to Yanjmaa’s mother’s home for a meal that included:

Airag – fermented mare’s milk. I took one sip.
Guriltai shul – Mongolian soupy noodles – oily broth with meat and noodles and veggies, which often comes as an appetizer.
Buuz – steamed meat dumplings
Khorkhog - Lamb cooked inside a pot over an open fire with carrots, onions, and potatoes. The specialty of this dish is that during cooking, smooth stones are placed in the container to foster the cooking process. The black stones have been pre-heated in a fire. I held one of these stones for a few seconds, then dropped it as it was quite hot. The smoky flavor of the meat complements the vegetables.

Speaking of which, I’ve been surprised at how bland the local food is. Mongolians seem to be proud that all they add to a meal is salt. When I made some deviled eggs for Yanjmaa one day, I looked in the store for paprika but there was NOTHING on the shelves. The whole culture doesn’t do spices.

The sun’s last rays shine golden on Yanjmaa and 3 of her 4 sons.

After the stadium show, we repaired to Yanjmaa's family home east of town where the TV was on showing the “manly sports” for Nadaam. One was archery. The other, which was in the main stadium, was wrestling, which dates back to Genghis Khan who wanted a way for his men to stay in shape. After watching it for several hours, I began to enjoy it. The men are dressed in short jackets that come midway down their chests and a very tight bathing suit bottom that just barely covers the necessary areas. When a wrestler wins, he does an eagle dance; literally flapping his arms gracefully and dancing his way around the field. The umpires and coaches are all wearing long, medieval robes and tapered durvud hats.

To walk off the meal, I went for a short hike in the surrounding hills with 3 of Yanjmaa’s kids and Yanjmaa herself. The evening light was golden and it was so pleasant walking through purple asters, buttercups and lots of grass.

A look at a village outside of Ulaanbaatar with houses and gers mixed together.

The next day, we drove about an hour west of the city to the area where they were doing the third sport: The longest horse races in the world across miles of steppe. The jockeys are young children. Somewhat like people camp next to dogsled trail routes during the Iditarod, people watch the race along its many miles of trails. We first visited one yurt near the starting point (Mongolians call them 'gers'). A member of parliament (and a relative of Khudree’s) was holding court there and we had some food, then left within the hour. The second place we visited was a dairy farm also along the race route where we relaxed in two gers for much of the day while some of the men slaughtered a sheep and cooked the meat and its head, the latter being quite the delicacy. I told my hosts at the beginning of the trip that I would NOT eat anything to do with a sheep’s head. I do have certain limits.

Don’t look too closely at the bottom of this photo where one of the men is butchering a freshly killed sheep.

One thing I noticed while watching some teens play cards with each other in one of the gers; they were talking in English. This was on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So many of the younger kids are functionally bilingual. Yanjmaa’s 16-year-old son, Dash, who spent 4 years in the States while Yanjmaa was getting her doctorate, is completely fluent.

Sunday, we repaired to the ger district southwest of town, which was basically a shantytown or favela kind of place. These are the folks who’ve moved into UB in recent decades after having given up their nomadic lifestyle. The church we visited was a brick building atop a hill with a killer view to the south. It’s called Source of Blessing Church. Unfortunately, the former pastor had the land in his name. He’d departed for a Korean cult and is trying to sell the land out from under the remaining congregation, which is headed by a handful of female elders who have no way to get title to the land and could lose everything. They are learning ruefully that churches need to be set up like corporations with the title in the name of the church, not the individual pastor. That is the curse of being a country of independent churches.

Yanjmaa and Khudree then dropped me off at the Winter Palace of Bogd Khan, a museum not far from the Nadaam stadium and a major tourism stop. The architecture was a wonder of Chinese/Buddhist design. The woodwork was pretty stunning, but the property wasn’t kept up well. The grass had not been mowed in ages and was full of weeds. There were signs up in English that barely sufficed to explain what I was looking at and many times the explanations were several feet away behind a rope and therefore unreadable. The gift shop was extremely sparse. I paid 8,000 turks to get in (about $3) but I had no idea what I was looking at half the time. There were no English-language guides and big restrictions on photography. Which was weird as there weren’t any decent photos of the place in the gift shop.

So...two weeks down and one to go. Veeka called early this morning and she very much misses me. Monday, my hosts and I head east for a night with a nomadic family to give me a truer picture of pastoral Mongolian culture where there's no plumbing or electricity.

Mongolia part 3 and what happened next

The capital of cashmere