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been reading this thread and uh....what were they herding, exactly? cattle? to sell the milk? how were the economics of that working out during your time? seems tough to make money doing that pretty much everywhere
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Nov 19, 2022 01:40
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Lemony posted:Okay, I feel like I'm missing something obvious here. What happens if one person throws down an index finger and the other person throws a pinkie, for instance? Is that just a draw and you go again? Or is there some complicated tier system? I assume that pinkie wins. Fewer degrees of separation. pinkie–thumb–index index–middle–ring–pinkie
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Nov 19, 2022 02:17
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20 Blunts posted:been reading this thread and uh....what were they herding, exactly? cattle? to sell the milk? The group my professor was with herded goats and also had a small herd of horses. They did milk the horses, but that was for personal use to make alcohol and a yogurt type drink. They herd animals like goats, cattle for meat. My professor said that the herding families in Mongolia are the wealthy class. Meat animals = serious $$$.
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Nov 20, 2022 13:47
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The ones I met herd cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. Rarely some had a camel or yak. In my experience, they will milk all of them. In the summer they butcher sheep and goats, in the winter cattle and horses. They shear the wool from the goats and sheep and sell the wool or cashmere, they will also trim the manes on horses and use that. They also sell the hides when they butcher them. Mongolian sheep (and a goat kid)  Mongolian goats  Domestic horses  You can see their manes have been cut  Cattle  Baby cows left at the ger while their moms went and grazed  A bankhar dog resting up for the night shift 
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Nov 21, 2022 04:30
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Did kids ever leave the community as they grew up?
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Dec 18, 2022 02:07
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This is bringing back memories of my time in Ethiopia. I wasnt peacecore I was actually an employee at a university up in the Eastern mountains near Harar but all my friends worked for NGOs, mostly for the Brirtish version of the peace core called VSO. One thing I missed and you pointed out OP was about how people would just shrug when things would get hosed up. I remember getting vexed at times at people being so nonchalant at ineptness or chaos, but retroactively I appreciate the willingness to not beat yourself over things you can't control, and the sunnier disposition you get compared to the West based on accepting all the things you can't change. OP, what's the craziest/funniest story involving Mongoliams just saying what can you do to something metaphorically or figuratively blowing up/melting down?
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Dec 18, 2022 16:44
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:Resources for learning Mongolian are scarce, so I basically had a real lovely guidebook they gave me before I left America and a English-to-Mongolian dictionary. Yeah, I've been having a hard time finding stuff that clicks with me. I've found the flash card app anki to at least drill the alphabet so I might get somewhere with a textbook. I have the benefit of a native speaker to help, but they're from inner Mongolia and only know the traditional alphabet. I've seen the book сайн байна уу? (Sain baina uu? Literally how are you, practically hello) mentioned online a few times but it appears to be out of print. The name makes it hard to Google. If you have any tips short of going to live in a yurt for a while, I'd love it.
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Mar 18, 2023 22:02
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I hope the OP returns, I'd love to hear about the food and other stories. I'm very curious what the hot drink of choice is in Mongolia. Tea, Coffee, something else? Some special way of preparation? Mongolia seems like such an interesting place, a very different approach to life than what I'm used to.
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May 3, 2023 20:22
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Milk Tea is pretty common there. There's some regional variation in the exact recipe, but in general it contains tea, milk, and toasted millet. Sometimes added salt and butter. Meat or bread can be in there too, hotpot style.
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May 4, 2023 00:40
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Greetings everyone, it's me, the guy who started this thread and then promptly forgot about it for over a year.Saladman posted:Oh now I do have a relevant question: do you feel like you accomplished anything concrete? Good question. Short answer: yes. Like I mentioned, I was the first ever PCV they had, and many people's first experience with a foreigner that wasn't Chinese. I can't say that all my students learned English, or all the teachers I worked with are now better educators, or that the local projects I worked with led to something really big happening. But I don't believe that most change happens as a first, second, or even third order effect. I'll never know whose life I changed by interacting with them. I have students on Facebook that I still follow, some are even in English or foreign-adjacent professions, and maybe I helped spark that path. Who knows if one of them will end up being in politics and help build relationships with the West because they had a fun American teacher when they were kids, or maybe someone who still lives in the village will encourage their kids to go to college and be a teacher because they had me. But it definitely changed me for the better, and the relationships I made there are still part of my life. I hope that people over there feel the same about me. a strange fowl posted:this is a great thread. From my experience, herder life is basically waking up crazy early, going out to check on the flock, move it if necessary and then do any milking/shearing/butchering. Most guys I knew were home by like noon. Obviously it's a lot harder in the dead of winter, and there are "seasonal" events like castrations and such. I'm not sure how people managed horses, because they really only kept a few at their home, and even the "domesticated" ones were left to roam with their packs (what is a group of horses called?) most of the time. A funny tidbit is that Mongols will cut the mane of horses that are "domesticated". So you'd see a huge pack of horses running on the steppe and like 5 would have the horse equivalent of a buzz cut. Original_Z posted:Thanks for the thread, every once in awhile we get a former Peace Corps volunteer make one of these threads and they're always super interesting. This is a bit of hyperbole, just based on population density. In the cities and more urban areas? Probably. Mongols are incredibly hospitable and most foreigners are rare enough that if you were wondering through some area and said "I don't have anywhere to sleep" I'm sure you could find a family to let you in. But let me assure you there is no "wandering the country". Outside UB and the other major cities, it is hundreds of miles between villages. Even if you had a car and drove yourself, it would be incredibly dangerous to just set out somewhere because you can easily drive 200 miles without seeing a village that had a gas station. And there are about 4~ months in the year where you wouldn't risk freezing to death in the elements. Views on the communist era seem to have the same sort of generational split that capitalism does in the US. Older people, those who lived through it, seemed to be a little more favorable towards it. I heard several people say, "you had less freedom, but everyone had work". Most younger people seem to prefer the more modern systems of democratic capitalism, but this is anecdotal and may not reflect actual views of people. DicktheCat posted:The food is what I'm most interested in, too! The food is frankly, awful. The stereotype was that Mongolia had the worst food of any country in the world. It's not their fault, they just have virtually no arable land and so they eat mostly milk and cheese and meat. Meat is rarer, because a sheep or goat or whatever can provide a ton of milk products over its life, but once you kill it for meat that's it. Meat was more common in the winter, because herd animals provide less milk in the colder months, and also because the extremely cold climate means its easy to store meat for a long time. Most gers have a thing they called a "ping", which is basically a little shed made of tin or sheet metal that attaches to the door of the ger. This helps add another layer of wall between the door and the cold, offers a good place to store meat, and makes sure animals aren't tearing through your fabric walls to steal the carcasses. But yeah, bad food. Even when you do get meat, they are mostly slaughtering the oldest or sickest animals. So typically you're eating the meat of like a 12 year old horse or whatever. They do have good dumplings (which I would argue Mongols actually invented, not China) as well as a thing called Tsuivan which is just handmade noodles and meat. Most of the vegetables are imported from China or Russia and it's mostly rice, potatoes, and carrots. And they are not high quality.
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Nov 10, 2023 16:36
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Lemony posted:Okay, I feel like I'm missing something obvious here. What happens if one person throws down an index finger and the other person throws a pinkie, for instance? Is that just a draw and you go again? Or is there some complicated tier system? It's just a "draw" and you go again. Kenning posted:Every story I hear about people who hang out with a group of Mongols makes them sound like total bros, it rules. Haha, which time? I got bounced like 4 times there. It was not, what I would consider, jovial. The big one was over the holidays a little over a decade ago. We had a big end-of-year thing for all PCVs.For a lot of us it was the first time we had seen each other since training ended months before, so we were all excited. I think I went up on a Friday, and it was the first time I had visited the capital city. The big event was saturday, and we had a nice dinner and then by about 7:00 PM we were all half lit in the hostels. A bunch of the older PCVs knew of some club and just sent out a big text to go meet there. We rolled up and there had to be like 40 PCVs there, which was our big mistake. A lot of foreigners means a lot of targets, and we were all pretty piss drunk by that point. It was a typical big, loud club with techno pop stuff playing and strobe lights all over. All of the PCVs, as well as some foreigners who were just working in UB or Fulbright scholars or something, were all in the back of the club hanging out as a group. I was mingling with them and then going back out to cut a rug on the dance floor. I was having a good time but was apparently drawing some unwanted attention. At one point I started to move towards our group in the back and had to slide past a group of Mongol guys. I sort of stumbled, assuming I had drunkenly bumped into one and said, 'Excuse me'. I turned to see a big Mongol guy, like 300 pounds, staring at me. I'm still not sure if I actually bumped him or if he stepped into me on purpose. He gave me a curt shove, and I said "Excuse me" again. He did it again, this time hard. My back was to a booth, and so he basically shoved me into a sitting position. I popped up and as I did he hit me right in the jaw. It kind of snapped my head around, and when I turned back I put my arm back to swing on him. As I did, I felt a pair of arms grab my waist and pull me back. My assumption was that it was another Mongol, but I looked over my shoulder and saw it was a PCV friend of mine pulling me back and shouting something. I was still getting pulled back, and I turned back towards the front of the club and it was absolute chaos. There were like 10 PCVs/foreigner who were out by the dance floor and they were getting absolutely rolled by a huge group of Mongols. Dudes on the floor getting the boots, girls screaming and getting shoved back by dudes, and I watched an older PCV get rabbit punched directly in the throat. He had to go to Thailand for surgery after that and couldn't speak for like 2 months. I got pulled back into our group and all the dudes had basically formed a defensive line. There were punches thrown, and I have a vivid memory of this Mongol wearing this very tight blue and white Freddy Kruger looking sweater, who I believe was with the Fulbright Scholars, do a full-on dropkick and take some other Mongol down hard. A Mongol guy we had literally met that night but would become our good friend, a doctor named Alta, was also wearing a motorcycle helmet because we were playing some game and he lost a bet so he had to wear it all night, and I saw him jump onto a guy on the floor and headbutt him with it. I miss Alta. This went on for a minute or two before the attacking Mongols (those barbarous tartars!!!) backed off. I think someone said the cops were coming so all the attacking dudes ran off. Some of the friendly Mongols basically said, "You need to go, now. The police will arrest you" so we booked it home. We learned later that the group was mostly Mongolian Ultra-Nationalists who got tipped off to our presence by whoever was there. We got in pretty big trouble from Peace Corps staff and said there was sort of a diplomatic incident because local nationalist politicians were blaming the fight on us. After that we learned we needed to go in small groups to places. Also a guy threw me through a table at a bar (different occasion, different bar) because he told me to gently caress off and go home and I was like "I'm busy talking to your girlfriend". I may have deserved that one. 20 Blunts posted:been reading this thread and uh....what were they herding, exactly? cattle? to sell the milk? Cattle provide milk, which you can eat or sell. That's about it. Most people didn't save much, if anything, and just existed on their herds. And it's always been tough, but it's much tougher now due to climate issues and modern capitalism deciding the age old tradition of "you can't own land, man" is outdated and has started scooping up what has traditionally been common use land.
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Nov 10, 2023 22:30
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Haji posted:The group my professor was with herded goats and also had a small herd of horses. They did milk the horses, but that was for personal use to make alcohol and a yogurt type drink. They herd animals like goats, cattle for meat. My professor said that the herding families in Mongolia are the wealthy class. Meat animals = serious $$$. Kind of. In the same way modern American farmers are pretty loaded because there's not so many small family farms these days. I knew lots of herders who weren't well off, and a few who were. I think more recently people are just working for herders who have all the cattle instead of having their own herds. Red Crown posted:Did kids ever leave the community as they grew up? Sure, same as any town anywhere. Some kids stay, some go. Shageletic posted:This is bringing back memories of my time in Ethiopia. I wasnt peacecore I was actually an employee at a university up in the Eastern mountains near Harar but all my friends worked for NGOs, mostly for the Brirtish version of the peace core called VSO. I lost count of the number of times a car or bus broke down on a drive, and everyone was just like "welp, guess we're staying here". Like a bus driving 12 hours with 40 people on board and the driver's like "nearest village is this way, we'll stay here. Bus should be fixed by next week". We also went to go ice skating in my friend's village one. I guess they had a big flat area they just put water in over the winter and ice skated. We rolled up and there was the smoking ashes of what I assume was a ger. One of the dudes with us was like "All the skates were in there. Guess we're not skating" and we just walked off. I need to articulate that the fire must have happened like...5 minutes before we got there. And they just kind of sauntered off after realizing all the gear was toast. No questions about what happened or anything, just acceptance. PleasantDilemma posted:I hope the OP returns, I'd love to hear about the food and other stories. I'm very curious what the hot drink of choice is in Mongolia. Tea, Coffee, something else? Some special way of preparation? Mongolia seems like such an interesting place, a very different approach to life than what I'm used to. The poster below you is correct. Milk Tea (Tsute Tse) is the drink of choice. Summer, winter, anytime, all the time. I would get furious because it'd be 100 degrees and I'd get back and my friends would serve steaming hot milk tea. Some sort of poo poo about it being bad to mix hot and cold elements, so when you're hot as gently caress just slurp down a nice steaming cup of goat milk tea.
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Nov 10, 2023 22:38
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How do people navigate? Like in their day to day life. Do they just follow the roads?
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Nov 10, 2023 22:51
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did you have much qurut/хурууд, and did you find any way to enjoy it if so uzbekistan had it marketed as a cool local snack and i can only imagine that it hasn't really caught on among the tourists as a fun thing to try
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Nov 11, 2023 03:28
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how did you handle the boredom?
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Nov 11, 2023 04:01
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Those mongolian ultra nationalists, sounds like they don't want foreigners there. What are their politics, do they have anything specific in mind they want to achieve, ethnically pure mongolia free from foreign influences or something? Return to Djingis Khan style conquest? I assume they're mongolian chuds at any rate.
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Nov 11, 2023 08:31
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111023_5 posted:how did you handle the boredom? Your name and reg date read like a twitter bot or sock puppet account, but this is a very good question. Boredom is the hardest part, bar none. There are so many conveniences we are used to in developed countries that are absent there. There’s an infinite number of things to buy and do any second of the day to distract yourself. That just does not exist in Mongolia. Add that to the fact that the most popular activity is “sitting around bullshitting with other people”, and if you can’t speak much of the language you can’t do that. My laptop died a month in and I didn’t get another one for like 5 more months, not that I had internet or electricity all that much. When I did have it, I messaged friends on Facebook or read SA. Anything that 56k internet could handle. At one point I spent like 3 weeks torrenting a copy of Neverwinter Nights and I played that nonstop for months. I mean nonstop. I got a kindle e-reader my second year and that was a godsend. I downloaded all of Project Gutenberg and probably read half. I’d travel on weekend if I had money just to see my friends. I’d play volleyball with the other teachers if they were around. I’d hitch a ride out into the countryside with random strangers and hang out. Play with my dog, which looks exactly like the bankhar dog photo in the post above. And I would sleep, a lot. Too much sometimes, like depression napping. I liked to be up at night because the night sky in Mongolia is…unreal. I don’t have words for it. So clear and so close it’s like you’re right there in the cosmos. You can sometimes see the deep blues and purples of the galaxy stretching out like someone had painted it with one perfect brushstroke. Too many stars to count, your eyesight fails before you can number them off in the distance. A moon shining down so big and bright you almost wanted to shield your eyes from it. I still wake up sometimes now and feel like I can see it, perfectly framed by the window at the top of my ger, moonlight piercing and streaming through the latticework supports all around me. Besides that it was work, walking around the village, working out in my get, getting drunk, meditating. One effect from my time there is that I am incredibly adept at being alone and being bored now. When covid hit and I was trapped in my apartment with the rest of the world it was barely a blip on my radar. Oh no, stuck inside with high speed internet and door dash and air conditioning? Poor me. My partner can’t understand it, how I can spend so long by myself and be fine. She’ll be like “let’s get out of the house I’m going crazy” and I’m like “we just went to dinner last week though”.
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Nov 11, 2023 14:06
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His Divine Shadow posted:Those mongolian ultra nationalists, sounds like they don't want foreigners there. What are their politics, do they have anything specific in mind they want to achieve, ethnically pure mongolia free from foreign influences or something? Return to Djingis Khan style conquest? I assume they're mongolian chuds at any rate. Yeah, Mongolia chuds, fascists. Return to an idealized world that…well normally id say didn’t exist but it kind of did under Genghis Khan. For mongols at least, briefly. Mostly now they just want to kick out all the Chinese and Russians. Did I tell the HiHo Silver mining company story? There are legitimate reasons for wanting to kick out foreign interests, one could argue. I used to see these one dudes driving around in a red GeoMetro with an enormous swastika on it, always cracked me up. 4 huge burly mongol fascists crammed into this tiny shitbox with a hand painted swastika on it. What would Hitler think.
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Nov 11, 2023 14:12
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He'd be pissed that it wasn't a VW.
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Nov 11, 2023 15:10
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I'm pretty sure the Mongol Empire was super ethnically diverse though, so joke's on them.
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Nov 16, 2023 21:40
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:I liked to be up at night because the night sky in Mongolia is…unreal. I don’t have words for it. So clear and so close it’s like you’re right there in the cosmos. You can sometimes see the deep blues and purples of the galaxy stretching out like someone had painted it with one perfect brushstroke. Too many stars to count, your eyesight fails before you can number them off in the distance. A moon shining down so big and bright you almost wanted to shield your eyes from it. I still wake up sometimes now and feel like I can see it, perfectly framed by the window at the top of my ger, moonlight piercing and streaming through the latticework supports all around me. Thank you for this, my friend. I am a history teacher and every year when I teach the Mongols I do a short section on Mongolia, and I have a picture I got from somewhere of the night sky in Mongolia with 0% light pollution and every year when I put it up on the screen kids gasp and go, "What are those?" And I get to say, "Those are the stars." While you were there, did you get to go see any history stuff having to do with the Great Khans? I only have a couple of days for the Mongols so obviously I focus on Jenghiz, Ogedei, Mongke, & Kublai (Guyuk gets short shrift, as does Ariq Boke) and I'd love an anecdote or two I can splice in there. Thanks for this thread, it's super interesting! I've always wanted to visit the land of the Mongols and everything I've read in this thread just makes me want to visit it more.
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Nov 23, 2023 15:13
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Thank you for this thread and the recent updates, a great read. Would love to read a book or article about your experience.
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Nov 25, 2023 17:03
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JonathonSpectre posted:Thank you for this, my friend. I am a history teacher and every year when I teach the Mongols I do a short section on Mongolia, and I have a picture I got from somewhere of the night sky in Mongolia with 0% light pollution and every year when I put it up on the screen kids gasp and go, "What are those?" This is such an incredibly bittersweet thing. I grew up very rural- places that didn't really have a name. I remember what the night used to look like as a kid, out in the woods, with no lights for miles. We should set aside places with no light pollution, for stargazing. Re: Mongolia What's the family unit like? Do extended families stay together? What do women do, you've talked a lot about what the men do in specific. What's the feminine place in society?
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Nov 27, 2023 19:51
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DicktheCat posted:
Some places do. I had an extremely enjoyable experience in the Davis Mountains at the McDonald Observatory. https://tpwd.texas.gov/spdest/programs/dark_skies/#:~:text=Big%20Bend%20Ranch%2C%20Enchanted%20Rock,are%20IDA%20Dark%20Sky%20Sanctuaries.
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Dec 2, 2023 17:04
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how does Mongolian humor translate? Were you able to understand Mongolian jokes? I realize that they have the Internet, but were there any aspects of Western culture that they didn't seem to grasp?
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Feb 1, 2024 00:58
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DicktheCat posted:This is such an incredibly bittersweet thing. I grew up very rural- places that didn't really have a name. You're in luck 
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Feb 4, 2024 18:10
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I'm pretty bummed out by the light pollution as well. I remember as a kid I could see so many drat stars during night. Now it's all gone, might see a few twinkles. The place I live in is basically rural and off the beaten path, yet we put out as much light pollution as the Helsinki metropolitan area. Massive greenhouse operations here (center of map near gulf of ostrobothnia). There is no large city there, north of the main light emissions is the biggest regional town of nearly 70k people and it's dwarfed in light output by the rural areas to the south of it. Sometimes if it's cloudy and I drive to work past one of the greenhouses the light reflects off the clouds and back down and everywhere is daylight bright but in a weird yellowish tone that's decidedly unnatural, like earth had moved to orbit a new star. And my kid is really interested in the stars and gets excited every time he sees one and it's just so sad when I look at the sky nowadays 
His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 08:37
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