Tsagaan Sar !

I think there are a couple of things that happened a week or so ago I need to write about,but while it's fresh in my mind I will write about the biggest holiday in Mongolia, which is happening right now...

Tsagaan Sar means "White Month" in Mongolian, and we know it as the Lunar or Chinese New Year. This year it is over Valentine's Day, which only some young people celebrate here. The actual holiday begins on the eve of the New Year, which was Saturday, the 13th. Close family and friends gather together and eat and greet each other. Sunday, there begins a cycle of visiting which lasts for up to 15 days! Family and friends gather from all over town, countryside, nation, and city to greet the elder persons of each household, and eat. We have no school this week, until Thursday, though some schools will begin on Wednesday.

The visiting routine is that the visitors arrive at the house, and greet the elders by sort of lightly grasping each others arms, parallel hand to elbow, younger person's arms on the bottom, elder on the top. greeting sounds like "Amor Ben-noh" but I have no idea how they would spell it really, and not sure exactly what it means, other than a greeting. :-P You must greet the elders before you remove your hat or jacket, if it is a formal meeting. If the guests are close family or very close friends, they greet with blue silk or wool scarves and give the elders money. If not, there is no gift from visitor to host. Next, the guests are seated and fed an absolutely rediculously abundant amount of food.

The same dishes are served at each home. There is a bowl of rice, upon which are pile traditional sweet breads in a careful puzzle-like stack, and topped with Mongolian dried dairy products of various types, and sweets such as sugar cubes and candy. This stack will stay put for around 7 days of visiting, then they will begin to eat the bread. If the elders who are visited are middle aged, they will have cooked the chest of a cow or sheep; if the elders are older, they have the back and tail of the cow or sheep. Each guest is first served a modest slice of that meat, which also sets on the table, completely intact (not carved). There are various plates of salads, mostly of potato, salami, and carrot with mayonnaise, and then rice with raisins. There will also be plates of sliced salami and sliced pickles. These you eat first, and are often expected to put a considerable dent in the 3 or 4 dishes they set in front of you. The eating is semi-communal, depending. It seems the less prosperous homes serve one dish and one or two utensils, with which many people are expected to partake. The more prosperous houses serve individual dishes and silverware. However, this observation may be wrong... It could be varying observance of tradition, or some such thing, I didn't visit enough houses to know. With the salads, you are served the Mongolian milk tea, which is very good, and a welcome and speedy warm-up after the chilly outdoors. There is then juice, which is often of a kind made from a native Mongolian berry, which has fat! The juice is a light orange, and really delicious! Sometimes you are served a fermented version of this juice, which is alcoholic and tastes a little like hard cider. Depending on the household, you may or may not be served vodka, and that may be before or after the "botss" (spelling wrong, just the sound) which are the sort of "main course". If you are served vodka, it is in a shot glass, and you must toast the elder, who initiates the toast, and either pretend to sip or take the shot. If you take the shot, they will inevitably refill you and toast again. The frequency depends on the household and the guests who are visiting along with you. Finally, you are served up to 50 "botss" which are small, look a little like pot-stickers, but rounder. They are filled with meat, which may or may not have been cooked with onions or some mild spice, and may or may not be mostly fat which takes FOREVER to chew!! The meat is wrapped and "pinched" at the top in a dough that resembles dumpling or, again, pot stickers. In some households, they set 30 "botss" in front of a couple of guests (Steven and myself) and expect us to eat every single one... at only one house! Needless to say, whether you take the shot of vodka or not may have quite a lot to do with how many houses and how many "botss" you have met with in the recent past... sometimes a shot or two of vodka is the only thing that enables you to remain polite and chow down on another "botss". It's not the most capitol of crimes, but they defintiely insist very very strongly that you EAT EAT EAT! Fortunately, I find the food very good. ;)

Finally, when you feel as if you have eaten them out of house and home, or rather that they have stuffed you and are perhaps preparing to take you out back and fatten you up for the next holiday... The host presents you with a gift. It may be a handful of candy, or a box of chocolates and a souvenir of sorts. Then you leave. Take take take, leave. I have to just do what my Mongolian friends tell me, and trust if they are decieving me at least they will have a good laugh... because it's so completely contrary to everything my New England Tradition has taught me. You don't even wait for the host to eat! They don't usually! They just watch! And you are served by younger relatives who are laboring all day in the kitchen. On the other hand, it is a remarkeable who of generosity and hospitality, that the hosts obviously take pleasure from. They thank you for visiting them, and the process of greeting is quite important, especially for older people, and among family.

I visited 4 homes on Sunday: 3 with Steven and his friend Mark, who lives a couple floors above us in our building. We greeted Mark's parentsin Mark's home, served by his wife and of course entertained by Amka, his 2 year old daughter. Then with him, his wife, and Amka, we visited his wife's father, and his wife's brother. They lived on the outskirts of Old Darkhan, in very small homes built on the sides of the hills, with small dirt courtyards for each one or two homes. The toilets are outside, in outhouses... I think they expect me to be more surprised by that. ;) Last on Sunday, we visited the home of Saraa, the director of our language department at school. She lives in Old Darkhan also, in an apartment. Her sons (who we teach) were also there, and they greeted us and we talked for a while. On Monday We visited Mark and Steven's friend Jack (I have written about him before) at his mother's house, also on the outskirts of Old Darkhan. At his house, we were not served vodka, because it has been only 2 years since his father passed away, and no alcohol is served until 3 years after. Later that day, Steven and I went to the Turkish School, which is the best school in the area, and visited another friend of Steven's, Boohrak (sp?!) who is Turkish, and is a dorm supervisor there. (He has been living in Mongolia for 4 years, and speaks Turkish, Kurdish, English, Mongolian, Azarian (Azerbaijain), and I think a couple other languages... he's 21.) Nadine joined us there and we hung out and talked over coffee in his apartment. Then we recieved an invitation to another home, of one of our fellow Mongolian English teachers. So we took Boohrak along (although he can't eat the Mongolian food because he is Muslim, we knew this friend has travelled much and would understand), and we headed to Boogii's! We had a lovely time there, and then returned home, where we spent the evening with Jack and Mark and some cards and vodka. It definitely feels like a holiday. :-P Today(Tuesday) I visited the grandmother of one of my students (11th grade, named Monkhoo) who invited me to greet her. We visited her home, on the outskirts of Old Darkhan as well, with several other family members. They have a large house, and apparently his grandmother (a really wonderful spunky lady) owns a company that as far as I could tell processes coal or some other type of fuel. Tomorrow I will visit my friend Hishigee, to greet her parents, and then all the teachers from our school will go to our school where we will greet our director, Delger.

And all of that visiting is the lite foreigner's version. Monkhoo told me he had visited 8 homes yesterday! Mark told us that often 60-80 people will visit one home per day.

So the holiday will last a day or so more, then we have work on Thursday. Friday and Saturday, although I usually have them off, will be spent administering some English Speaking Tests... Meanwhile I have emerged from the abyss of no internet that the holiday brought on. ;) And I'm thinking I will have no appetite, and no need to eat for several weeks...