Land of the Mongols

Sam bah Know! (Can you guess? Hello in Mongolian)

So we have arrived into Mongolia! We've been here now for almost two weeks actually. We trained to Ulaanbaatar where we spent a couple days touring around the city and desperately trying to get rid of our colds as most people walked the streets with face masks, attempting to protect themselves from the Swine flu. (Just today we had to get face masks in order to use one of the only remaining open internet cafes. Fortunately I was allowed to wear my balaclava so I didn't have to buy a mask. Yay!)

Then we headed out for a horse riding trek to the "Ancient Capital": a small, quite unexciting town. The horse trek was really cool. The highlight for me and I think Kyle too was staying with Nomadic families in their Gers ( smallish, circular, mobile houses that we know as Yurts but here they are called Gers pronounced Gears).
We stayed with one family for three nights and got to help with scooping poop, herding cows, goats, sheep, and horses, choping wood, taking care of calves, leading massive Yaks, and taking down, moving and reconstructing one of the Gers! Amoung many other things. We were constantly summond by whistles or pointing gestures to our next task for the day.
I really enjoyed it. The families really took us in and put us to work! Which made me feel like I was contributing and earning my keep.
We also ate all our meals together with the families, which consisted of meat, home made noodles or bread and almost every kind of concocktion you can think of from cow, goat, and/or horse milk. Lots of dairy products: milk teas, cold horse milk beer, incredibly hard yogourt cookies, soft butter or cream pancakes/creepes.
Living in a Ger we quickly found out that privacy is non-existent and that, at least in one family, yelling is niether uncommon nor taken all that seriously.

We have just arrived back into Ulaanbaatar again and are staying with Kyle's second cousin and are hoping to get involved with some volunteer work. However, the odds are not in our favor: It's winter, schools (as well as the "Black" market, many internet cafes and bars) have been closed due to swine flu, and major roads in Mongolia are soon to be closed to try to stop the spread of the swine flu. Meaning that we can't help in the schools, agricultural projects are at a stand still, and rural areas will not be accessible. So we'll just have to see and hope we can leave in the next couple weeks when our visas expire!!
We were quite lucky however, to have done our horse trek when we did and arrive back in UB before the road closures as well our stay with Kyle's relatives have been great so far. Very interesting hearing what they have to say and great hospitality.


The Tentative Plan:
Stay in UB for the next week or so
Then make our way south to see the Gobi desert and hopefully stay with a friend in a southern town
The take the train or bus to Beijing and likely along the east coast from there.

Take care everybody
Enjoy the day (it's all you have)
Kelly