Summary: This past weekend, my friends and I went dog sledding in Terelj Park. (I might quit my job and become a professional musher). After our day trip, we went to our Mongolian language teacher's home for a night of horse-meat-eating and huushuur-making.
Dogs!
If you had told me back in October, that I would be going outdoors in the winter time, I would've told you that's crazy. The weather forecast said it would be -20°C on Saturday, so I put on two layers of warm socks, four layers of clothing, a scarf, a beanie, earmuffs, and mittens. Turns out that it wasn't enough because my toes lost feeling after the first hour, but then I thought about how our dogs were doing this barefoot.
Dog sledding is not native to Mongolia, so it definitely was just purely a tourist activity. But we could tell the company was geared towards local tourists. When they realized we were foreigners, the company immediately tried to charged us double the price than what was advertised. To their disappointment, we had acquired our government residence cards, and we also had a Mongolian friend with us to back us up.
I had gone dog sledding once during a trip with my mom in Alaska, but our guide was the one who actually steered the sled because of safety reasons. That being said, I think safety standards are a bit more lax here, so they allowed us to steer our own sleds. Now, I'm not sure as to why my friends let me --- the one still without a driver's license --- steer the sled, but we didn't crash! We were lucky (or maybe I'm a natural musher) as there was one group that flipped over and wiped out next to us.
Also, I think mushers (at least in English-speaking countries) use vocal commands like "mush" to direct their dogs. We weren't given any instructions, but I just observed the team next to me kept yelling "go, go, go" in English, and it seemed to work. I guess I don't give enough credit to the sled dogs here. Maybe, they're bilingual.
Fellowship Dinner
Last week, our program director, Matt, from Princeton in Asia visited us in UB. We had a cohort dinner with him at one of my favorite restaurants, Rosewood Kitchen. He also got to observe one of my classes. That day, we were playing Jeopardy, and for the final Jeopardy question, I asked each team what was my program director's name. I had briefly introduced him once when he came in, so everyone pretty much forgot his name by the end of the game. We gave away hints - has an M, has a vowel, and has two same letters. I will tell you, my students are resourceful. One team stalked my Facebook friends list while another team went on a website with a list of popular names. The three teams came up with Adam, Matt, and Mala (they definitely made that one up).
Eating Horse Meat and Making Huushuur
Our Mongolian language teacher invited our class to her home for dinner. She said she would demonstrate how to make хуушуур huushuur (it looks like a deep fried empanada with meat filling). What she didn't tell us before going in was that the filling would be horse meat. I'm going to be honest; it was kind of weird eating horse after we just came back from horseback riding that day. But, I thought it tasted good! It didn't really have a smell that I thought it would have, and it wasn't too tough. Apparently, our teacher's parents are herders in the countryside, so they send her horse meat every year. We also made боов bouhv (deep fried dough sticks), and here's a video of my teacher demonstrating how to shape it.
That's it for this blog post. Hope you all have a great week!
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