Summary: We had Tsagaan Sar (the Mongolian Lunar New Year) over the weekend, and my friends celebrated it by making Mongolian dishes on our own. We also tried watching the Super Bowl but with a few mishaps.
Tsagaan Sar
The Lunar New Year here is called Tsagaan Sar, which translates to "White Moon." A lot of city-dwellers head back to the countryside to spend the holiday with their grandparents. My students told me that it gets quite busy because relatives, friends, and neighbors will endlessly come in through the door, and they need to have enough buuz (Mongolian dumplings) to feed them all.
They take the holiday pretty seriously here in that I had a whole week off from work. I'm pretty sure all stores closed on Friday night (including the KFC and Burger King), which would kind of be like if McDonald's in America had closed down for Christmas. Since everything was closed, my friends and I decided to recreate our own Tsagaan Sar.
One of our friends offered to host our dinner at his summer house in Terelj, the nearest national park. We all packed into the car and headed out of the city at 7am. We stopped by a nearby ovoo - a shrine made out of a mound of stones and ceremonial scarves - to catch the sunrise.
Then, after some serious snow off-roading, we made it to the summer house. I was super impressed with the all-wooden interior design and the fully equipped kitchen. The kitchen was probably more impressive to me because I was used to a small communal kitchen in my teacher's dorm.
We got started with cooking right away and made two dishes - tsuivan and buuz. Tsuivan is a noodle dish with stir-fried meat and vegetables. We ran into trouble with the noodles sticking to each other (probably because I looked up a recipe on an American website instead of consulting a Mongolian). At that moment, it made sense why my students suggested I should buy pre-made noodles instead of attempting to make our own. But at the end, we still had a good meal. From what I know, it tasted like tsuivan (although, I know don't know too much).
For the rest of the day, we played Monopoly and card games. I was the first one to go bankrupt, so I had dishwashing duty. I blame it on going to jail four times and not being able to "pass go" and collect money. Moral of the story: don't go to jail.
Before going to our actual bed, we decided to be a little crazy and lay in the bed of snow and look at stars while listening to the Interstellar soundtrack. I'm not sure why I agreed to this - maybe I thought I would discover something profound in myself through being one with nature - but nope, my nose just felt cold.
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl was going to air at 7am our time, and none of us wanted to wake up that early. So, we decided to meet later in the day at 6pm to watch a recorded version. We brought pizza, fries, nuggets, and soda to recreate our understanding of the classic American watch party. However, it turned out that every platform we checked didn't have a recorded version, so we ended up just watching the halftime show and a 30 minute highlights video on YouTube. Honestly, I preferred that because I never look forward to watching anything for three hours.
My American friend who hosted the night also had two Mongolian friends come over. I'd consider myself the last person to explain how football works because I'm always the least sporty person back home, but here I was explaining the rules to someone who I suspect only came to watch Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. But, who could blame them?
That's it for today's blog post! It feels like we're inching out of the deep freeze. Today was a whopping -3 degrees, but the weather forecast says we're heading back to -20 on Sunday, so we'll see where this goes. Hope you all have a great week!
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