Khan's Country

The Luck Doesn’t Stop Here

So far my expectations for Mongolia and my life here have found little common ground, not that that’s necessarily bad. This trend continued during my first trip to Mongolia’s countryside. Saturday morning I planned to catch a press bus to go see—and then write – about Chinggis Khan’s Calvary, an exhibition of 14th century Mongol warfare. Instead, I spent the day visiting the ruins of a Buddhist monastery, a lama’s (the human kind) home and tourist ger camps.

As I waited at wide and empty Sukhbaatar square for a press bus that never came, I thought, “this is just my luck. I can never do things the easy way. Now I have to hitchhike like a crazy person, asking to be taken to the Monol Hordes.” Moments later my editor called me and after some deliberation, decided that he and his family would accompany me to the countryside. I realized that, no, this is just my luck. Something goes wrong and I get bailed out.

I don’t really have a problem with this pattern. It has served me well to date, but I am embarrassed to admit that I’ve relied so heavily on other people, especially Sumiyabazar my editor, during my first week. I am doing fine here. I have an apartment; I have a registered visa; I know how to find my way to work; I even know how to order soup now, but I couldn’t have done any of it without help.

I was anxious enough about my first story not to reflect on the debts I owed, I was just glad to get a ride however. Sumiya—I called him Sumi until it became obvious that it wasn’t his name—, his adorable two-year old daughter, his wife, and her sister picked me up at the square. We stopped for breakfast on the way. I never made a habit of eating mutton and drinking mutton flavored tea for breakfast, but after Saturday I’m kinda used to it.

Buuz Cruise

We chowed down on Buuz, steamed dumplings with mutton, and I was reminded that men in Mongolia should eat fast. Mongolian Mother’s train their sons to eat rapidly, because if you’re a slow eater in the army, the officer stop giving you food. Mongolian women and children have adopted speed eating as well, and I should’ve fit right in, except that cooks here server their food piping hot. It’s so hot I think you can still here it crying in pain, or maybe that’s just me. I salvaged my pride with a heroic last minute gobble to clear my plate before the toddler, and then we went on our way toward the countryside’s rolling green hills.

All air pollution disappeared half a mile outside Ulaanbaatar, and I got my first sense of what most of Mongolia looks like. A closer view of the hills reveals that I half-dreamed their uniform green beauty on the cloudy day. They have more rocks, more color variation, and more character than I originally thought. They remind me of slightly pointier versions of California hills in winter. Unlike home, however, grab-bag herds of gorat, sheep, cows and horses, and white tents called ger dot appear regularly.

First Ger, It’s All Right

We rented a ger outside a hotel to rest before going to the Calvary show. About eight feet tall at its highest point, a ger looks something like a more compact circus tent. Inside they’re surprisingly well insulated. The proportions of ger furniture won’t accommodate your average fat person, and the table and stool inside approach play house dimensions. The door to every ger ever erected faces South, because as Sumiya said, “that’s where the Chinese come from.” Mongolians do not generally care for the Chinese.

As another pleasant surprise, my editor’s parent’s joined us. His mother is a boisterous longtime employee of the Mongol News Company. She introduced herself to me as the woman who sometimes comes into the UB Post office screaming “SUMIYA, SUMIYA!” His step father is a mild mannered seventy year-old professor of biological sciences at a university. They make a cute odd couple. He carries an umbrella with him and sits in the back of the car while she drives.

The Show Khan Wait

After more Buuz and milk tea (which is part mutton oils, part salt, and part milk, but I don’t think any tea) we headed to the Chinngis Khan spectacle. The price was unfortunately out of our league, however, and the owners were not accepting press passes. We slunk off and parked our group’s two cars about thirty meters away from the exhibit hoping to catch a peak from a distance, but a diligent parking attendant shooed us away.

Deprived of a spectacle of war, we headed to a peace spectacle, an old Buddhist monastery that once housed hundreds of lamas. I got to drive the parents on the familiar right side of the road, but in a Japanese car with the wheel on the right side. I was not great at judging the cars dimensions or avoiding potholes, and, even though Sumiya’s Mom seemed like she got a kick out of my driving, I think both elderly people were relieved when my time at the wheel ended.

Lama Drama: The Russians Came

For a peace spectacle, the monastery had a violent history. Russians burned it down and killed the lamas in the 1960’s, but the area now serves as a national park and wild life preserve with some ruins and some newly constructed Buddhist buildings.

Situated in a partially wooded valley, the area houses evergreens and gabby brooks. Eagles love this place and their presence borders on infestation, albeit a magnificent one. Walking around the place my Mongolian Companions helped decipher the history lessons on display. An old bark tepee provided an example of the housing northern reindeer herders use while giant, intricately detailed Caldrons once held the boiling meals for any number of lamas.

A little museum contained taxidermy from the area (mini-bears, lynx, eagles, wolves, and marmot) and some native art (feather collages, carved roots, and rock drawings). The three men braved the midday heat and trekked to the ruined monastery, adjacent to the one remaining original building from the religious compound. Inside the standing structure, statues of Buddha and other relics sit, waiting patiently for visitors to put money and bow in front of them.

The nearby remains—the Russians did a thorough job—now look like many other destroyed brick buildings which nature reclaimed, though pictures suggest it was once beautiful in a man-made way.

The Old Man and the Tea

Proof that Ruskies didn’t exterminate every lama in the area during their occupation of Mongolia emerged when we visited a cousin of Sumiya’s stepfather, the oldest lama in the area. He looked his 95 years, but as we walked into his ger just a mile away from the nature preserve he greeted us actively. Seated on small stools, we faced the old man in the ger back as he said some prayers. Mongolian’s reserve the northern ends of gers for the most respected objects and things like books, TV, Buddhist relics, family photos, and men. The fronts are for everything else.

As the lama chanted, his wife served up steaming hot mutton soup and of course as much milk tea as we could drink. The lama burned incense, on a tray, handing it to his guests who then passed rotated it around their backs in a circle two to three times. He also passed out snuff, which I scooped onto my fingers but never tried, before returning the bottle with my right hand.

More Than Appealing

Our last excursion took us to a tourist ger camp where we stayed just long enough to eat a final mutton meal, with vegetables some vegetables this time. We walked briefly around the camp, looking at the numbered, nicely decorated gers, and the often impressive wheeled platforms they stood on. I thought that these were just for show, but Sumiya said Mongols would hitch these massive structures to ox and then sneak up to China.

I arrived home just after sunset. My pores smelled of mutton and I had nothing to write an article about, but I’d have to say that the day was my favorite in Mongolia.

Quiet on the inner Asian Front

Delivery (oh) boy

Another nice thing about working for a weekly is that occasionally you deliver newspapers. The job harkens back to old people’s childhoods, when those once young and industrious Americans woke up early, grabbed their bikes and threw papers at neighbors’ houses. But, with my editor’s model sister out of town for the week, I did my harkening in the passenger seat of her air-conditioned Lexus SUV.

With UB Post editor Sumiyabazar at the wheel, we took to the wild roads of Ulaanbaatar (the publicity lady normally does deliveries, but she called in sick). We dropped off eleven papers at an English book/wine store, 10 at a crazy German lady’s café, 3 for international clients at the post office, and five at an Indian restaurant in a five star hotel (one for which the UB Post’s parent company owns a controlling interest). At 400-500 Togrogs per paper—a little less than 40-50 cents—we covered the cost of gas for the afternoon.

Burn noticed

Each stop was interesting in its own way—complete with haggling and the calling of mangers— but the luxury hotel stop proved the most memorable because next door to this grand building, inside and outside of which everything seems to be functioning normally, sits the burned shell of Mongolia’s People’s Revolutionary Party Headquarters.

A week and a half before I arrived in Ulaanbaatar, a riot erupted in the city following nationwide parliamentary election results that showed the ruling MPRP retained a majority. Some members of the opposition Democratic Party declared the election tainted and took to the streets. Somehow, what started as a non-violent demonstration turned bad.

Protest, Mr.

Rioters attacked the People’s Party headquarters and then looted the neighboring Modern Art Museum. Neither of the hefty Russian-styled buildings have any windows left intact. Their concrete facades are singed from Molotov Cocktails, and the front of the party headquarters is splattered with blood-red paint in several places at various (sometimes impressive) heights.

During the riot, outnumbered police officers called the Army for backup. At least five people died, many were injured, including a photographer for the UB Post, who members of the staff visited in the hospital today. I saw B.Byamba-Ochir or Mr. Protest (a nick-name earned from previous protest coverage) smile and laugh with his guests, but he admitted that it made him tired. It took three days of surgery to put a plate in his head and he still wears a white bandage around his head; he doesn’t remember anything, but it looks like a rock hit him.

Nothing out of the ordinary

By the time I arrived in the city, however, there were almost no signs of the recent violence (only the damaged buildings and the continuing media coverage). All told, 700 people were arrested during the riot, but if turmoil still simmers on the streets of Mongolia, I have yet to notice (protests have occurred in Mongolia before: a famous one ended peacefully in the 90’s when a tragic hero of Mongolian democracy, Sanjaasuren Zorig, stood on a friends shoulders and reasoned with an angry mob as it tried to enter the parliament building).

Various election monitors have issued reports regarding the legitimacy of the election (some say fair and some say foul) and the Democratic Party has threatened to boycott the creation of a new parliament. As these stories unfold, there may be more overt signs of political and civil action, but until then it looks like business goes on as usual in Ulaanbaatar.

Work starts again in earnest on Monday and it looks like I will have my first assignment writing about the Calvary of Chinggis Khan.

Weekly Vocation

A Weekly Journalist’s Life and Crimes

There are lots of things I’ve come to enjoy about working at a small weekly newspaper. For one, I can’t get enough of the crazies who work these jobs, and I like that staff is so limited that I can get my fingerprints on almost every story. Most of all, I like the desperation.

It’s always a mad rush to meet a deadline, but more than that, these news organizations, and the people who run them, assume the traits of men on the lamb. The UB post steals its English-language horoscopes from some hippie web page (it doesn’t have sufficient personnel to write its own). At the weekly where I worked before, journalists pretended to be regular guests at a hotel to get free breakfast.

Weekly papers always seem one slip away from not making it to print; the writers one slip away from bouncing a check. Despite this pressure, all non-student journalists I’ve met exhaustively fact check mundane details and prefer an accurate, objective story to sleep. I aspire to be like these poor malnourished people.

Day one on the Job

Toward that end, I set out an hour before work started in search of the Mongol News Company building and the start of my career at the UB Post. Heading north past Suhkbatar square (Ulaanbaatar’s expansive mall dedicated to government and independence from the Chinese), I quickly found that stones and pavement no longer cover the sidewalks, while the number of pot holes, uncovered manholes, and regular holes increases dramatically. In this city you very literally have to watch your step, and I almost took a few body length plunges into garbage and rocks when I forgot this maxim.

After a lot of walking, turning around and then more walking, I arrived at the Mongol News Building. This gray structure was unfortunately not the Mongol News Company building, and to keep this short, with the help of some very nice Mongolian citizens, I found a stranger who drove me to the right place for 1,000 tugreg’s (a little less than $1).

I walked into the office 5 minutes late, just after 10 a.m. (If you’re an ex-pat you call this Mongolian time, or as some British lady told me, “a damn civilized time to start your day”). The Mongol News Company building sits at the edge of a promenade with a beer garden in an oversized ger (tent) and a baragian market under blue cloth tarps. On the tall side for UB, it looks like a mid-sized gray hotel and houses a television station, an ad agency, at least 4 newspapers, and a photo shop all owned by the company.

Colleagues: Room in the office

The office reserved for the UB Post is a good sized room, but we have to share it with the sports paper whose employees watch music videos and snore throughout the day. Our half of the office has five desks which means, following my employment, the paper has a 1.25 to 1 desk to person ratio.

At the desk with the layout computer sits Sumiyabazar, the 29 year-old editor who loves t-shirts, pops his collar, and resembles a Mongolian Dilbert. I like him already. I sit at a desk facing the clock and behind me is Kirril, the friendly Australian who followed his “crazy American girlfriend” to Mongolia and works part time as a journalist and part time as English teacher. Across from him is Bulgamaa who speaks English diffidently, likes to laugh, write about economics, and gave me a cookie today.

And that’s it. That’s the whole staff. On my first day I worked for 9 hours editing stories and making a database for contacts so that the UB Post can do away with its cache of business cards. Editing can be brutal, especially when some of the non-native speaker English needs extra polishing. I wrestled with this sentence for a while before giving up.

All in a day’s work

“Since 2003, every Mongolian family was allowed to own land, but no more than 0.7 hectares would be granted free. After the amendment, every citizen would be granted land from the day they were born, but only 0.7 hectares would be free”

If you have suggestions, please let me know. In spite of some frustrations, I really enjoyed my first day. One of the best things about working for a paper is that you feel like an expert on a place after a short time, in this case apparently, one day. Sitting at my desk, I didn’t realize that I was hungry or tired until I looked at the clock and saw that it was a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. Those who know me well will think this is a small miracle. If I have to work for a living, writing and reading may not be such a bad way to do it.

UB Arrival

Pre-trip

Six months ago, I decided that after graduating from college, I would seek my fortune, or more realistically a subsistence livelihood, as a journalist in Mongolia. Securing a job* at the UB Post,a small English-language weekly in Ulaan Baatar, I put all of my warm clothes in two suitcases and a backpack and prepared to travel to a city, country and continent that outside of books I knew nothing about. This all seemed like such a good, exciting idea (I even convinced my lovely girlfriend— and future co-writer of this blog—Bijani to abandon her job at a publishing house and join me in September) until two days before my departure when I panicked, imagining life in a post-soviet industrial city where I didn’t speak the language, knew practically no one, and where, by all accounts, it would get monstrously cold. I was not ready to go, but I already bought the ticket and I had told enough people about the trip that I couldn’t chicken out. Besides, I’ve managed to wing things before, so why should this venture prove any different?

On the way to town

Riding toward Ulaan Baatar in the backseat of a private Hyundai turned taxi cab, a ring of green hills caught my very red, very jet-lagged eyes before everything else. Cedar look-a-likes garnish these hills, standing dark and thick in defiance of my expectation that Mongolia had no living trees (Coal and Manure are famously burned for warmth in Mongolia and I mistakenly assumed that if you are going to burn these things, it must be because you have not trees). The sky was gray, the clouds were big and gray, and the bright hill grass blanketing the narrow river crevices and modest crests stood out beautifully.
These hills and their color also provided a contrast to the second thing to catch my eye, the outskirts of the city itself: a series of brick, cinder and wood buildings, shadowed by power plants whose large stacks puff out coal smoke. The roadside scenes looked like a union of Green Bay and Chinatown, with many structures that could’ve fit into a PBS special documenting the depression-era Midwest (some of the larger ones even have the distinctive shape of an old red barn), except for the ubiquitous, green, somehow Asian looking, corrugated tin or tile roofs.

The good, the not so bad, the not so ugly

Looming almost as distinctively as the smoke stacks over Ulaan Baatar are dozens of yellow cranes accompanying dozens of construction sites throughout the city. Foreign investment and increasing local wealth, largely from mining, has launched a construction boom in Mongolia’s capital, with several sky scratchers (they’re tall, but not that tall, and yes I would like you to help me coin this phrase if haven’t stolen it) nearly completed in the city center. Smack in the middle of downtown, there’s a large square sprawling in front of the elaborate parliamentary building which combines elements of a parliamentary building, the Lincoln memorial, and a green house. Most impressive about this building is a massive front and center statue of Chinggis Khan, who sits upon a throne, looking calm and just, yet impossibly wide and imposing.
I had heard that Ulaan Baatar was a city influenced by Asia, Russia and more recently Europe and America, and so far this appears to be true. In terms of architecture, the Russian’s did worse in East Berlin as far as ugly Soviet-bloc housing goes (perhaps these buildings improve with age and minimal maintenance), and there are many interesting and beautiful buildings in the city, which in spite of dust and some unruly city green spaces, has its own cosmopolitan feel.
So far, I like the city, but Ulaan Baatar has presented some difficulties and unpleasantness. In the early morning hours at Chinngis Khan international airport, I had a little trouble finding a cab driver who didn’t smell like a Smirnoff distillery. Anything pertaining to cars has proved harrowing as Mongolian drivers love to pass, do it constantly, and have sworn an oath to prevent pedestrians from confidently using their right of way. Deciphering the Cyrillic alphabet has also proved a challenge, as has deciding which way is north, in part due to fatigue, in part due to poor signage, and admittedly to congenitally poor directional sense.
Enough people speak enough English that I’ve had no trouble procuring food and water despite my complete ineptitude in Mongolian, and the few local people I’ve spoken with at length have all been remarkably friendly. As far as winging it goes, so far, so good. I begin work tomorrow when the real fun begins.

*This job may not be secure