Feb 11 2008
Long overdue post
The past couple of weeks have been surreal from a variety of standpoints, so apologies to those who are wondering if I am still alive. I was sick for about a week and a half, enough so that I didn’t go to work for almost a week. So, for me, that means *really* feeling shitty. I had a bad cough which was really hard to stop and thus very distracting. I think it was probably compounded by the general coldness and dryness here which is why it took so long to finally subside (this past Friday or so was the first night in a week that I fell asleep not coughing and woke up not coughing, and on the dot 9pm I would start coughing for the night). I pretty much stuck my head in my hot water pot/heater as often as I could bear and slept during the day, and when I was tired of that, I tried to boil water at my place to increase the humidity. It really sucked.
But! Now I am better. I kind of felt bad because this week was the week my boss was gone, and I was hoping to do all sorts of productive/interesting things at work both alone and with my counterpart and I didn’t get to do so. And I had to decline or curtail many of the Tsagaan Sar-leading-up events, like helping my counterpart make a zillion dumplings and what not. So I started off distinctly off-balance holiday-wise.
Tsagaan Sar here is a 3-7 day celebration of the lunar new year. I’ve heard someone else call it a “Thanksgiving Pub Crawl” but to me it’s more of a Halloween Prom Night Thanksgiving. You dress up in your best clothes, go from house to house greeting people for the new year, get stuffed silly with buuz (dumplings) and the accessories, then receive a small gift, most often candy, though some people got bras and long underwear for some reason. At least, that’s the kind of trivial way of viewing it. I think more formally it’s a way to honor elders for the new year and start it off right by being generous and catching up with family, which is very important here. The first day or two tends to be family-visiting days, along with a visit to your big boss (departmental director, governor, or whomever). The following days are friends and close coworkers. On the third day typically you go to work and along with your coworkers go to all your partners/collaborators and greet them. This day is pretty brief - maybe 15 min per partner - and you take a piece of candy. Oh, and at all these visits snuff is an important component. You exchange snuff bottles, politely sniff at it (or take a bit if you want) then hand it back. This is how it was out here, but I hear it’s more compressed/exclusive in UB, and drawn out in the countryside.
The first thing you do when visiting is go to the oldest person (typically oldest male, but oldest female if there’s a grandma around) and greet them with a special sort of arm clasping, then you continue to greet going by descending age. The snuff gets passed around and the woman of the household serves you enormous quantities of food and puts the buuz on to steam. All told you spend at least an hour at each house between the greeting, the eating, and the buuz making then eating. It’s polite to bring a gift or money, and I’ve been handing out chocolate bars here. You can get away with eating only 3 buuz at each place, but you have to be firm, like with alcohol. Since I didn’t go to too many houses, I ate closer to 15 at each place, especially as they were spread out over the 3 days so I wouldn’t explode. Others weren’t so lucky and had to go to up to 5 families in a day. I know one guy who ate 100 buuz on the first day, but I think he was just being a boy. My counterpart’s parents in law bought 20kg of meat to make dumplings, and she herself bought 10kg, so we’re talking thousands of buuz made leading up to this event. You just put em outside and they freeze until you’re ready to serve, too. This to me is part of the Thanksgiving feeling too - the buuz are the turkey equivalent as you eat them *forever* after the event.
This event, I think, is probably also the most expensive holiday of the year for families; I suspect there is some stressful times going on in the background, trying to get all the things you need to properly host, not to mention the labor. It’s customary to give overflowing amounts of food and to display it in that way too, as generosity’s a big part of the hosting/holiday tradition here, so you way overpurchase to make that impression. I think some of us volunteers next year will band into a àéë (family) to host together, but the first thing my coworker said was that it’s a good idea because then you can share the cost. Sounds intimidating cost-wise…so we’d likely have to save.
While I was sick though I hosted a fun morning of politics and food. I’m the only one with a TV, and my cable has Al Jazeera news, which has been fascinating and frustrating (as in, it’s great, and why the hell doesn’t the US have a station with these kinds of programs?? It’s half PBS and (the good) half CNN). We watched their primary coverage on Super Tuesday from about 8am to 1pm that day…Jen, Dayla, and Andy came over to help make breakfast, and I literally woke up when they came, so I was all bleary and congested-y. We had buttermilk biscuits, “sausage” (chopped up mutton) cream gravy and tasty cake donuts with optional chocolate flavored condensed milk. It was totally exciting for us here to be able to watch it, rather like a sports game 
About that time too we had a flat food-themed party of sorts…M16 Suzie, who I worked with before coming out to Khovd, sent us an awesome package that included a pound of pecans, coffee, and dried blueberries for a pancake breakfast. So we had build-your-own pancakes, pizza, and focaccia night. I was a bit bummed because by the end I was coughing so much I couldn’t eat 
and that day I completely had no sense of smell, but I ate the pizza the next morning and it was really good.
Finally, my breadmaking has been improving greatly. The bread book I brought back from Bonnie’s place is really good and after following their high altitude adjustments I’ve made excellent french bread and my own braided challah! So I’m going to work through those recipes - bread’s one of the easier things to make here as the ingredients for most recipes are basic and available here.
Speaking of Bonnie, she ran a 10k in LA this (current? past?) Sunday through Chinatown called the Firecracker 10k. Super cool! I hope to speak to her soon to see how it went, as I heard there were some tough hills.
I guess the new generations really are of the facebook-communication variety. For some reason I hear from my sister far more often through its messaging system than through email. But it sounds like she’s doing well and is back in school and balancing work.
So, that’s been me for the past couple weeks or so - I’ll try to post more often and in shorter chunks so that things make sense from a chronological standpoint…
