Tsaagan Sar - Mongolian Lunar New Year

As we drove towards the outskirts of the city I made a promise to myself. This promise was the manifestation of an already strong resolve; a spirit of adventure that I had forced upon myself. I WOULD eat things put in front of me, and I would either enjoy it or die trying.
The car pulled off the paved city street and onto a dusty road that ran off through the ger communities. After a while we stopped in front of a wooden fence with a painted sheet-metal gate; the home of one of the church workers and some of her relatives.
I got out of the car, feeling relatively foolish. I was wearing my del, and up until this point I had not succeeded in getting it right. No matter how I wrapped the long belt around myself it was always wrong; either too loose or too tight, too high or too low. No matter how I erred from the accepted norm I always erred in the direction of "too feminine". It's a dubious talent I seem to possess.
Inside the fence there were two buildings, both apparently belonging to the same extended family. We made our way towards one of them, and up a set of stairs to the second (and top) story. Inside the cozy one room apartment the newlywed church worker and her husband welcomed us, and told us to sit down and eat. There on the table sat a bowl of potato horshur (pouches of dough stuffed and fried) and kimchee.

Well now, that isn't exciting at all. This won't require a sense of adventure!

We sat there for about an hour. Most of the conversation was in Mongolian (which I could usually understand) and Korean (which I could not). Since I was the only native English speaker there none of it was in English. The combination of the food, the warm del, and the constant banter (which I could only understand with intense concentration) began to take effect, and I started to fall asleep.

TEACHER!

I jerked awake, and saw.... someone. Yes, yes, it was definitely someone. Definitely someone I was supposed to know. I smiled in a friendly and knowing way at the person I was supposed to know.
"Come, downstairs!" said the person I was supposed to know.
The pastor and his family were getting up to go downstairs and greet the rest of the family, so I followed them. There, on the first floor, we found a much more traditional Tsaagan Sar celebration. A dozen people were seated around a table covered in plates of cabbage salad, plates of horshur and buuz (steamed meat dumplings), candy, and an array of vodka bottles ranging from empty to unopened. At the center of the table were two things: a pile of hard bread and a deceased sheep. The pile of bread was perfectly round, with the bread stacked in layers like bricks. The top was covered in cheese curds and sugar cubes (the main idea being "white foods"). The head and legs had been removed from the unfortunate sheep. The sheep had then been de-haired (mostly), split down the middle, stretched, and baked whole. The resulting product looked almost exactly like a western saddle made of lard.
This was more like it! We greeted the hostess and other people sitting at the head of the table then took and sniffed their bottles of snuff (I really need to get my own snuff bottle...). They then told us to eat, which we did.
Taking a fork I speared one of the buuz. After a moment of preparatory meditation I bit off half of it, chewed, swallowed, then bit off and ate the other half. Much to my stomach's relief they were beef. I can deal with beef, even Mongolian beef. At the urging of the hostess I ate several more buuz. They were oily, and the beef was very chewy, but college cafeteria food had trained me to ignore unpleasant food entirely, so the buuz and I were at peace.
Despite the fact that the pastor and myself were almost always either eating buuz or drinking salt tea the hostess felt that we should be eating more. She asked someone to make us a salad, and someone did. They placed a plate of salad before us, saying that it had potatoes, cabbage, mayonnaise, and that it was "guy gwee", or "not a problem". The pastor and I began eating the salad, and discovered that it did indeed have potatoes, cabbage and mayonnaise. It also had pork, which was not "guy gwee". I grinned at the pastor, who looked at his salad, shrugged his shoulders and continued eating. Good Adventists aren't supposed to know what pork tastes like, how should we know what they had placed in front of us?
Next, shot glasses of vodka were passed around. I shifted in my seat uncomfortably, knowing that an awkward situation was about to take place. One of the family members who went to our church explained to the hostess that Adventists don't drink, and that he (along with the rest of us) would not be able to drink to her toast.
The woman made her toast (which I did not understand), and everyone drank. Everyone except for us that is. We put our glasses back down on the table. It was awkward, especially when the hostess asked why we disliked Mongolian vodka so much, and what kind of alcohol we drank. The pastor tried to explain that we didn't drink any alcohol at all. The lady contemplated this for a while. Telling a Mongolian that you don't eat meat and don't drink anything alcoholic is like telling an American that your religion prohibits the consumption of bread or the drinking of juice, so it's hard for them to wrap their minds around it.
After a few more buuz and some more scalding hot tea it was time for us to leave. At the door one of the women told us we must take gifts before we left, and also that we absolutely had to take some cheese. I gladly accepted the gifts and stuffed them into the front of my del. I then selected a cube of cheese from the plate and put it into my mouth.
The term "cheese" is applied to many things in many cultures. I'm pretty sure that what I ate fell outside the accepted boundaries of "cheese". It was something like a dried, slightly rancid cube of yak butter. More accurately, it WAS a dried, slightly rancid cube of yak butter, but my stomach and I decided that since it was already in my mouth we would think of it as slightly rancid candle wax instead. I chewed the slightly rancid candle wax, then sent it down to my cramping stomach. My stomach told me that it would process and dispose of the candle wax on two conditions: that I feed it nothing for the rest of the day, and that I eat nothing but pleasantly familiar mexican food for the next week. I lied to it, promising to do both of those things.

Having thus lied to my internal organs like a mother lying to her children as she takes them to the doctor's office for shots, I got back into the car. We drove to the next house, which also had a pile of hard bread, a baked sheep, and vodka bottles on the table. My stomach looked suspiciously about the room, noticing the distinct absence of anything resembling mexican food.
Telling my stomach to get a grip, I began stuffing buuz and kimchee down my throat. My stomach examined the buuz and kimchee carefully, concluded that they were NOT in fact mexican food, and said that if I took another bite it would spew everything all over the baked sheep in the middle of the table.

I paused in my eating, realizing that this was a hostage situation. I slowly placed my fork back on my plate. The hostess looked at me quizzically, and told me I really should eat more. I smiled weakly, and said that I hadn't been well for the past few days (which was an obvious lie). My stomach nodded it's approval, thereby nearly upsetting the delicate balance of things. I lay back, closed my eyes, and tried to ignore the strong smell of dead sheep and kimchee.

Ever since I took organic chemistry I have had the olfactory hallucination of alkenes and thiols whenever I am sick to my stomach. Exactly two of the people who read this blog will have the foggiest idea what alkenes and thiols smell like. For the rest of you, I will say that natural gas has the smell of thiols diluted to a few parts per million, and alkenes smell like tar that has gone bad in an eye-watering kind of way... of that's possible. Until we left these smells were strong in both my nose and my mind, and when we finally went outside I greedily inhaled the smell of coal smoke and animal dung, just for a change.

ALL the Asian lunar new years are now over, so happy new year to all!