The life of the goat is driven by a raw spontaneity that has little human equivalent outside of childhood, senility or mental illness — and perhaps those hippie free-spirits who dance around in fields all day or drop lots of acid.
…First, deomestication: 10,000 years ago. Then, the pagan traditions which are eventually immortalized in the Bible (Sheep go to heaven, Goats go bring the plague to thy neighbor so you can return to village bizniss).
I see it all unfold from about, without. A meta-travel. We goto this land for many reasons that are all the same. We run from broken homes, repentant lovers, dead pets.
Flip through the study-abroad brochures advertising semesters in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam. Flip to the next page.
Now you are in the Exotic section. Beijing, Hangzhou, Dakar, [...]
You push from your mind the ever-surfacing thought that her english is just a little too good to be working for some college student for $20 a day, let alone working as a Mongolian language teacher at SIT.
…After your week in the countryside—during which you simultaneously try to conduct interviews through confused translation, and try to win over your stand-offish translator, say that you hope she had some fun, that you enjoyed working with her .
The first time I heard heavy metal— the kind I listen to, from Scandinavia — in Mongolia was also the first time I heard this music broadcast on mainstream TV, while staying with a herding family in East-Central Mongolia.
…Usually, I get up every ten minutes or so to clear my side of the ger, if only to lessen the number in my immediate vicinity, for a few moments of relative peace.
As if the fruit hadn’t been fully separated from its skin, and took bits of skin-adhesive with it, leaving traces for the eater to ponder.
…And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
One would think, given the number of livestock (35 million) and their centrality to Mongolian culture and lifestyle, and that all the main livestock varieties produce milk fit for the purpose (sheep, goats and cows) that Mongolia would have developed a robust cheese-making tradition.
…So on that fateful day when I drank a glass of Mongolian Coca-Cola with breakfast (my host father later told me my illness must have been due to that) the contents of my GI tract decided to riot and collectively exited my body.
It was my girlfriend’s 21st birthday; I dreamed up a romantic weekend in the little town we used to visit in my summers as a kid 0 – to a bed and breakfast on the water, a massage, dinner whatever I got directions, and we were on our way…. I was going to a land of alien culture, custom, cuisine, climate color For years I’ve justified my ignorance of Boston with the fact I went to boarding school for 4 years Being lost in a place you should know is mortifying especially if people find out When weekend guests know from which way you came on the street after shopping at a store.
Raised Wooden saddles, floating inches above the horseback; short stirrups, tied together beneath the belly, that would make our knees lock and scream. Yet they fly in frozen standing stance, slouched to one side, pole-lasso in hand, poised in galloped rhythm, as familiar as their own pulse.
General Advice on Mongolia Travel
If they fail to recognize you for your achievements (i.e. survival), realize they don’t get it (yet) and have faith that their time will come .
…well the G is swallowed, and calls up from the bottom of your throat, leading to a slippery o that somehow terminates in a soft V. Realize you won’t be learning this language from a book.