July 19th-20th: Family Time

July 19^th

In the morning, I headed to the center of UB to take care of something important. The day before, I’d gotten a call from Altankhuu about 6 volumes of Gesar books, in Mongolian and Tibetan, that were very old and very rare. 

I rushed over to Dashchoilin, in a constant, low level but persistant rainstorm.  When I arrived, Altankhuu pulled out six volumes of 60 year old books. Photocopies of handwritten texts on thin paper, at risk of falling apart. Only one book was written in Tibetan, the other six were 5 different versions of Mongolian records of Gesar.  Since I can’t understand Mongolian well, much less read archaic poems written in a now mostly obsolete script which I have only started to learn. 

In years of researching Gesar in different countries, I had rarely encountered such tomes.  My hands were shaking.  I needed to know: what would happen to these books if I didn’t purchase them.  Altankhuu was also concerned.  The price was originally twice as high, before Altankhuu bargained the seller down.  He was sure that if we didn’t get the books, the seller would find private collectors and these books would disappear for at least another 40 years before being on the market at an obscene price.  I hadn’t budgeted for this. But I knew what I needed to do.

“I’ll take them all. Find out if there are others and hold on to them as best you can. If I can’t afford them, I’ll find people who can.  We’ll get them onto an online library for public consumption.”

I looked at the rain outside. As much as I wanted to take these books, I couldn’t shove them into a backpack and drag them through the rain.  Altankhuu understood. He locked the books in a safe for me.  We will get an appropriate box created and ship the books back to America as soon as we can manage it. 

I came back home, shaking with emotion. So happy I was having trouble breathing, but also nearly in tears.  M and S were happy for me when the realized what a find this was. 

We packed out bags and headed over to Ogoo’s house, M’s sister.  Ogoo had made buuz for us, and the grown ups ate buuz as the children gorged on ice cream. I was a bit jealous of the kids. There is only so much meat I can take. 

The grown ups told jokes and sang songs. At one point M and Jedampa, Ogoo’s husband, got into a heated discussion. Thanks to a few shots of vodka, it was looping.  Finally I got sick of it.

“DONE? DONE! HERE! Everyone drink! Here. Vodka, vodka, DONE!”  Apparently that tactic worked. 

We went upstairs with water, juice, beer and vodka, and the kids played with each other while the grown ups shared drinks.  Unfortunately, as my American classmate who is now in Mongolia very accurately said, Mongolian social drinking would be alcoholism anywhere else in the world.

July 20^th

I woke up but was the only one to do so, so I went right back to sleep. When I woke up for the second time, Ogoo asked if I wanted tea.  I absolutely wanted tea. I was, however, somewhat dismayed to find that my tea had ham in it. Big slices of the weird, Russian, processed meat kind of like a gross version of bologna with big chunks of fat in it. In. My. TEA.  UGH.

I had to utter a sentence I never thought I would have to say “Is there any meatless tea?”  This, somehow, made me the odd person. But ogoo took my tea and poured me a new cup of just regular, salt milk tea. Sans ham.

We sat around eating bread with the weird Mongolian processed meat. 

M asked if I could go with them to the country side, coming back the next day around 2 PM.  Unfortunately, I had a meeting the next day which I could not reschedule.  Instead, after lunch, we headed over to M’s mother’s home.  We discussed heading out to Bulgan the next day and then watched weird Russian science fiction movies until bed time.