Ireland

My flight was scheduled to leave from the Paris-Beauvais airport at 9:25am on Christmas Eve. I found out the night before that the Paris-Beauvais airport wasn’t technically in Paris (as the name would suggest) rather 80 kilometers outside of the city. So I awoke at 5am, caught the earliest tram at 5:30 to cross the city and just barely made the airport shuttle at 6:25. I checked in at the airport and made it to my gate on time. Phew. The only thing left to do was wait, and wait, and wait …for three hours. The region’s foggy morning inhibited all incoming flights from landing and as a result some 500 people were crammed into the tiny terminal eager to leave. At 12:30 an announcement came on saying that because of the weather Ryan Air flight 25 would be re-routed through Lille airport, which was about a 2 hour drive north. All the passengers were loaded into five buses and sent northward. We finally took off at 4pm from Lille and arrived in Dublin at 4:30, seven hours later than we were supposed to.

I had anticipated spending New Year’s back in Berlin, but I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to stay in Ireland nor the mode of transportation that I wanted to depart on. So I entered the country with a TBD ETD. Well, the immigration office was not pleased to hear that. I spent half an hour talking to the woman at the immigration desk, being mistakenly honest. “Yes, I know I’m travelling on Christmas Eve. Yes, I know that I’m travelling alone. No, that doesn’t bother me. Yes, my parents know. No I don’t have a return ticket. No, I won’t try to live illegally in Ireland. Yes, I do plan to return to the United States. Yes, I do have a place to stay. Yes, it is a real place. No, I don’t have the phone number of my hostel….” And so it went. After a second officer came in and confirmed that the Avalon House was an actual hostel and not code for ‘illegal immigration’ they finally stamped my passport and let me in, but with significant suspicion. I caught the 16A bus and headed for the city center to check in at my hostel.

Being the Catholic country that it is, it’s needless to say that Christmas is big in Ireland (AKA every thing is closed for the holidays). When I arrived Christmas Eve all the markets had locked their doors, pulled their metal screens down and pasted their “Will re-open in January” signs on the windows. Shops, pharmacies, train stations, restaurants—all of them closed. I wandered the eerily empty streets around my hostel in search of dinner and settled (without choice) on a ‘hot and ready’ Spar dinner. Spar became my new best friend over the holiday weekend; with the exception of churches they were the only place to keep their doors open. Over Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St. Stephen’s Day/Boxing Day, I ate just about everything Spar had on the deli menu.

I made some friends in the evenings at Avalon and took a complimentary tango lesson one evening, but wandered the streets of Dublin alone during the day, enjoying the time to myself. On the 27th when things started to open up again, I visited the beloved Guinness Storehouse. For 11 Euro I experienced a walk-through commercial for Guinness beer and enjoyed a ‘free’ pint at the top floor’s bar overlooking the city. It was already two o’clock by the time I finished my draught and I only had a few hours of daylight left. So I took the elevator to the ground floor, conveniently located amidst the Guinness gift shop where I escaped spending only 50 cents on a postcard. I wandered the streets toward the River Liffey catching the Christchurch Cathedral, James Joyce statue and the Spire (a god awful monument).

I only had one full day left and I really wanted to see at least part of the countryside. I visited the train station that day to see if I could travel westward for a day and a night before I left, but I could only catch a train to Galway or Limerick the following morning and try to take in the sights in just a few hours of daylight. It would definitely have been worth it to see the cliffs and coast, but I wasn’t sure I would have enough time. My only other option was a guided tour. I had wanted to avoid such tourist traps, but with my limited time-frame alas I caved. I woke up the following morning at 6am to catch a tour bus out west. I hadn’t made reservation, but I was lucky enough to get the last seat, at the last minute. After three hours of driving through the frosty morning countryside we were at the coast. I got to see the cliffs, some castles and the Burren (my personal favorite). The day was spent mostly driving, but I thought it was worth it to experience not-Dublin. When we got back to Dublin I had enough time to grab some hard cider at a market, pack my bag and take a nap before my early flight the next morning back to Berlin.

Berlin-->Nice-->Barcelona-->Paris

Guten tag (again)!

I’m back in Berlin! Once again my blogging consistency has failed and it’s been three some weeks since I’ve posted. To catch you up, if you’re interested, this is what I’ve done so far.

Berlin, Germany

I spent three days in Berlin recovering from tonsillitis, waiting for my ears to pop from the airplane’s descent (took four very painful days of waiting), waiting for my bank to understand that I would be withdrawing money from strange places and waiting for a train to Nice, France. I tried to spend as little as possible and just walked around the city for the duration of my stay.

I met up with an old friend (from pre-school) who accompanied me to Nice and on to Barcelona. We visited the Holocaust Memorial, which was more striking and eerie that I had anticipated; snacked on some currywurst at a little indoor market waiting for the rain to pass; and visited Soluna Brot und Öl, to see if the New York Times really knew what they were talking about. We bought a two kilo loaf of Rundling bread and some raspberry-ginger jam and snacked on a picnic bench outside a nearby church (and for days after…the loaf lasted us about a week).

Nice, France

We finally boarded a night train from Berlin to Nice the following day to arrive in a torrential downpour. We planned to stay three nights at the Villa Saint Exupery Hostel up on the hill waiting in anticipation of Barcelona where we were going to meet Claire, yet another friend from grade school. We spent two days wandering the beach, harbors and markets, especially admiring the fake-snow covered conifers displayed at the ubiquitous Christmas markets.

Barcelona, Spain

We met Jacob, a student from Stanford who was traveling to Barcelona day ahead of us. With no set itinerary, we cancelled our last night in the Villa and followed Jacob to Barcelona a day early. Together we took a free walking tour around Las Ramblas, the main road through Barcelona, and otherwise just wandered the city taking in sights like Gaudi’s Sangrada Familia.

The next day when Jacob had left, we met up with Claire and spent the next five nights in Kabul hostel off of the Placa Reial. Experiencing the night life in Barcelona requires one to sleep half the day if not more, as things don’t really get started until 2am and last until 6am. We still managed to be awake in daylight hours to see the Barcelona Zoo, the magic fountain and catch a movie at the Verdi Cinema. And lots of paella, tapas and sangria were consumed in those five days.

Paris, France

Claire returned to the States from Barcelona on the 21st. We said our good-byes and Owen and I set off North. We went as far as Montpellier then parted ways, he back to Nice, I to Paris. I hadn’t anticipated visiting the bank-draining metropolis, but it had the cheapest flights out to Dublin, my next stop, so made a pit stop in the interim.

I stayed at a 20 Euro a night hostel, the cheapest I could find, for three nights. I spent the following two days leisurely (and cheaply) seeing the city. In an attempt to travel cheaply I ate mostly out of a grocery marts (with the exception of some compulsory éclairs and crepes), enjoying some Muenster, camembert and bries on bread.

My first site was the Notre Dame Cathedral. I had intended to find an English bookstore, but the metro stop I got off at was coincidentally kitty-corner to the magnanimous church. Shakespeare & Co., the bookstore I was trying to find, ended up being right across the street and rather than finding a guide book as I had hoped, I walked out with a new Chuck Palahniuk novel and read several chapters at a neighboring café with an espresso and crepe. I perused the Jardin du Luxumbourg, the Pantheon perimeter (it was 11 Euro to go inside) and wandered the streets en route to the Tour Eiffel.

That night I visited the Eiffel Tower. I showed up before sunset to see it in daylight. I found another café around the corner and read and consumed copious amounts of espresso until twilight when the lights turned on. I retired to my hostel with a round of brie, a loaf of bread and an orange for a quiet evening.
The next day I circled the Arc du Triomphe (9 Euro to see the center) and the Musee du Louvre exterior. I stopped at yet another café for an espresso and éclair and read. A friend had recommended that I scale the Eiffel Tower at night so I returned for another go. I spent sunset perusing a Christmas market across just across the Seine. I enjoyed some warm Christmas wine and a chocolate crepe in the waiting. At twilight I paid 3.50 Euro to scale the 800 some stairs to viewing level one and two. I waited for over an hour and was on my way down when the delightfully tacky twinkle show started. When it was all said and done I descended the tower, headed back to the hostel and enjoyed some Muenster and rye and prepared for my early morning flight.

Dublin is another story. I'll update soon (this time I promise!).

Epic Blog Fail

I’m writing this post (or at least the start of it) in a quiet morning lounge in Frankfurt, Germany’s airport. There’s complimentary tea and coffee, free newspapers and the people greet me in German because they can’t tell I’m foreign (!). If you’re not a Facebook enthusiast or haven’t been in direct contact with me, you’re probably wondering why I’m in Germany… Well, I’ll tell you a little story.

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who was traveling abroad in Mongolia. “Mongolia?!” They all said, “Where is that?!”

“It’s a rather large country above China and below Russia and I’m ecstatic to go,” I said. “And I’ll keep a blog of all my happenings so that you can learn a little about what (and where) Mongolia is.”

FAIL.

I think I quit after Khuvsgul. I hope that you all have been following Glimpse as my weekly deadline kept me posting. As for the incentive-less blog-spot, well check my last post date. In any case I told many of you that I would be traveling the Trans-Siberian Rail from Ulaanbaatar to Moscow, experiencing the frigid temperatures of December Russia and seeing the Urals. I was going to depart Moscow to Helsinki and travel the Euro-Rail wherever my heart desired this winter’s break. I planned to meet a dear friend in Barcelona for a week or so, but other than that I was itinerary-less. In fact I never bought a ticket home, date TBD.

So what happened to the Trans-Siberian you might ask? Talk to the Russian Embassy. I unfortunately never got a Russian visa before leaving the States, hearing through the wireless grapevine that I could easily obtain one in country. I had three months, no problem. I acquired my visa application form in the cold concrete building in UB and even found a Russian speaking friend who wanted to accompany me (at least to St. Petersburg).

As you might know, Russians can be sticklers about who they let in their precious borders. We needed an invitation. No problem, we thought. My friend knew a friend in Moscow that we could register with and avoid the invitation fees. Some conflict of interest or limited amount of time (one of the two) meant that she couldn’t invite us, but was pleased to offer a residency for registry. We went to the Mongolian Russian Embassy website, clicked the red-white-and-blue link to an “official invitation” site and paid 56USD each for a little slip of paper to arrive by fax. Yes!

Harry, the man we were corresponding with, didn’t fax but emailed a PDF copy of our invitation. “Sounds good. Thanks a lot, Harry.” We drop by a little photo studio in the back of a clothing store in downtown UB, have some horrid portraits taken and photoshopped to oblivion and head to the Embassy.

When we dropped by the Embassy last they said, since we were registered for over 90 days in Mongolia we could obtain a visa no problem. We show up with our appropriate documents and you guessed it, get denied.

“Do you have the original copy of your invitation?” the woman asks.
“Um, no. We used the promotional site on your website, to which the protocol is fax, although we got a PDF.”

“No, I’m sorry we need the original in order to get your visa. Oh and you’ll also need three weeks for processing.” Harry!! Peeved, running out of time and visa-less I immediately contacted Harry asking him if there was any way we could have the original copy shipped to us. ASAP.

Being in country for about two months at that point, I had discovered the reason we call it ‘snail mail.’ Mongolian mail is incredibly slow and rather unreliable and as far as the students and I were concerned a big basket of envelopes en route to the U.S. sit around until the basket is full and only then are they shipped to China and then to the U.S. Parcels have been averaging three weeks or more and at a $100 DHL charge, the short time constraint wasn’t worth the price. So we gave up. On to Plan B.

My dear friend would still be waiting for me Barcelona and tickets across the Pacific were far too over-priced. So on November 14th after much deliberation I booked a flight from Ulaanbaatar to Berlin. I would leave on December 8th from UB, fly to Beijing, take a red-eye to Frankfurt and arrive in Berlin at 8am on the 9th.
So here I am. In Frankfurt, ten minutes from boarding and less than two hours from setting foot on European soil for the first time. I’ve booked a hostel for a night in Berlin and then the continent is mine to explore. I’ll be in Barcelona on the 15th, as promised, but otherwise I am still itinerary-less. Since I failed at updating you on my Mongolian ventures, I’ll do my best to keep tabs on my Euro-trip.

Wish me luck, pray that my tonsillitis will go away and stay tuned. And if I’ve disappointed you in blogging, call me when I’m back in the States and I’ll make time to grab coffee and re-tell all my Mongolian stories in person.

Khuvsgul Catch Up

I’m alive, I promise. My apologies for not updating the ‘mingle’ for some time. I meant to give you all the scoop on the rest of Khuvsgul before I left for Khentii and then when I got back from Khentii I meant to give you two scoops on both Khuvsgul and Khentii, but I failed and I’ve returned from Sainshand without giving you anything. Please forgive. To make up for lost time I’ll start by giving you the breakdown of my Khuvsgul homestay day by day. Here goes:

September 12:
Today was the first full day of my homestay. My father had arrived late the night before so I woke up hazy eyed to his greeting. My host mother gave me a hot bowl of milk tea and some fresh bread with orom. Orom is the foam ladled off the top of boiling yak or cow’s milk. When the foam is cooled you’re left with a rich and creamy spread that is absolutely delicious. I helped my sister shovel the poop out of our goat and sheep pen. It was an octagonal fence with made from several Siberian larch logs. I glamorously pushed thousands of little goat terds with the flat, tarnished shovel into a big pile in the corner of the pen. Then my ten year old sister, Hulan and I shoveled the pile onto a torn synthetic burlap sack and in several trips moved the pile to a larger dung heap about ten meters away. My host mother was so proud of my poop-scooping abilities that she invited me back into the ger for another cup of milk tea and a hard candy. About an hour later I was sitting inside the ger watching my mother mend a shirt. Hulan was running back and forth from behind the ger to the door bringing my mother new cuts of meat. I asked my mother if I could help her at all and she took my hand and led me outside. My father, Tsogtbayar, my oldest sister, Ariuntogs, and Hulan were busy slaughtering a sheep and my mother sat me down with them. My father had already skinned it and removed its organs and was now separating the cuts of meat. Ariuntogs handed me a knife and one end of the large intestine. We squeezed out the rest of its dung onto the grass and then slit the small intestine along the top. Then we scraped the inside out. After we had finished, we went inside to prepare dinner. We rinsed out the stomach and then poured a mixture of blood and salt until it inflated ten times its size. We cut strips of fat, the small intestine, and some unidentified rubbery thing to stuff the large intestines for a ‘sausage.’ The stuffing was topped off with some more blood and salt and the end was sewed shut with a splinter of wood. All our concoctions and the liver and kidney were tossed into a pot of boiling water and left to simmer for an hour. I had already determined that I didn’t like the boiled blood the day before and I was hoping I could skirt that portion of the feast. But they generously gave me a piece of everything, extra blood and I had to choke it down. After several offered helpings I was finally able to convince them I was full.

September 13:
I helped my mother make aaruul today. Aaruul is the traditional Mongolian cheese curd that’s rock hard and rather sour. It’s made from yogurt that’s boiled for an hour over the fire. It’s thickened and cooled and poured into silk fabrics, placed into a tray and put outside to harden in a rectangular shape. Once it’s hard enough to remove from the fabric, it’s broken into smaller blocks and dried for several days. When it rains we have to run it inside before it gets wet. A storm rolled in today and I made several emergency runs with my mother. Our ger had a solar panel which powered our single energy-saving lightbulb and black and white satellite television. That evening we watched sumo wrestling. Boiled mutton and flour noodle soup for dinner.

September 14:
My little sisters departed for school today. Countryside kids spend the week in dormitories at the Soum center and come home on the weekends. After an hour of preparation, packing clothing, food, and books, the family loaded all their supplies to the back of the motorcycle and my father, mother and two younger sisters set off for school. I spent a large part of the day examining our ger and landscape today. My family has two gers side by side. One housed Ariuntogs and my sister-in-law, Bolormaa (I had two older brothers, only one of whom I met) the other housed my mother, father, two younger sisters and myself. Ours was a relatively large ger with five walls. The stove in the center was tarnished and black. There were two beds on the east and west sides. The north end traditionally holds an altar. The altar can house anything that the family cherishes or finds sacred: photos, buddhas, figurines, offering plates, etc. The Darkhaad Depression was an open, grassy valley nestled between a majestic mountain range and a river in front of rolling hills. My family’s camp sat a few hundred meters from the river in a field of boulders, something that I still don’t quite understand. Boiled mutton and flour noodles for dinner.

September 15:
This morning Ariuntogs and I rode our pair of horses to the Bag center (local ‘town’ center) to purchase some items at the store. We rode through several ger camps and as my blonde head stuck out, were approached by several locals to share their greetings. The store we visited was a short larch log shack too short to house me. The store’s owner was an adorable little eight year old boy with Down syndrome who shook my hand and then proceeded to sneak candy out of the baskets. I later found out that he was the son of every family in the bag center and known as the happy child. We bought a package of baaw (cookies), a block of black tea, a package of raspberry gum and a bottle of lotion. On our way back we were approached by a young, drunk man on his galloping horse. He tried to sweet talk my sister, but his attempts failed and when we gave up and galloped away my sister raised her pinky finger at him and said he was gross (an upturned pinky finger is akin to a downturned thumb). In the afternoon my father took me out for another ride to herd our sheep and goat herd. We rode to the highest point in the middle of the valley, dismounted our horses and looked over the landscape through his tarnished binoculars. He took me a few kilometers further and taught me the names of each mountain in sight. We met two of his friends and dismounted again to take a break. Laying on one shoulder, I chewed a piece of grass and watched the three of them roll cigarettes in old newspaper and smoke them in the afternoon sun. We stayed out several hours and when we cantered back I was (surprisingly) eagerly awaiting our dinner of boiled mutton and flour noodle soup.

September 16
Today was a very, very bad day. I had thought a month into my stay in Mongolia I had outsmarted my body and skipped the usual twenty-four hour sickness. Not true. I woke up at 4am violently ill. I spent the five hours running in and out of the ger. I spent the afternoon with an empty body, trying to sleep off the pain. This was the day our class was supposed to visit the local shaman and ranger and I was extremely disappointed that I slept the entire day. At 7pm my family drew me a bath (filled the little metal tub with boiling water and let me crouch in the tub with a ladle. Needless to say I was happy for that day to end and for my sickness to be over. The family had boiled mutton and flour noodle soup for dinner, but I opted out of dinner.

September 17:
I watched my host father kill fifty flies with a rubberband in our ger today. He held one side back like a slingshot and nailed them every time. I helped shovel poop out of the goat pen again this morning. The afternoon was devoted to scraping moldy aaruul. Aaruul is an extremely important food in the winter and helps sustain the family in the toughest of times. My family stocks up on aaruul in the spring, summer and fall months in preparation, storing bags and bags of the hardened curds on the periphery of the ger. We had a bag that had gotten wet at some point and was covered in mold. Rather than dispose of the supply we spent hours scraping the spores with a knife (the same knives used for preparing dinner after a quick wipe of a rag). To spice things up, we had buudz for dinner tonight, one of my favorite Mongolian dishes, steamed lamb dumplings.

September 18:
One of my last days with my host family we spent a large part of the day taking family portraits. We saddled up the horses with the traditional, decorative saddles, dressed up in deels and started snapping away. In the afternoon I visited my peer’s ger for our language class. She lived fifteen kilometers away and my father and I took our motorcycle across the valley to get there. She lived by a series of healing springs and after our lesson the students and I drank to our head, stomach, eyes, heart and ears. This evening I helped my sister weave rope from the hair of a yak’s tail. First we separated the hairs and laid them out in large squares. The squares were rolled up and twisted with two hands to make tighter strands. Two of the tighter strands are then twisted and rolled into a longer rope. For the saddle straps we were making, three of the twisted ropes were then braided and leather bound hooks were sewn to the ends. Boiled mutton and flour noodle soup.

September 19:
Today was the last full day of my homestay. I spent most of the day scraping mold again. By the afternoon I had developed arthritis. I tried to explain to my family the probability of my graduate school path. They told me I study too much, but said it was a good thing. They gave me their address to mail them my photos and told me I should visit them again. A heavy snowstorm had hit UB much of southern Mongolia. As a result our drivers were delayed getting to us in the isolated Darkhaad valley and we fortunately got to stay with our host families a little longer. Boiled mutton and flour noodle soup.

September 20:
We were supposed to depart at 8am, but the storm delayed our departure until 3pm. It was a slow and bittersweet morning. My family gave me a wooden necklace and a vest my sister had made me as departing gifts. In the afternoon a surprise entrepreneur stopped by our house. My host mother teared up as I left and kissed me on the cheek. It was sad to say good-bye. We drove into Ulaan Uul, the Soum center, for the night and had soup for dinner again.

In the interim...

I've got more stories from my trip to the countryside that I will be posting in the next day or two, but in the interim I'll tell you about the picnic I had with my family yesterday.

I had originally wanted to visit the Museum of Mongolian Traditional Medicine this Sunday and my host family in UB said they would be happy to accompany me (my host father is a doctor of traditional medicine...I watched him do acupuncture in our living room.) but when I woke up that morning my mother said that her brother was going to a monastery and asked if I wanted to come. Of course I did, so I postponed the museum outing for the time being. After a fresh breakfast of eggs, 'sausage,' cucumbers and yellow rice tea (like milk tea, but with sauteed yellow rice kernels added into the mix) my uncle, aunt, and two cousins arrived at our house with a Chinngis Khaan hot water thermos and a bag full of apples.

We piled nine people into their low-rolling van and set out. I thought we were driving to the Gandon Monastery in town, but as it turned out we started driving to the next aimag over, Tuv. Forty five minutes and a flat tire later we arrived at the gates of Manzhir monastery park. At most parks or famous sites foreigners have to pay two to sometimes five times the entrance fee, but my host mother successfully told the fare collector that I was her daughter and I got in Mongol price.

We pulled into the parking lot filled with tourist buses and minivans, poured all nine people out of the van and started up the hill. Manzhir is one of many monasteries that were destroyed during the religious oppression under Soviet control. All that stood was the clay bricks of a foundation, a partially reconstructed wooden building turned museum and the modest wooden roofs scattered across the mountains face protecting large paintings of Guatama Buddha on the largest of outcropped boulders. My host father and mother are both practicing Buddhists, so the summit to each hut yielded whispered prayers and bowed heads.

I was es tactic to have an opportunity for climbing. Being in a crowded district and just coming out of a cold front the air quality in UB is horrendous and will only get worse, inhibiting my runs or any form of exercise out of doors. My mother called me a mountain goat as I hopped up the rocks to the peak where an ovoo had been erected overlooking the valley. After circling it three times in solitude, my family finally caught up to me and we decided to descend back down to our van.

At the base, my father and uncle went down to the car while the rest of us staked out our picnic spot for our late afternoon meal. When we found a few square meters of stone free grass my uncle and father returned with a rolled up carpet on one shoulder and bags and bags of food and drinks. We rolled out the floor rug, removed our shoes and began the feast and I mean feast.

My mother feeds me like there's no tomorrow. Even when my hands were full with an apple and half a sandwich she reached out to me with a cookie and yet another sandwich and said, 'Eat Lindsay, eat.' We had three loaves of bread, apples, grapes, oranges, chocolate cookies and wafers, pickles, salami and the holy grail of Mongolian picnics, an entire pig's head. My uncle whipped out the cutting board and started slicing pieces of fat from it's neck and ears. Shortly followed by my mother making me another sandwich. I tried to explain to them that I prefer the leaner meats, but my attempts were lost in translation and my ability to reiterate my preferences obstructed by the two other sandwiches I was being forced to eat.

When the sun set over Tuv aimag and our family had finished eating we packed up the leftovers, rolled up the carpet and piled back into the van to drive into the early evening lights of UB. What I had expected to be a three hour tour (a three hour tour) of Gandon Monastary turned out to be a whole day of climbing and chewing the fat. It didn't work out so well for the paper I had to write that evening, but I must admit it was one of the most interesting picnics I've had in a while. And that beats the watermelon and three spoons party I had on the Ithaca Commons late this August.