Every day we see and or do something we have never done before. These experiences are stacking up one on the other. Even though we are in Mongolia now I feel as if I still haven’t mentally processed Siberia, or Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan or, you get the picture.
In every country, every city, nearly every night we dine with new friends. Last night there was a man eating by himself who looked like a foreigner so we invited him to our table. We spent the evening with John, an American who has lived in China and just wrapped up a trip there, currently from Manhattan who works for a NP that is hired to do diplomatic work with China. Great conversation, great spirit of camaraderie. In Oolgi we met two Americans who had been in Oolgi for only two days and beginning a two year Peace Corp post there. We had dinner with them, one from Encinitas and one from Houston. Fun young men on a mission to make the world a better place and fully prepared to live in places with no running water and winters of 30 below weather for 6 months…. shudder. We have experiences like this every day.
We had a similar experience in Siberia. Half way to the Mongolian border from Barnaul, Russia, is a tiny artist’s colony; Chemal. We pulled in at 6:00 on a Sunday and everything was pretty much closed up for the night but we found a nice B&B. As we sat outside having a piva (beer), a Russian family vacationing for the weekend invited us over for some homemade cranberry schnapps. We ended up spending the whole night with them, eating, drinking and using the Banya they had rented for the evening. Alex, the father, invited his friend, the Chief of Police of Chemal, to join in the festivities. We sat and drank schnapps and drank schnapps and drank schnapps and then the Chief made a call and within the hour someone approached with a shopping bag which he gave to Jim and I. Inside, an enormous bag of Altai herbal tea which we haven’t tried but he says is famous in Russia for it’s health benefits, Ginseng for Jim (we told him we had 7 kids and everything was okay in that department… he had a good laugh!), some other female herb for me and some Altai dried mushrooms which are going in to a risotto when I get home (excited!). Then I asked if we were going to have problems at the border with the “tea” which looked very, well, herbal. LOL, they thought that was hysterical! Lot’s of teams saw pot growing wild in that area, though we did not.
The Banya (sp?) is a kind of sauna but more complex. It’s a building separated from the house and they said everyone in Russia has a Banya. Sure enough as we drove through the edges of the city we saw entire neighborhoods of tiny cottages with a tiny yard and kind of patio covering with a picnic table beneath. We think they are Banyas for people who live in the giant Soviet era apartment blocks in the city. At any rate, you go into the banya and the first room is where you undress. You go through a door into a room that has a wood burning stove and a bench and faucet and plastic tubs. Here you wash up with cold water in a hot, dry, sauna. Then you go into the next room and there’s a regular hot rock sauna with wooden benches and a bucket of water and ladle. What’s not so regular is there is also a bunch of birch branches with leaves tied together in a bundle. You get all hot and steamy and then you thrash one another (or yourself) with the birch branches. It’s supposed to be super therapeutic because of compounds in the birch. I do not know about that but we had a good time whipping each other after six weeks in that tiny car! We were sooooooooo relaxed when we emerged we could barely walk the four flights to our room.
I have more pictures but it is just excruciatingly slow…. been at this for 2 hours and the exploration of UB awaits!