Christmas in Absurdistan

Xmas in UB

Ulaanbaatar turns you into James Garner from The Great Escape.  You become a scrounger, regularly trawling through up to 9 or 10 places to do all your shopping.  Once you find something decent (like, say some hot sauce from Mexico) in the markets, it's imperative to buy up as much as you can carry and to never, ever tell any other expat about the exact location of your discovery.  (I made that mistake once and then, a few days later, an entire shelf of pickles from North Carolina disappeared from the State Department Store's supermarket.)

Supply chains to Mongolia are so thin that when something useful sells out at the supermarket, you might not see it for months, if ever.  This seems to be because most of the food seems to be put on a train in Germany and sent via the Trans Siberian Railway, with occasional random treats flown in from the States or Korea (depending on where you're shopping).  It's an absurd way to stock a country, especially when food giant China lies just to the south of you.  Although, with the ever flowing news of disgusting food handling procedures in China, perhaps this is a blessing.  

Expats and locals who are lucky enough to regularly leave the country stock up on essentials in other countries, so that flights into Chinggis Khan International Airport resemble food drops to impoverished nations.  The luggage conveyor belt (the only one at the airport) heaves with boxes full of dried food, fresh fruit, vegetables, cans and jars, sacks of legumes, random specialities of wherever you're coming from, tastes of home and tastes of abroad forever unavailable in Mongolia. 

Last week, we cooked Christmas lunch for 9 people.  Tess' family had made the trek up to UB from Beijing and Melbourne for the holidays and we invited a few of our friends over as well.  Scrounging the usual Xmas accoutrements for that many people becomes a necessarily organised, coordinated and determined process in UB.  

The main challenge was finding a turkey in a country that not had a regular, if any supply of the big bird for about a year.  We asked Our Dear Friend Will to head the Turkey Exploration Subcommittee and he immediately turned to Daniel, the chef, owner, barista, and impresario of Millie's, the local diner that serves as the gathering place for large swaths of the expat community in town.  Millie's is a close UB analogue to Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca, and Daniel is perhaps one of the most connected dudes in town as I'm sure he basically knows everyone and almost everything that's happening in town, because everything is discussed at Millie's.  

Daniel asked his usual suppliers and the answers were uniformly depressing: there had been no turkeys in Mongolia since last year when a bunch were trained up from China.  We explored other options (an English butcher, the markets) and they confirmed the news.  And then, a few days later, a breakthrough, some South Carolinian company, possibly via a Russian intermediary, had dumped a few frozen turkeys in Mongolia and we had one.  

We then had to find all the rest of the necessary elements of Christmas.  Tess brought up frozen cranberries sourced in the incredible Hong Kong expat supermarket CitySuper.  A ham was located in a market across the street from the American embassy in Beijing.  I baked many loaves of bread from German rye flour: one for stuffing and the others for general eating.  We scrounged our way around Mercury Market for all our fresh vegetable needs.  The supermarkets provided everything else we needed, although, sometimes in comically large quantities so that we, for example, had to buy a litre of corn syrup and a kilogram of pecans for a pecan pie that needed a tenth of that at most.  

Cooking a turkey for the first time is an event rich with deeper significance.  For a week, I researched online obsessively for the best tips.  Stuffed or unstuffed.  High heat or low heat.  To brine or to salt or to not brine.  Trussed or untrussed.  Some recipes were incredibly fiddly and fussy (I have to drape the breast in a butter and white wine soaked cheese cloth for 60% of the cooking time? Fuck that noise, Martha Stewart!).  Others were the handed down wisdom of American homemakers, calling for the best in mid 60s comfort seasoning mixes.  Deep fryers were sometimes called for.  Some chefs offered their best bullshit cheffified sure to be turkey disasters.

Apart from the logistics of cooking a small dinosaur sized bird, there's the whole thing about being the first of the next generation to host and cook a Christmas dinner.  This puts those of the previous generation in an odd spot, one which they had never experienced, but soon confronted after enthusiastically and adventurously putting their hands up for a Christmas in UB.  The turkey is a case in point, as Tess' family never has turkey for Christmas, but it was something that I had always had growing up and was my first priority in Christmas feasting (for the day and then for the turkey juk a.k.a. congee the day or week after).  For a while, Tess' mum seemed at first unconvinced of any changes to the Christmas celebrations, aside from location, and then in turn paranoid about how we were going to junk all the traditions of the family.  In the end, not much had changed aside from a turkey in place of chicken and fish, some different takes on vegetables, the Christmas music (I insisted on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special soundtrack) and the giant bowl of maple bourbon eggnog we made (but wasn't drunk much in the end).

The day proceeded much as previous years I had celebrated with Tess and her family.  There was singing and dancing around the Christmas tree, followed by presents, and then finally a breakfast of sweet rolls, fruit and muesli.  Our Dear Friend Will and our good friends Lena and Nick came by around 2.  We ate lunch, which seemed to take a few hours, and then we went for a walk before dessert and more singing, which were mercifully (for me) cut off after awhile.  Outside on the streets of UB, Christmas day passed like any other day, as it's not a holiday since this is nominally a Buddhist country (a meat eating, vodka swilling, drunken fighting nation at that).  In fact, I had to specially request the day off and then returned to teaching on the 27th.  

The juxtaposition of our celebrations and the normality of the day outside was, for lack of a better way of explaining it, another absurd moment in Absurdistan*.

*"Absurdistan" stolen or borrowed from Our Dear Friend Will.  

A final note: we've had a few visitors to UB since we came here but it's always interesting to see how China people are constantly surprised by the differences between the 2 countries.  Tess' parents are experienced Sinologists with 30 plus years of experience in and about China, so they, at times, shrugged off our advice about Mongolia (from the safety of public transit to the nonavailability of lentils in supermarkets) mostly to adverse though not disastrous results.  While they adapted to UB somewhat by the end of the week, it was clear that despite geographic proximity, this is a very different place, a divergence that becomes exremely apparent to me the more time I spend here.

The Talent Show

In September, I heard the first whispers about something called "the Talent Show," and how it was going to happen in December but I had no idea about what it would entail or its scope.  Details started to emerge a few weeks ago.  Basically, every class from grade 1 to 11 would participate and each class would present a song, a dance and a dramatic performance.  The Talent Show would take place over 2 6 hour days at a local theatre across the street from school.

It's supposed to be a fun venture (but is shockingly serious) and for two weeks before the show, the kids practised almost every day after school, and on the weekends.  All the windows of the classrooms' were covered over so other classes couldn't get a glimpse of the preparations going on in the rooms.  During this week, the final run up to the Show, all educational goals were shelved for the sake of the Show.  Out of the 12 double lessons I had scheduled this week, I taught 4 as the students were sequestered by their homeroom teacher to practise their routines.  I would show up for class, ready and willing to go, and, if the class was nice about it, one of them would make an appearance and "ask" for permission to practise.  Other times, I would go to my room and find it locked or full of another class.  Eventually, I just stopped going to class.  When I did have class, students were too tired to focus and were distracted to the point of being unable to do any work.  A student in a grade 8 class confessed that they'd been working on the talent show every day and then were at school all weekend!  Insanity.

(At this point, you might be like, "oh boo hoo, you didn't have to do any work this week."  That's basically correct but, as I've described previously, being at school with no teaching related work to do is damn boring, and a soul crushing waste of time.)  

I didn't get to see any of the primary school talent show (I'm told I didn't miss much) but I did watch a fair bit of the secondary Show today.  First, the sheer length of it (7+ hours today with one break) was impressive and oppressive.  The performances themselves were mostly short but seemingly never ending due to their profusion.  Despite the "one song, one dance, one play" format, it seemed like every class instead fit 3 or 4 songs and dances into their "set" so that it was difficult to tell when one ended and another performance began.  There were the somber songs about the necessity of water, the John Denver cover (!!!), the somber monologues in Mongolian, the en masse dancing to dubstep, the overly dramatic skits about life on the steppe/Chinggis Khan/both, the Adele cover (played by a bunch of grade 8s learning how to play their instruments), the songs on traditional instruments, the modern interpretative solo dance pieces, the bboy routines and so on and so forth.  (And that was just the kids in grades 6 to 8!)

In an Australian or a Canadian school, I think such a show would be a voluntary, extra curricular pursuit (if anything at all), instead of at the centre of the school's priorities.  In a way, and I have no evidence for this whatsoever, it seemed like a holdover from the days of Communism, with its emphasis on the collective performing completely irrelevant pursuits for the benefit of the whole (at the expense of the larger, more important goals).  I'm paraphrasing here (and leaving out some profanity), but one foreign teacher asked, "if that was it, that wasn't worth all the lost time."  He is, of course, dead right but perhaps there's more since the students who won were pretty happy.  The losing classes though were devastated.  I tried to say hello to one of my most boisterous students afterwards and he couldn't respond to me at all, utterly heartbroken at his class' failure.   Perhaps that's the lesson of the Talent Show (and much of Mongolia): there are winners and then, son, there are losers.

3 sights on the way to school today:

• I passed by a manhole that I know is home to a few dudes.  Those unfortunate souls without even ger space live in the sewers, huddled next to the heat bearing pipes for warmth.   Usually, it's closed but this morning, for some reason, it was open.  I peeked in and saw 2 fellows hunched together in the space of a phone booth, in a completely dark, dank and filthy sewer.  Running straight through their space, and serving as a divide between the two, was the heating pipe, spewing out steam and whatever else.  
• Further on, one of UB's ubiquitous feral dogs was hobbling along, shivering in the cold morning air, in the parking lot outside a hotel.  It spotted a dark , now frozen pool of (human) vomit.  Starving, cold and probably on its last legs, it stopped and ate the vomit.
• For a Buddhist country, there sure are a lot of Christmas related decorations around.  Every major building has a massive fake tree outside of it now (the biggest is in Sukhbaatar Square outside the parliament, naturally).  But, the one display that got my attention is above.  Central Tower has gone above and beyond by setting up a giant, Coke sponsored Santa Claus, which somewhat oddly is glancing ominously towards a statue of Marco Polo, as if to say, "what the fuck are we doing here?"

The Cold, The Cold

Portrait of the Bloggeur as a Cold Man

I grew up in Edmonton, so I grew up in the cold.  The changing of the seasons there was brutal and unrelentingly regular.  After 2 months of OK summer and 2 months of ever more depressing fall, winter and snow arrived by Halloween and then you lurched into Spring in late March.  With winter comes the tools of survival and the usual travails.  You froze your ass off.  You hauled out your winter gear (parkas, long johns, snow pants, gloves, mittens for when it was too cold for gloves, toques, scarves of various lengths, and whatever else might be useful).  You spent your time after school toboganning down ridiculous steep slopes on your trusty blue Krazy Karpet.  You had your heart broken by the Oilers.  It was winter: these things just always happened.

I left Edmonton when I was 18 and since then I have never really experienced a true, damn cold winter.    Vancouver's winter features pounding rain and general, grey dreariness.  Toronto has its cold moments (especially when the wind comes off the lake) but, in my one winter there, it was generally mild and tolerable.  Melbourne's winters seem much colder than they actually are, especially if you are blessed with a cold house without any central heating (pretty much guaranteed if you want to live anywhere decent).

I have now found myself in a real winter for the first time since 2000.  (I've been holding off on writing about the cold for awhile until UB had well and truly sunken into its deep Siberian chill.)  It's now about minus 35 in the mornings climbing perhaps 15 or so degrees on a great day or 4 or 5 on a lacking one.  And there's another 10 to 15 degrees to drop before we hit the bottom and the yak's heart freezes.  I leave the apartment at sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 each morning, and head into the darkness and cold bundled up in all the winter essentials.  The time just before sunrise seems to be one of the coldest times of the day.  By the time I've walked to school in 20 minutes (see: above portrait), my beard is frosted over and logged with icicles, my thighs ache with cold (especially if I forgot the longjohns), my feet tingle with cold (probably because I wore my Fred Perry sneaks instead of my boots) and my will to power is nearly sapped.

It's funny what's comes back to you, as long repressed knowledge of living and walking in the cold flood your consciousness.  What to wear.  How to find the warmest routes.  Your ingrained knowledge of when you're damn cold but ok and when you're damn cold and fucked.  I've found it's all about knowing your limits and experiencing what's ok with your body and what's not in extreme climates.  I often (over)hear Australians in town complaining about the amount of layers and clothes you have to wear and the time it take sto get ready to face the elements.  But, then, I was a whinging mess of a man during my first few, sweat logged summers in Australia.  Eventually, you learn what you can do and what you can't and you get on with your life.

UB's cold though is more extreme than Edmonton's for a couple reasons.  First, the depth of Edmonton's winter doesn't compare.  You get your minus 40 days here and there, but it doesn't stay down there for months on end.  And, second, Edmonton doesn't have Ulaanbaatar's smoke problem, that makes it the second most polluted city in the world.  One of UB's most striking features are its extensive ger (yurt) districts that comprise about half of the city's population (perhaps 500 to 600 thousand people).  Each ger has its own stove for cooking and heating, but to make it warm enough to be livable, the gers are forced to burn all sorts of shit ... from dirty, lower than low grade coal to bricks to tires.  The city's geography, nestled in a long valley ringed by high hills, means that the smoke doesn't have a chance to blow away, leaving an ever present haze of cough enducing coal smoke.  It's interesting teaching the kids about urban development in IGCSE Geography because, reading the tests and homework, you'd think that ger produced smoke is the biggest issue facing the world right now.  But, to these kids and anyone who lives in UB, the smoke is something that you experience everyday: it's ultra visible and damaging.

In a cosmic joke, the heating of Ulaanbaatar is worthy of an absurdist novel, designed and built as it was by the Soviets.  Basically, almost every permanent building (excluding ger districts and some new developments) is heated centrally via a network of over and underground prehistoric looking pipes that carry steam and heat from various plants directly to your apartment  (much heat is lost from origin to destination).  For most people, you have no control over it.  It's turned on in September and it's turned off in May.  The intensity depends on the building with some receiving a paltry amount and others enduring furnace like heat.  My building, probably due to how it was the apartment of the secret police, is definitely in the latter.  The heat, especially in the bedroom, is so overbearing that we often need to open windows to regulate the heat (and let a lot of smoke in), sometimes for hours upon hours in the night. The only salvation from the heat comes from the smoke laden, minus 35 winter air.