New Years Eve in Mongolia
Last night: the night between the 31st of December and the 1st of this new year proved a memorably good time.
Alan and I had devoted the preceding two days to our move. We had found a better and cheaper place to stay in a very central location through our friend Enkhbold. It was funny and rather alarming how the volume of our belongings had burgeoned in a short three months of staying in Ulaan Baatar. To mentally excuse us of too egregious a growth, I'll mention that some of the goods we moved were edibles and soaps and detergents that we wouldn't ordinarily travel with. We also have acquired a washing machine here, hence making our move one taxi-trip longer.
Even though the move was a tiring project, it carried with it a bit of excitement. A change. New horizons, a new frontier. The quarters we now occupy have the distinction of being of older, more classical construction. The building has fewer stories (our apartment is on the third and top floor), faces a real courtyard (in the Russian sense of "dvor") and boasts a feature that is the pinnacle of human comfort in my opinion 11 foot (or slightly higher) ceilings! We also now command a nice view of the mountains to the South of the city. Moreover, within mere hours of our move-in process we've identified our new neighbors as having a much friendlier disposition than the previous ones. One man saw me carrying bags up the stairs and promptly emerged to give a hand. Another lady greeted us today which is almost more verbal interaction than we had had in three months with anybody in our Sansar place. Even Harley, our pet hedgehog, quickly pointed out the spatial superiority of this flat: in the first fifteen minutes of arrival he gleefully jogged around the perimeter of our three new rooms at least a half a dozen times. Having a much bigger kitchen is an instantly apparent plus. In a few weeks we will be hosting our good friend YT, and rest happily assured that the three of us will fit in said kitchen without having to fold and stack YT up on top of the refrigerator, which would have been the only working solution in the previous place.
And so, exhausted but happy we realized that the New Year was approaching. Alan and I had been invited to a party co-hosted by our South African friend Stevan, but as the clock ticked and daylight faded away, I almost wished we did not have the engagement. In retrospect I am glad that I did not sack out before the soiree.
Robert LaMont is an American lawyer working on court reform in Ulaan Baatar through USAID. His apartment is very close from the headquarters of the project with which I am associated through my scholarship. Like us, he also lives in an older building with tall ceilings. His place however, as we jealously noted, has had the benefit of full remodeling. His is the first apartment that we have seen in Mongolia that lacks any sort of wallpaper. Wallpaper in this country is like a plague* it pervades any inhabited or inhabitable quarters and comes in an array of splendidly ugly, splendidly gaudy combinations. Most of it is floral in nature, and the "better" stuff features shiny silver patterns superimposed on gray scrawlings below it.
So here we were drooling over Robert's tastefully decorated place (rugs from his stint in Iran, shadow puppets from Cambodia, antique Mongolian ger furniture, wooden Buddha sculptures, portraits of the Dalai Lama, bamboo parquet, beautifully healthy house plants, bookshelves full of good books) mingling with some interesting people and grazing on some tasty New Year's bits. Among the latter, a fresh vegetable dip that could have been mistaken for a mustard in color stands out. It turns out that it consisted of mayonnaise spiced up with curry powder, garlic and cayenne pepper (a recipe to remember).
At Robert's I met a pleasant Arkansas woman who works at the US Embassy here and an interesting German gentleman in public health. The latter, I thought, looked rather like a subdued, trim and proper version of a graying Oscar Kokoshka. He spoke at great speed and with some passion and a spark that showed his interest for his own work. Most of his job centers around public health, much of which focuses on family planning and sex education for secondary school in five aimags of Mongolia.
Finally, as I finished my conversation with Wolf, and as midnight approached, I ambled over into the bay window where the food (and my husband) were. Alan was talking to KC, a guy that we had met early on in our introduction to Mongolia but had lost track of since then. As champagne glasses were offered to each guest, KC suggested that we take a five minute walk from Robert's flat to the central square, Sukhbaatar Square and meet the New Year under the shower of Mongolian New Year's fireworks. We were only happy to follow this excellent recommendation.
And so, bundled up back into our outerwear, the four of us: Alan, myself, KC and his Mongolian friend Nima trundled off to the Square. We approached the lively crowd assembled round the "Ice city", a large subsection of the Square, where in the past several weeks groups of amazing, large sculptures and children's slides were erected in the sturdy but glowingly translucent medium of ice. KC studiously attended to shaking up our companion bottle of New Year's champagne for a big eruption, which came to pass as soon as the festive fireworks above and around the Square grew denser, more urgent and thicker. In the cold chill of a reportedly "especially harsh" Mongolian winter, with dancing Christmas lights strung up in haphazard fashion around the ice monuments and with the wind whipping along smoke-like wisps of dry snow, chasing and interweaving them along the dark night pavement, the bubbly fizzing potion was exactly the right festive touch. We bounced about dancing, hopping, hugging, drinking, gazing up into the firework filled air. Then we directed our steps into the thickness of the crowd in and around the Ice City.
The four of us slid down one of the slides. As gravity's influence lightened it's pull, and friction did its job another slider from behind and on top of me gave me a good shove and spin from behind not unlike two billiard balls. Everywhere was merriment and children. KC and Nima made their departure to rejoin Robert's party, but Alan and I hung behind to take in the last sites of the New Year's arrival on Sukhbaatar Square. We reviewed the ice creations with already several of them exhibiting great traces of wear, tear, and New Year's revelry. Several ice dinosaurs (in honor of Mongolia's paleontological riches) had paid dearly with bits of tail and spike. One very cleverly assembled crocodilomorph emerging from a pond of frozen "water" and gingerly holding her egg in her massively toothed jaw had her entire snout missing by the first few minutes of the child year. And here and there a few enterprising souls were running around with small carts with fire going cooking mutton pieces on a stick.
A few minutes later, entirely satisfied with the proceedings of the New Year night Alan and I, holding hands, turned our footsteps away from the Square and towards our New home. I am happy I spent the evening in such rewarding fashion: with interesting new people, in a tastefully decorated apartment with good food, and then with the lovely experience of champagne on ice amongst sites that we would never have seen had we not been in Ulaan Baatar: snow sparkling below us, ice sculptures sparkling around us, and webs of colorful fireworks sparkling above us.
* Alan claims that the wallpaper is worse than a plague: calling it a plague implies that someone objects to it, which clearly, the Mongols don't. It's more like a family member that won't leave.
So, that was Zina's essay on our first and only (so far) Mongolian New Years. My account of our holiday festivities continues on the next page.
NOTICE: all contents copyright Alan Lapp and Zina Deretsky 2003