MWW 30: Хуушуур

Cyrillic	хуушуур
Transcription	huushuur
IPA	[χʊ:ʃʊr]
Layman’s Pronunciation	HOH-shore
Translation	fried meat dumpling
In Genghis Khan’s time, I’m not sure if it existed.

America has hot dogs and hamburgers, Mongolia has buuz and huushuur. In each case, you’ve got two different, but essentially similar things that have sort of become archetypal. Americans, stereotypically, eat hot dogs and hamburgers, and grill ‘em outdoors on Independence Day or Labor Day. In Mongolia, buuz and huushuur are probably the two foods that people cite as their favorites, and which get hyped as “Mongolian national food.”

Hot dogs and hamburgers are both molded ground meat in a bun. Buuz and huushuur are both ground meat in a dough pocket which is pinched shut with pretty designs. Within this identical basic framework though, they’re way apart. The main difference is that buuz is steamed, but huushuur is deep-fried. Aside from that, they’ve also differentiated themselves in lots of other details. They tend to be pinched with different styles, use different seasoning combinations, and be associated with holidays at opposite times of year.

бууз	хуушуур
steamed	deep-fried
stiff dough	floppy dough
round and compact	long and flat
pinched at the top	pinched along the side
stereotypical Tsagaan Sar food	stereotypical Naadam food

Huushuur with coleslaw or something

Huushuur from the fast food chain Haan Buuz

As often happens in life, the biggest divide seems to occur between the two most similar things. Serbs and Croats. Crips and Bloods. Buuz and huushuur. Personally, I choose huushuur. Which one will YOU choose?

Now I’m hungry.

China, Part I: The Trip There

In Midsummer I took a trip to China. Often people fly in on some package tour, but seeing as I'm adjacent to China, and I'm poor, a different route appealed to me. Drawing on the experience of other PCVs, I traveled entirely by land, taking a sequence of trains, cars, and buses to get from here to there. My goals were Beijing, and Shanghai, where I intended to visit a friend I hadn't seen since I studied abroad in Japan (and who was kind enough to write me the invitation letter I needed to get my visa).

July 27

My adventure starts on July 27. On this day, I took the overnight Mongolian domestic train to Zamyn Uud, a town by the Chinese border. I had a "hard seat," which means I have to sit up (or slouch) all night. There isn't much to say about that.

July 28

The train arrived in the morning. There are jeeps by the station to carry people across the border. Land crossing must be done in a vehicle. However, there are two checkpoints, a Mongolian and a Chinese one. At each one, everyone and everything must be taken out of the car and physically taken through the immigration office in the checkpoint, then put back in the car to continue on. At the Mongolian checkpoint, I discovered I had the wrong bureaucratic form with me. By the time I found and completed the correct form and went through the line again, my impatient driver had driven off. I had to flag down a new car to take me the rest of the way.

In this way I arrived in Erlian (Mongolian: Ereen), a border town in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, and the counterpart to Zamyn Uud. After having traveled all this way, what was the first thing I ate in this brave new world? Mongolian food. In Inner Mongolia, I found myself instantly seeking out the ethnic Mongolians instead of the ethnic Han, so I stopped by a diner and demanded the Mongolian menu, to the waitress's surprise, and ordered huushuur. It was noticeably different from the huushuur I'm used to. The Mongolian spoken around here sounded strange, so that I was initially not sure that some people were actually speaking Mongolian, although they understood me well enough when I spoke standard UB Khalkh dialect. Actually, one woman at the diner jumped out of her seat and exclaimed, "Whoa, I've never heard a white person speak Mongolian before! Can I take a picture with you?"

Huushuur in Inner Mongolia

From Erlian, I took a bus to Beijing. The bus ran overnight, and had no seats, only bunk beds, as can be seen in the picture below.

Sleeper bus

July 29

The bus was supposed to arrive in Beijing at 5 AM or so, but it actually arrived at 2 AM and dumped in some dark parking lot in who knows where. I had to catch a taxi to Beijing Station. The central train station was one of the dirtiest places I've seen, although I was also seeing it for the first time at 2:30 AM. In front is one of those "We need to build a huge place for Socialist rallies" squares, which was covered in trash and people sleeping on the ground in cardboard boxes. Other people wandered around trying to hustle you for rooms. I bought a map off one of them for $3 (I would later find out this is 10 times the price I should've paid). Occasionally a guy with a straw broom would come along and push the trash up against a lightpole. Instead of waiting in the open, I went to the only place open at the time - McDonald's. A McDonald's which, I soon found out, had no fries.

Goodness, China has swamps!

After falling asleep inside the station for several hours, I boarded the slow train to Shanghai. This ran for 20 hours, and I had a hard seat here too. This brings us to July 30, Shanghai, and the next part of my adventure.

MWW 29: Сум

Cyrillic	сум
Transcription	sum
IPA	[sʊm]
Layman’s Pronunciation	SOOM
Translation	county, district, village
In Genghis Khan’s time it was sumu.

Map of Mongolian sums: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Mongolia_sum_map.png

A sum (also transcribed soum sometimes) is a kind of political subdivision in Mongolia. In English it is usually translated as "district" or "county." Here in PC Mongolia, we usually don't translate it and just say sum in English, because we all know exactly what we're talking about, and don't have to say things like "district" that don't really fully convey what we mean by a sum. Sum also has connotations of "rural," and the sums collectively make up the хөдөө (hödöö, "countryside"), which stands in contrast to the various хот ("city"), including aimag centers (аймгийн төв), designated cities (like Дархан / Darhan and Эрдэнэт / Erdenet, which have equal status to provinces), and the capital Улаанбаатар / Ulaanbaatar. (As a matter of fact, Mongolians usually don't say "Улаанбаатар," they just say хот "the city." When unspecfied, it's assumed they mean Ulaanbaatar.)

If you visit a typical sum, you will find yourself in a small and often undeveloped (by American standards) kind of human settlement that would probably fit the image of a "village." They average about 3,000 people. The one exception is Хархорин (Kharkhorin), which is the ancient capital, a major tourist site, has over 14,000 people, and generally fits the description of a town. This part is the "sum center," because technically the sum also includes the out-of-sight nomads who orbit the sum center. Soums are divided into small units (often only a couple hundred people) called bags (баг). Usually the soum center is one bag, with the surrounding steppe divided into several more bags.

Here in Peace Corps we often divide volunteers into UB volunteers (in Ulaanbaatar), aimag volunteers (in aimag centers / provincial capitals), and soumers (out in rural areas). Not many volunteers get put in UB (proportionally much fewer than the 40% or so of Mongolia's population that lives there). Most people get put in aimag centers, which usually have plenty of infrastructure but are still only partly developed. Aimag centers usually have several PCVs together. Sums aren't big enough to warrant having many developers, so soumers, almost by definition, are the only volunteers, and often the only non-Mongolians at their sites. The exception, again, is Kharkhorin, which has two volunteers (but this is still smaller than some aimag centers that have half a dozen volunteers or so). Soumers also generally deal with fewer options in shopping, and fewer or no places to eat out. UB and aimag PCVs are usually put up in apartments. Soum PCVs are never in apartments, and almost only in gers (except some in forested areas who have wooden houses). Six volunteers, including me, have no internet access at site, and we're all soumers. For us, using the internet, visiting friends, or buying fruit means traveling from site. That can be a journey of anywhere from 1 hour in my case, to 6 hours (I hear) in the case of another guy out in the Gobi. Soums may or may not have paved roads or plumbing. Sucks, doesn't it? Well...actually not. Pretty soon you get used to the "deprivation." Furthermore, we get the "жинхэнэ Монгол" ("real Mongolian") experience. Our daily lives are permeated with the kinds of things that tourists pay thousands of dollars to see for a week or two in the summer: gers, airag, horses, ovoos, vast skies and steppes, deel-clad nomads herding sheep, and nothing but Mongolian spoken. And anyway, if you just wanted to sit in a cushy apartment, why join Peace Corps?

MWW 28: Хаан

Cyrillic	Хаан
Transcription	haan
IPA	[χa:ŋ]
Layman’s Pronunciation	HAHNG
Translation	ruler, emperor
In Genghis Khan’s time it was qaγan.

When you see the name “Genghis Khan,” the “Khan” part is not Genghis’s last name, it’s his title, marking him as the supreme ruler of the Mongols. This term didn't originate with Genghis. As a title for rulers, it actually appears throughout history in lots of different Central Asian tribes. Turkish has an equivalent word too, kağan. While it may not have been Genghis's family name, it is probably the origin of the name Khan that is found in some Asian countries.


Хаан is similar to but distinct from хан, which in olden times referred to the ruler of a mere province or region. Genghis on the hand, was the supreme ruler, the хаан, with a double аа: twice the vowel length, twice as important. Actually, the long vowel is only modern Mongolian - originally it was qaghan, with a consonant in the middle. However, since that consonant gh is the voiced counterpart to the q that begins the word, I wonder: was reduplication at work here long ago, and can I find it in any other words? Could a similar process have been at work in making the word for queen, хатан?

MWW 27: Монгол

Cyrillic	Монгол
Transcription	Mongol
IPA	[ˈmɔŋ.ɢəɬ]
Layman’s Pronunciation	MONG-gle
Translation	Mongolia, Mongolian
In Genghis Khan’s time it was Moŋγul.

This one is so obvious it’s a wonder it took me this long to get it up. In addition, it should be easy to remember and pronounce, since it’s almost the same as its English equivalent, largely because the English word is borrowed from the Mongolian word. According to the online etymology dictionary, it may come from a native word meaning brave, though I don't know this word.

At this point I'd like to point out the fact that in Mongolian, country names can be used directly as a modifier without any suffix or other overt! This unlike many Mongolian nouns, and also unlike English usage of country names. Notice that in the English translations, Mongolia has to be turned into an adjective by adding -n.

Монгол - Mongolia

Монгол улс - Mongolia
Монгол хэл - Mongolian (language)
Монгол хүн - a Mongolian (person)
Монгол дуу - Mongolian song

The same thing happens with other country names. The term for all Mongolian people together is Монголчууд, with the collective suffix -чууд.

More about country names: Most country names in modern Mongolian are the same as their Russian equivalents (with the exception that Mongolian usually lops off any final vowels) and also tend to look like their equivalents in other modern European languages. Some other national or ethnic names, however, persist from Pre-Soviet times. Sometimes you get an older word alongside a more modern word. I decided to put in a list of some of those terms I don't think came from Modern Russian

English	Mongolian
China	Хятад (Hyatad)
India	Энэтхэг (Enetheg)
Kazakh	Хасаг (Hasag)
Korea	Солонгос (Solongos)
Mongolia	Монгол (Mongol)
Russia	Орос (Oros)
Tibet	Төвд (Töwd)
Turkish	Түрэг (Türeg)
Tuvan	Урианхай (Urianhai)
Uzbek	Чантуу (Chantuu)

MWW 26: Айраг

A bowl and vat of airag

Cyrillic	Айраг
Transcription	airag
IPA	[ˈæ:rək]
Layman’s Pronunciation	AA-ruck
Translation	fermented mare’s milk, kumiss
In Genghis Khan’s time it was ayiraγ.

Airag is the Mongols’ traditional alcoholic beverage, made from fermented horse milk. The first airag I had was given to me, along with a hadag, in a rinsed-out 1.25L coke bottle when I first arrived at site. (Airag isn’t sold in stores; you get it from your rural cousins in a recycled coke bottle.) It wasn't bad but I didn’t like the milk solids that tended to float in it. I recently had some of the new stuff that’s just coming out this summer, and it was smoother. I could also see the little fermentation bubbles in the drops of airag that stuck to the cup. I drank at least three bowls of it. And an hour later I ran to the bathroom three times. Airag is not for the sensitive stomach: even Mongolians sip it little by little at the beginning of summer, until they rebuild their tolerance.

Making Airag

Airag appears early in the summer as mares produce foals, and thus milk. If you take a walk around where there are lots of horses, you can probably see women milking the mares. Why do we not have cow airag? The answer lies in the composition of the milk. Alcohol is made by fermenting sugar. Horse milk has the most lactose (milk sugar), so it gets the most alcohol. (Goat milk has the least, which is why it's the easiest on the stomach.) Airag is usually left to ferment in a leather bag near the door of a ger. (I’ve also seen a guy with a 60L vat of the stuff.) It’s “stirred” by punching the bag. It’s polite to give the bag a punch if you walk into a ger with someone brewing it. Airag continues to appear through autumn, and the autumn airag is considered especially potent. There was also airag at Tsagaan Sar. I don’t know if mares are still giving milk at this point, or if that stuff was somehow saved since autumn. Airag can also be made into a kind of “Mongolian vodka” (Монгол архи) by freeze distillation. You just leave your airag outside and part of the water content (but not the alcoholic content) will freeze and you can lift it out. That stuff is pretty nasty though. It tastes sort of like vodka with a hint of old cheese.

Airag Customs

At parties airag is usually ladled from from a large ceramic vase into a traditional аяга (bowl for eating and drinking). You drink as much as you can, then hand it back to your server, who refills it and passes it to the next guy (or back to you, if you're the only visitor). An amusing tradition is to make the guest sing, while holding the bowl, and sometimes while standing. Usually after a few lines everyone else joins in. Once you’re done (but not before), you may drink the airag.

Perhaps because airag is traditionally ingrained in the culture, and because its alcohol content is low, it’s not looked at the same way as other drinks like beer or vodka. It’s not “bad.” Mongolians just don’t think of it as “booze” and so they give it to little kids and pregnant women.

So since it’s summer again, here’s to the airag!

School Vacation / Fourth of July

As most of the world knows now, it's July, and thus well into summer. The Mongolian school year ends at the beginning of June / end of May, much like the American school year. And also much like the American school year, this originated for agricultural reasons. Summer is the busiest time of year not only for farmers (originally the majority of the US population), whose crops are growing, but also for herders, who have lots of young animals running around. In both cases, it was assumed that kids should help their parents, and so everything else was planned around it.

Horses, young and old

A lot of Peace Corps volunteers have therefore gone home for vacation or migrated to UB to enjoy its many luxuries. I didn't and had no fixed plans, so I was talked into running a summer English club back in my village. Not about to miss out on Fourth of July for that reason, I then talked my students into having a 4th of July party (it didn't take much talking). They raised the funds and bought the supplies. The original grand vision included fireworks and baseball - both of which are obscure out here - but at least we had marshmallows! So we started a fire and roasted sausages and marshmallows on pieces of abandoned wire.

Mongolian kids' weenie roast

That this took place is a small success and a bit of a miracle. The Fourth was very stormy, to the point that the wind began peeling the canvas cover off some gers, sending me running to my counterpart's house in anxiety that my home was falling apart. Actually, nothing structural was affected, and my stuff didn't even get wet. And by about 8:00 the weather cleared, allowing our party to take place anyway.

My ger on July 4

The rest of the country, meanwhile is gearing up for Naadam, the biggest sporting event of the year, and now I'm in UB running through hoops to get a Chinese visa, which promises to provide more material for blogging eventually.

Updates

This is a housekeeping day. Check the following words of the week for corrections or additions (including pretty pictures!):

тэнгэр
баяр
говь
овоо
сар
хадаг
хавар
салхи
аргал

MWW 24 - 25: Аргал (ft. Баас)

Cyrillic	аргал
Transcription	argal
IPA	[ˈar.qəɬ] or [ˈar.ɢəɬ]
Layman’s Pronunciation	ARGLE
Translation	dried dung
In Genghis Khan’s time it was arγal.

Cyrillic	баас
Transcription	baas
IPA	[pa:s]
Layman’s Pronunciation	BAAHHS
Translation	fresh dung
In Genghis Khan’s time it was baγasu.

Now that it’s late spring, the days are warm, the ground is clear, and poop is back. Let’s talk about poop!

Mongolian has two words for poop. Argal is dried dung, whereas fresh poo is baas. Species may be another criterion, because you can get argal from cows, goats, sheep, horses, and camels, but humans always make baas. The difference between the two types of poop is important. Baas is always gross - exactly like we Americans think of poop. It’s soft, dirty, sticky, stinky, and spreads germs and you want to stay as far away from it as possible. We hate it, flies love it. When it comes out of a cow, horse, sheep, or goat, it starts as baas. But over a few days, due to the gentle touch of nature (sunshine, wind), it is transformed - into argal. Argal is hard, dry, and doesn’t smell much. As I’ve found out, it isn’t anymore gross to pick up than a piece of wood, and it doesn’t attract flies. Most importantly, you can burn argal but not baas. Argal is an important fuel source. In fact, since Mongolians have herded for thousands of years and many still do, it’s probably the oldest, most readily available fuel.

This pile of argal will keep me warm tonight.

Dung as Fuel

There are three main sources of fuel for heating: dung (аргал), wood (мод, mod), and coal (нүүрс, nüürs). Of the three, dung is certainly the most environmentally friendly, and coal the least so. Unlike coal, dung doesn’t release poisonous gases, or leave behind ugly, dangerous dust. You’d better have a working carbon monoxide detector if you burn coal while you sleep. Also, it is the most renewable. Coal takes millions of years to develop and for all practical purposes, our supply is fixed. Wood can be replenished if we plant trees, but trees grow slowly, much slower than they’re cut down. But dung replenishes itself constantly with no direct effort by anyone. A herder’s supply is replenished every day when his animals poop. One more thing: poop is free. If it’s left out in the field, anyone can go grab it. I’ve never heard of a herder yelling, “Hey! That’s MY poop! Get your own!”

Argal on fire

So why use wood and coal at all? Dung gets used up fast. You need to keep shoveling more of it into your fire, perhaps every 20 minutes or so, if that’s all you’re using. Wood burns from 45 minutes to almost 2 hours, and it burns really hot (unless it’s damp). Coal doesn’t burn as hot, but it can burn for several hours. By combining wood and coal, you can keep your home very warm for a long time. It’s hard to do this with just dung.

To sum up, here’s a comparison chart based on my personal experience:

Parameter	Dung	Wood	Coal
Renewability	High Renews itself quickly	Moderate Renewable, slowly	Low Non-renewable
Danger (1)	Minimal: germs from stuff that’s too fresh	Low: splinters, handling sharp tools	High: carbon monoxide is deadly, and ingesting coal dust can cause other problems
Cost	Free. It’s there for the taking.	? (2)	? (2)
Labor	Minimal: walk around and pick up poo.	Intense: Cut down the tree, then saw and chop the wood.	Moderate: carry a large coal bag, and break the big pieces of coal up.
Temperature	Moderate	High	Low, moderate
Stamina	Low	Moderate	High
Pollution	Minimal	Minimal	High

(1) Of course, it’s possible to burn down your ger with all three.

(2) My school provides me wood and coal, so the cost is hidden from me. Another volunteer who lives in the Gobi near a coal mine says it can be purchased for about $8 per ton.

Fun Poop Facts

• Баас has an associated verb, баах. It means “to defecate.”
• The Mongolian expression for a pen accidentally discharging too much ink is Үзэг баах, or “the pen pooes.”
• Camels don’t poop! At least not in Mongolian. There’s no such thing as camel баас. Camels are so good at conserving water that their dung is dry enough to use as fuel as soon as it comes out. (It must hurt, though!)
• The past tense of баах - баасан - coincides with the word Баасан, “Friday / Venus.” They’re different in Classical Mongolian though: baγaγsan and basaŋ, respectively. The planet’s name is ultimately a Tibetan loanword.
• Баасан, with the other meaning, is common in personal names. The name Баасанхүү (Baasanhüü), roughly equivalent to “Son of Venus,” is homophonous with the phrase баасан хүү (baasan hüü), “the boy who pooped.”

MWW 21 - 23: Ингэх, Тэгэх and Яах

Cyrillic	ингэх
Transcription	ingeh
IPA	[ˈiŋ.gɪx]
Layman’s Pronunciation	ING-gikh
Translation	to do this, to do it like this
In Genghis Khan’s time it was inggikü.

Cyrillic	тэгэх
Transcription	tegeh
IPA	[ˈthe.gɪx]
Layman’s Pronunciation	TEH-gikh
Translation	to do like that, to do it like that
In Genghis Khan’s time it was tegekü.

Cyrillic	яах
Transcription	yaah
IPA	[ja:χ]
Layman’s Pronunciation	YAHKH
Translation	to do what, to do it how
In Genghis Khan’s time it was yaγakiqu.

One of the cool things about Mongolian is that it has proverbs. I don't mean widely-known sayings encapsulating conventional wisdom - although Mongolian has those, too - I mean something like what pronouns are to nouns. Just as pronouns can stand in generally for a noun phrase, so proverbs stand in for a verb. They refer back to actions mentioned previously, or that can be inferred from context, or that are unknown. There are three particularly important proverbs.

Ингэх and тэгэх are demonstrative proverbs. Ингэх means "to do something in this way" and тэгэх means "to do something in that way." They correspond to the pronouns энэ "this" and тэр "that" respectively. As a matter of fact, the Mongolian words for "this way / like this" and "that way / like that" are forms of the verbs ингэх and тэгэх.

ингэх         à        ингэж “like this” (“while doing this”)

ингээд “like this” (“having done this”)

тэгэх          à        тэгж “like that” (“while doing that”)

тэгээд “like that” (“having done that’)

Тэгээд is also used like a linking conjunction "(and) then." The doubled imperative form тэг тэг is also used to grant permission.

Ингэж хийнэ.
You do it like this.

Тэгээд сургууль явсан.
Then I went to school.

Би энэ номыг авна.
Тэг тэг.
I'm going to take this book.
OK. ("Do that.")

Яах is an interrogative proverb.  Its meaning is something like "do what? do it how?" It's very pervasive and found in many fixed expressions.


яаж how
яагаад why
Яасан бэ? What happened?
Яах вэ? What shall I do? What am I going to do?
Яах нь бэ? What in the world?
Яавч амжихгүй. It's impossible. (Whatever one does, one does not succeed)
Яасан ч яахав. I don't mind. (Whatever happened, what will happen) (яахав = яах вэ)
Яах ч аргагүй. There's no way out. (Whatever happens, there is no means)

And now for an example combining two of our verbs:

Тэгэлгүй яахав. Of course! (If one doesn't do that, what will one do?)