Fun Facts About Mongolia

If you were going to move to another country, you'd want to find out everything about it. I did, and I'd like to share some of the interesting little fact(oid)s I've found about Mongolia.

• Mongolia is the 19th-largest country in the world.
• Mongolia is the 2nd-largest landlocked country in the world (after Kazakhstan). Before Kazakhstan became independent, Mongolia was THE largest landlocked country.
• Mongolia is bordered by 2 countries: Russia (the Siberian part) in the north, and China (the desert part) on all the other sides.
• Western Mongolia contains the furthest point away from the ocean of any point of land in the world.
• Mongolia has the lowest population density of any independent country (about 4 people per square mile).
• But it has 81 airports.
• Mongolia's capital, Ulaan Baatar, has the lowest average temperature of any world capital (it averages below freezing for 8 months of the year).
• Mongolia has on average 257 cloudless days a year (which doesn't sound that different from Southern California).
• The lake Khövsgöl Nuur contains 2% of the world's fresh water.
• Mongolia has snow leopards, wild gazelles, reindeer, the world's only REAL wild horses (i.e., not just feral), and some elusive thing called "the Gobi bear."
• Cows, sheep, goats, horses, yaks, and camels outnumber people almost 30 to 1.
• Mongolia was the world's second communist country (after Russia).
• More women than men go to college there.
• As much as 8% of the men in Asia (2% worldwide) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.
• In Genghis Khan's time, urinating in water was punishable by death.
• In 2010, the tögrög was the best-performing currency world-wide.
• Rumors are circulating that the country will open its first McDonald's and Starbucks this year.

Feelings Going into Mongolia

When I was invited to Mongolia at the end of February, I was surprised because Mongolia wasn't a country I'd been nominated for, and I was uncertain of what to expect. I didn't know anything about Mongolia except what I learned for a report I wrote about Genghis Khan years ago. Immediately after accepting it was a rush to get the passport forms and other urgent paperwork in. But the more I read about Mongolia, the more excited I got, until I really couldn't imagine getting invited to any other country. It was all good for two whole months, with only a couple of moments of worry that something could happen before June - some sudden illness or injury or something. One of my friends was all set to enter the Marines in March when he sprained his ankle and boot camp got put off a month. If that happened to me, well, I'd already become endeared to Mongolia even though I'd never been there!

But in early May, even though I was still excited, the anxiety really stepped up. One day I went to the store and while walking down a random aisle, I suddenly stopped, got butterflies in my stomach, and just thought, "Holy ****! Mongolia! June 2nd!" It wasn't a panic attack, but it was just like it had all suddenly "hit" me. Most of the time the future creeps onward at a steady pace, but at that moment it was rushing down on top of me. Since then almost every day I've had one moment where I just stopped whatever I was doing, got this feeling like I'd had too much coffee, and inwardly screamed "Mongolia!"

Not to sound morbid, but I think of it as like a little death. In the case of death you have to make the most of your time alive - think seriously about what you want to do, and do it - because you're going away for a long time and you can't take anything with you. I have to make the most of my time in America, because I'm going away for a long time and I can't take much with me. I want every minute to be the most memorable, emotional minute ever. Now, I've also gotten frustrated because I feel like I've wasted all of the free time I've had for the last couple of years of under-employment, and that I've got to live two years in two weeks. Of course overall, my outlook has been positive. Major life changes bring every kind of emotion, don't they?

Сайн байна уу!

Сайн байна уу (Hello), I'm Andrew and I am a soon-to-be Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia. I finally have a blog to share what I hope to be many irreplaceable experiences in Mongolia. So, how about starting off with an explanation of my blog's name?

It took me forever to find a good name for this thing, as most of the cool, clever names have been taken in some way or other, but it came down to The Road to Xanadu and my friend Carlos's suggestion, Eye of Tengri. Xanadu, of course, is the name commonly given to the capital city of Khublai Khan, Genghis Khan's grandson and one of the rulers of the Mongol empire. Although I don't think the exact title The Road to Xanadu has been taken on blogspot, there are books with the name, and plenty of stuff on the net that has to do with Xanadu. Obviously Eye of Tengri won. Tengri means "sky," "heaven," and "God." The lord of the skies, Tengri was the spiritual center of the world for the nomadic people of Asia. His name is found in languages all over Asia. In Modern Mongolian it's тенгер (tenger). As he personifies the sky, Tengri is said to have two eyes, the sun and the moon. Because Mongolia is known as the "Land of the Eternal Blue Sky" where the weather is clear and the land is open, everything is always under the eyes of God.