Some lessons from Mongolia

A few lessons from Mongolia for my lovely loyal readers:

Horse meat should be eaten cold, not hot. Hot horse meat is of course disgusting. I am surprised you didn’t already know this.

The stairs are a perfectly reasonable place to have a sleep. I found a very drunk young man asleep in the stairwell of our apartment building.  It is so incredibly cold outside now that the jagged stairs are of course a better option than the street. I gave him some water and saw him upright in the morning. Better luck next time mate

Marmot meat is very delicious to Mongolians, although when my workmate offered me some today I felt so guilty. Marmots are on their way to extinction. Unfortunately, the little things have their taste against them. If they tasted like hot horse meat they wouldn’t be so sought after now would they?

I haven’t been paying enough attention to cleaning behind my ears. I realised what being clean behind the ears is when I had a full body scrub with my colleague. The scrubber puts her full weight into it, sanding you down like a fat naked piece of wood on a table. Like a beached whale isn’t a bad analogy either since she chucked buckets of water on you intermittently to wash away the dead skin like you would do a whale who is stuck on the sand.

Mongolian women aren’t as squeamish to be naked in the shower/sauna/scrubbing table as I am.

What cold is. I now know what true freezing cold is. Cold is -35 and you can’t get a taxi which is suddenly much harder to do than when it was warm and didn’t seem so URGENT. When you walk for 35 minutes in -35 you learn what cold is. -35 is fucking freezing. It’s like someone is smooshing a block of ice against your face and legs. That kind of cold stings. Even Mongolians would call -35 cold. It is the year of the monkey you see. I am told winter in the year of the monkey is always harsh.

That I need to wear more clothes when it is -35.

That at such temperatures your snot freezes. Out there it constantly feels like you have a booger.

That other cultures will just call you out if you’ve put on weight. Twice now I have been told I’m packing it on. Like directly, hey you are getting fatter. Well maybe if the food here wasn’t all fried and tasty and full of meat and fat. Oh and beer.