More Kazakh than Kazakhstan

Before I took the job here in Mongolia, I was very interested in a trilingual school system in Kazakhstan, the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools.  Besides being a great opportunity, I was intrigued by Kazakhstan, which I was passing familiar with from reading (at that point - I watched it soon after) The Long Way Round.  When I mentioned it to my colleague in Shanghai, Iron Man, he asked, "Isn't that where Borat was from?"  >sigh<  ...PE teachers...

Yes, Borat was from Kazakhstan, but don't believe everything you see in movies.  Kazakhstan is a central Asian country, formerly part of the USSR, with a rich heritage, but the best place to experience their culture isn't Kazakhstan; it's Bayan-Olgii.  Chalk it up to the fact that Mongolia under communism wasn't as hard on culture as the Mother-Russian' Soviets.  After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a fair number of Kazakhs repatriated, but there are still plenty of them in Bayan-Olgii province. 

In fact, it hardly feels like part of Mongolia.  To start with, there are the gers....or, technically, yurts, although we were never able to get ourselves to call them that.  On the outside, they're taller and pointier.  And on the inside, they are even more colorful than Mongolian gers.  Kazakhs are famous for their beautiful, hand embroidery, and the tapestries that deck the...walls?...of their yurts are truly works of art.  I've been eyeing the tapestries and bags sold at Mary and Martha in town, but have been holding back since I knew I'd be going to the Eagle Festival this year.

(Note to anyone who might be interested in going - you can get a MUCH better deal buying them at the source.  Mary and Martha is a fair trade shop, and that's wonderful, but they are still there to make money.  If you are going anyways, do yourself a favor and save some money by eliminating the middle man!)

I ended up coming home with a new purse, a long, embroidered jacket with fox fur cuffs and collar, and a long, narrow antique piece that was honestly probably once on a pair of eagle hunter's pants.  Engrish, I think, came back with even more, although her vest was not quite as "dope yolo swag" (as my students would say) as my coat, on account of lacking kick-ass fox fur.

Oh, and the clothes!  I hope you've gotten a little bit of an idea of what the Kazakh style of dress is like, based on my last two posts.  Today on our way to the orphanage, we were passed by a Mongolian on a horse in his deel, and it seemed strange again, for a moment.  For a year I've been around men and women who wear Mongolian dress all the time - not just for special occasions - but after six days away it took me by surprise.  That's how different the clothing styles are.

I wish I'd taken more photos of Olgii itself, because it looks SO different from the towns in Central Mongolia.  Homes in Bayan-Olgii have flat roofs, and I don't know what it was, but they definitely had a kind of middle eastern feel to them.  Or so I thought, at any rate...Geek, being a veteran of Kuwait, might have disagreed (I didn't ask her because I was afraid of sounding like a moron.  OBVIOUSLY better to introduce this idea on a blog where the internet's anonymity allows people to be MUCH more bitchy!)

It is possible this is a connection I made up in my head, based on the fact that Kazakhs are traditionally Muslim.  Regardless of whether or not your friendly, neighborhood art teacher saw architectural similarities that weren't there, one thing Bayan-Olgii did have in common with my former host countries of Bahrain and the Emirates are its mosques.  Islamic ephemera doesn't give me nearly as many warm fuzzies as anything Korean, but I was hoping to hear the call to prayer, because I've always found something hauntingly beautiful about its sound.  I didn't hear it, but Engrish did, early one morning.

The change from monastery to mosque wasn't the only change in the scenery - we were also hard-pressed to find any ovoos, the stone cairns decorated with colorful silk scarves.  As we topped a pass going into the countryside on our third day, Engrish pointed out that any other place in Mongolia would have one in that precise location.  But not in Bayan-Olgii.  We did see one, and there was another marker that looked more Tibetan to me, with prayer flags tied onto a branch broken off from a tree, but these were few and far between.  Instead, the landscapes were dotted with cemeteries, which would be an oddity elsewhere in Mongolia.  Until the rise of communism, Mongolians typically put their dead to "rest" with sky burials, which means that they chopped up the body and left them on the mountains for animals to eat.  If birds came to feast, it was a sign that you were karmically ascending closer to nirvana.  On the other hand, being eaten by land creatures - dogs, for instance - was a bad sign (I think the whole concept would be a great way to get rid of a body if you murdered someone, which made Geek pretty uncomfortable until I pointed out that murdering her would NOT make me a very good role model for my students). 

Kazakhs, on the other hand, are (as I mentioned) good Muslims, which means they bury bodies with all the necessary rites.  And THAT means cemeteries to stop by and look at while driving hours on end through the countryside.  Speaking of which, you have one last blog to look forward to about Bayan-Olgii, and that's our trip into the countryside to see the "roof of Mongolia."  'Til then....

Who's Got Your Goat?

The afternoon of the Eagle Festival we had the chance to learn about a sport I'd heard of, but never seen.  Khaled Hosseini mentions it in The Kite Runner, and later in our trip, I read its name again in And the Mountains Echoed.  It's a popular sport in Central Asia (don't know your geography?  Central Asia is all the 'Stans), but it sounds barbaric.  It's called buzkashi.

It began with the players racing out onto the field on their horses, looping around the goals, and coming to the middle to trade handshakes or high fives in a show of sportsmanship.  A referee came out (on horse, of course!) and threw a decapitated, legless goat corpse on the field.  Yep, you read that right: headless, legless carcass.  Told you it sounded barbaric. 

The object of the game is to race over to the goat carcass and pick it up from the ground without getting off your horse, then race to the end of the field and fling it into the goal - a tower-like structure with a hollow in the top of it.  Sounds simple enough, if you like defying death, but retrieving the carcass from the ground is not the most difficult part (as hard as that may be to believe).  This year, the game was played between teams, whereas in years past it had been played by individuals. This means that even though you may risk your life picking up the goat, odds are highly unlikely that you will keep it long enough to put it in the goal, because a whole team of riders are going to be wrestling you for it, earning it the name of "tug-o-war with a goat carcass," which is how it's typically described to foreigners.

We were watching the teams from Sagsai Sum (a sum is, to the best of my knowledge, kind of like a county) and another sum, maybe Tsengel but don't quote me on that.  The local crowd was, of course, quite into it, but I was still surprised by how quickly Engrish and I got excited about it, and started cheering for the players ("Knock him off his horse!" might have been heard from us at one point).  But then, it is a sport you need to keep an eye on.  You stand at the sides of the field, and there is nothing separating you from the action.  Which means that you may find yourself in the path of a stampede of distracted horses and riders...and we did, several times throughout the afternoon.  Engrish almost peed her pants one time!

There was also a kind of a half-time show.  This was a race around the field.  The woman has a yellow handkerchief attached to her shoulder, which the man has to snatch off of her.  If he succeeds, she has to catch up to him and hit him with her whip.  In the background, you can see the buzkashi goal.

This was the lady who served us lunch earlier in the afternoon, and there were several other women who took part in this sport.  It was amazing to see them ride in their beautiful clothing.  I can't stress enough how awesome the Eagle Festival was.  It's going to be a hard one to top, whether I'm here for an extra year or not!

Fly Like An Eagle

As much as I loved Pamukkale, Turkish food was not and never will be the highlight of a trip to Bayan-Olgii.  That honor goes to the eagles.

The eagles were not the only thing going on out in this valley eastward from Olgii last weekend, but they are so amazing that they deserve their own post.  I took a LOT of photos of them, because they really were that cool.  It is hard to stop yourself.  And it's not just because of the birds - the Kazakh hunters (yes, Kazakhs in Mongolia - we'll get to that in my next post or two) are equally stunning.  Engrish asked me when we were walking around if I could tell the difference between the Mongolians and Kazakhs, and I could.  When she asked me which I found was more attractive, I had to go with the Mongolians, but the Kazakhs...as an artist, there is something so visually compelling about their weathered faces, their light colored eyes... 

On the trip out to the valley we drove past several groups of hunters riding out.  During the festival there are contests between them - calling their eagles down from the mountain.  On Saturday they were supposed to have come to the hunters' arms, but since our flight was delayed all damn day we missed that.  Sunday, on the other hand, the hunter rigged a sort of fox skin that they dragged behind their horse for the eagle to catch.  Some of them did better than others.  We saw some pretty sweet dives, and it was amazing to see how fast they flew.  Some of the eagles, when released, did a nice lazy circle around the spectators, or flew back over the mountain (they're well-trained, so I'm assuming they came back eventually).  And then there was this:

That guy is not nearly terrified enough.  A couple weeks back I stumbled on an article about footage from a camera on a Russian wildlife preserve.  It was there for the Siberian tigers, but it caught footage instead of a golden eagle taking down a deer.  That is how powerful these birds are.  In eagle hunting, they simply run down the prey and their hunter comes to club the animals, but they are more than capable on their own.  Well, friends of Engrish were telling us about the first day of the festival, and how a guy was climbing up the hillside where he wasn't supposed to be, and that one of the eagles attacked him, rather than flying to his hunter.  Mostly we didn't feel like we'd missed out on too much because of our delay, but that would have been classic.  We had barely finished talking about it when suddenly, one of the eagles swooped down ON THE SAME MAN!  We had no way to tell if it was the same eagle, but the fact that the guy got attacked twice over the weekend maybe ought to tell him something.  My takeaway is that if you look like an old, slow member of the "herd" (us spectators), you should not isolate yourself around predators.  Shit's gonna get real.

The eagles were everywhere.  This is the ger where Engrish, Geek, and myself stopped for khuushuur around noon.  This beauty was sitting there, patiently waiting.  I held a golden eagle when we were in Terelj at the end of summer, and they're heavy, so it's not surprising to see one parked in a ger...on a Kazakh carpet for sale...on the back of a motorcycle...

If you look closely at this man's arm, in fact, you will see a wooden prop.  This helps the hunters to hold up their arms for their eagles to perch on.  Looking at the hunters, I got the feeling that they weren't dressed up for the festival.  These were their working clothes.  Engrish, Geek, and I bought some antique Kazakh embroidery for wall-hangings, and as we watched the hunters, we began to suspect that our beautiful tapestries may have come off the legs of some hunters' pants, and that made me laugh to think of it.  They must think we tourists are crazy - spending so much money on their old, battered pieces - while gladly pocketing the money and making new clothing and tapestries with bright and beautiful colors.

The Eagle Festival has become my favorite thing I've done in Mongolia.  Get yourself out there the first weekend next October.  If waiting that long is too hard, hunting season is about to begin, and there are groups that run tours in which you travel with the hunters.  They don't always bring down prey, so be sure you go for the journey, not the destination (so to speak), and bring your long underwear because it gets pretty cold.