Tsam Folks Say...

So if you ever tell me you've been thinking, "Maybe it's time to get a master's degree," I - as a caring and concerned friend - may recommend you ask yourself a few more questions before proceeding.  This week the question is, "Did you ever get over procrastinating?"  When you've put off your assignment til the night before, and you get a headache, will you be able to push through the pain and do the work anyway?  If not, are you tech savvy enough to deal with the inevitable issues that come up when you woke up at 5:30 to finish before school on a half-asleep brain?  Because that is where I was this morning.  I still managed to get 100% from a professor that I've heard is tough but excellent, but I just take that as proof that God really does watch out for fools and children.

This week you're getting a break from the art posts courtesy of Engrish.  Although she was quick to explain that she and Blondie hadn't been to many cultural events while I was gone (because there really hadn't been any), she was even quicker to deliver one.  Danshig Naadam is the religious flavor of Mongolia's manly sports festival, first celebrated in 1639 to commemorate my old buddy Zanabazar's elevation to the Peerage (or something like that...his title was Bogd Jebtsundamba Khutuktu rather than Sir Zanabazar, but you get the gist, right?)*  This year the timing was pushed back to the beginning of September, which is good, because when I took Evil's niece in 2015 it was in August and too hot to really enjoy.

The reason why I was REALLY looking forward to it is the fact that after five previous years in Mongolia I was still trying to see Tsam dancing.  Okay, so to be fair, I'd seen it before, not only at Tumen Ekh but at an event the owner of my school invited me to attend at the National Museum of Modern Art, but...well, you know me.  If seeing something is good, seeing it in its original context is even better.  And the previous time I went to Danshig Naadam, we somehow missed the Tsam dance.

See, Tsam wasn't intended to be entertaining.  It's not some crazy booty-shaking in fancy dress just for funsies...not that there's anything wrong with that.  I personally enjoyed the hell out of exactly that during my years in Korea.  But Tsam has spiritual significance, as was pretty apparent from my first look inside the Naadam stadium on Sunday.  Across the field I could see an enormous applique thangka - a Buddhist devotional image - hung from the roof of the stadium and facing the field.  According to its very short Wikipedia entry Tsam can be seen not only as religious instruction but also a form of meditation.  Which makes sense, because the music is not exactly the rockin'-est beatz.  Tsam dance moves to the sounds of cymbals and conch horns, the latter of which have a tendency to drone a little, and while it's not the kind of sound that will drift you off to Dreamland, there is something hypnotic about it.

On the other hand, it carries very well over a distance, and as Engrish and I left for the stadium from our rendezvous at the nearby shopping center, we were reassured that we were in the right place, and hurried on our way over.

I might have been a bit concerned we were missing the action, but the dance was in progress as I went in to claim some seats for us.  Engrish joined me a few minutes later after waiting to hear from Blondie, so she got to see a little before the masked dancer left the field.  I wondered if that was it, but before long, another dancer came out and performed, and eventually Blondie joined us and got to see it all for herself.  It's possible that she may even have been a little grateful that she didn't see the entire dance, because...well.  I'm just going to come out and say it: the dance is a little repetitive.  Maybe the conch horns sound a little like butt-trumpeting.  If it's enough for you to see just a glimpse of the dance, Tumen Ekh's daily performances are a wonderful opportunity to do exactly that.

But on the other hand...even though the seats in the stadium can't be considered comfortable by ANY stretch of the imagination, and the full dance seemed to stretch on a little, I didn't for a second wish I had missed the chance to experience it.

I was sitting in the shade on a cool, Sunday morning, with two of my favorite peeps, feasting on a culture I'd been largely cut off from the last two years.  I was finally experiencing something I'd hoped to see for most of the years I lived in Mongolia.  Sadly my dumb ass left the apartment without my Big Gun - I actually realized as I was walking out to get in the taxi, but I was worried about being late and also, I was lazy, so I didn't go back for it - so my photos were shot with my iPad.  Sorry for that.  Luckily after the dancing wound down the dancers came over to the altar set up in front of the thangka, so I got some decent shots anyways.

And THEN they handed out candy, and it was like a feeding frenzy.  If you've never been to Mongolia, you have to understand that Mongolians love candy.  It's not even that good chocolatey shit like we Americans hand out every Halloween...no these are just the hard candies like everyone's grandmother except mine keeps in a glass dish in their house.  I didn't join in the battle royale, but one of the grandpas kindly shared with Engrish.  It was sweet.  The gesture, that is, not the candy...we were ready for some real food by this point, and maybe our Western culture has some deeply ingrained beliefs about accepting candy from strangers.

*Liberties taken with info reported by Montsame

Taking Advice

When it comes to traveling, I have some pretty clear ideas about what I want to do.  That said, when I decided to come to Shikoku and see Nagoro...

...which didn't happen, btw.  Plans to visit the #1 thing I really wanted to see on my vacation - the creepy "scarecrow" village where an artist decided to replace all the people who died or left with lifesize dolls - got wrecked by a bloody landslide.  Which sucks the big one, but what can you do?

As I was saying, when I decided to come here my teacher friend, Sensei (that's a new nickname, for those of you keeping track), told me that she was actually from Shikoku.  I told her what I was planning and asked if she had any advice.  She put me in touch with her friend in Tokushima and suggested that instead of making Awa Ikeda my base camp for getting to Nagoro that I stay in Oboke.

Tokushima wasn't originally on my itinerary.  Honestly Shikoku seemed pretty expensive to get around as I was pre-navigating on Google Maps, and it turns out, it is.  Any express train costs twice as much to ride, and the route to get to Matsuyama, where I'd hop back over to Honshu, was already long enough.  But I really loved the idea of getting a little extra sightseeing done and meeting her friend, which is just as well since I didn't actually make it to Nagoro.  Takamatsu, on the other hand, was, but I didn't do much of anything there, except get up WAY too early and get the bus.  I just didn't feel like it.  Tokushima, though - I arrived around 8 in the morning but wasn't meeting Ikuko until 5, so I was going to need something to do.

So I get into town around 8.  It's a ghost town...in Tokyo, even though things aren't open, there's a sense of life.  Not so much in Tokushima.  After chucking my bag in a locker and deciding Lotteria's breakfast was not a suitable replacement for McDonald's, I decided to do a little wandering.  The only other person who was out on the streets was the guy banging on the window of the pachinko parlor 10 minutes before it opened (like, really?  You couldn't wait politely a little longer to get your fix?)  I've been traveling with my pocket router, so I looked at my options and decided to start with the Awa Odori Kaikan, for the simple reason that it opened first. 

I've seen the Awa Odori before, back in August in Koenji, so it made sense to me to check out the museum and learn a little more.  After wandering around the nearby shrines and temples, I went on in.  Unfortunately, almost all of the signage was in Japanese, so mostly I just looked at the pictures, of which they had an impressive array.   If I was interested in being a museum curator, I'd want to learn from the Japanese, because they've made it into an art.  Although the museum was small, it was very well presented and even without being able to read the labels I started to get an understanding of the history of the dance.

At 11 they had a performance which demonstrated some of the history of the dance, and included an audience participation bit.  They chose four audience members as the "star dancers" and - big surprise - guess who was one of them (hence the flowers).  Perks (?) of being the token foreigner in the audience, I guess.  It was a little embarrassing, but I got a headband out of it as a prize, and if I was Five, I'd subtract that from the cost of the ticket and call it good.

Sensei sent me a link for the Awa Jurobe puppet museum (let your friends know that you went to a doll memorial and are planning to visit a scarecrow village and they start to draw some conclusions), which has performances at 11 and 2 - but in the end, it didn't happen.  Google maps failed me again, not being able to tell me how to get there, so I went back to the train station and asked at the information center.  They gave me instructions on how to get there by bus, but when I figured out that I wouldn't be able to do both that AND the Naruto whirlpools, I knew what I was going to decide.

For the record, I didn't make this decision under the influence of my otaku tendencies.  Not entirely, at any rate...although it IS pretty cool to be able to say I passed under the real Great Naruto Bridge.  More importantly, my current work for my painting class deals with water, and I thought it would be excellent research to this phenomenon in real life.  Naruto is the closest point on Shikoku to Honshu, and when the tides of the Inland Sea and the Pacific Ocean are changing, they create some pretty kickass whirlpools.  It's safe to take a boat and take an up close look at them, so that's what I did.  I regret nothing.

Actually, I should have gone up on the bridge afterwards, but I was kind of tired.  I'd had enough Naruto for one day.

I considered staying in Tokushima a little later the next day so that I could see the puppets, but I decided to head onward early again.  Sensei had suggested the Iya Valley to me for several reasons, but it's vine bridges looked pretty damn amazing, so I wanted to make sure I saw at least the first one, Kazurabashi.  I got my first hint that my plans were not going to work out when I tried to get the bus to Oboke, and the lady at the bus depot told me, "No."  The train was running though, so I grabbed a ticket and hopped on (and then had to pay more because it was one of those damn limited express trains), and made it to Oboke with almost no problems.  Where I found out - once again - that the buses weren't running.  I looked at some of the tourist stuff they had in the station, and then got pulled into a conversation between two older Japanese ladies and one younger one, wanting to know where I was going and if I wanted to share a taxi there and back?

Well, of course I did!  My share was 1,000 yen each way, and maybe I had a little buyer's remorse because I was still thinking I'd make it to Nagoro the next day, but it was honestly worth it.

I don't know if I can really do the bridge justice - I mean, if you are an adrenaline junkie, this is the bridge for you.  In the first photo, that's my foot (if you can't tell by my trademark 5 yen Converse shoes.  I have been blessed with feet that are both long and wide and I still got nervous that my feet were going to plunge between the slats.  That was what got me - I knew the bridge had been reinforced with steel cables, and it wasn't going to break, but those gaps...  About halfway across someone seemed to be shaking the bridge.  Maybe it was just a physics thing, where that's the least stable part of the bridge and you feel every footstep...I'm not sure, but it felt, at least, like someone was trying for the dickhead of the year award.  I was too busy watching my feet to try and figure out who, which I guess is a good thing, because I probably would've pitched their asses off the bridge.

Feet First

The alternate title for this post was "Everybody.  Dance.  Now."  While normally I would never choose anything over an Arrested Development reference, I felt like feet first made a better title for a couple of reasons.  First of all, there's the fact that my dance teacher, Azhaar, used to tell me that you should work on getting the footwork first in a choreography, that everything follows from there (not that I was very good at listening, which is why I was kind of a spaztastic dancer, but there ya go).  The second reason is that I feel like that's what I'm doing - jumping in, heedless of whether or not I'm out of my depth.  Because yesterday I decided I would visit not one, not two, but three different dance festivals happening in Tokyo.  That's just how I roll.

It started with an early roll out - the Harajuku Super Yosakoi started at 10, although I didn't get out of the house until almost 9:30.  The closest station to my apartment is Kikuna, and from there it's a straight shot up the Tokyu Toyoko Line to Meiji Jingu Mae station.  I walked up the stairs to a flashback from three and a half years ago, standing beside Omotesando, looking at the sign pointing to the Ota Museum.  I can't explain why it is comforting to be in a place you visited traveling and have it be familiar, but it is.  Following the teams in costume, I crossed the street and passed the entrance to Meiji Jingu, and almost felt tempted to walk its cool shady paths, but I caught a hint of drums and my feet carried me onwards.

When I met up randomly with Flower Boy (my dance sister's friend) at the Pikachu Outbreak, he asked if I was thinking of taking up any Japanese hobbies - his is ikebana, the art of flower arranging.  I replied that I hoped to, possibly taiko since I'd had so much fun with it last fall.  Less than ten seconds into watching my first yosakoi performance, I'd changed my mind...I wanted to be a dancer again!

I haven't really danced since I lived in Shanghai.  I miss it, but it's a little demoralizing to practice belly dance in the shape I'm in (ie, round).  Probably I should have practiced anyways, just without a mirror, but after a full day of teaching on my shitty feet, most of the time I can't even.  But yosakoi looked damn fun.  The beats of the music made my feet itch, and the dancers' passion was infectious.  I wanted to be a part of a group like that, all part of the same music.

I stood in front of the stage for a while, getting a tan line from my necklace (true story), until the smell of the food and the music being played along an avenue lured me away.  After looking at all the vendors' food, I decided what I really wanted was the biggest shaved ice I've ever seen, and they let you add your own syrup.  With my big bowl of sno-cone I followed the truck and the next group up down the avenue.  After watching a few performances, I decided I preferred the stage performances best, because you got to see the whole group at once.  But parade-style is nice too, which was reinforced when I got to Koenji station.

Of course, I didn't go directly there.  First I had to drag myself away from Super Yosakoi, which was hard - I could have stayed there all day.  I grabbed a bite to eat from the CoCo Curry close by (not really...one station was a pretty long walk this time) at Yoyogi station, and then got on the train, but took a detour when I got to Nakano station.  See, I have fairly well restrained myself when it comes to my otaku tendencies, but there's a shopping center called Nakano Broadway with shit tons of goods, and I had to check it out.  That accomplished (with zero money spend - see?  Restraint.), I went back to the train and went one station further to the Koenji Awa Odori.

And proceeded to wait (for the record, SavvyTokyo had the right time on this one, not whatever website I'd looked at that morning).  I got there around 3:30, figured out I was early, and went to McDonald's for ice cream and a place to sit and wait.  At 5, the first group started dancing down the street.  The three events I visited were each a specific kind of dance, and the awa odori had two different kinds of dances - a men's dance, in which they crouch as they make their steps, and a woman's dance, which uses geta, the Japanese traditional shoes, kind of like a thong sandal on stilts.  Both were very similar, the feet doing a kind of step-touch, and the arm posture...well, you can see, huh?

The music they brought with them.  Each group of dancers was followed by a band, with drums, flutes, and strings.  For a second, I found myself changing my mind, thinking that I'd rather learn taiko in my "spare time."  The therapeutic value of beating the hell out of a drum can't be overestimated.

I didn't stay very long at Koenji.  My feet were dying and I still had one more event to go, so I excused my way through the crowds up to the train platform.  From there, I got a bird's eye view of the street where I'd just been standing.

Have I mentioned lately that I hate crowds?  Because that for sure is a crowd, but while I stood at the side of the street, it didn't feel that crowded.  There was no pushing, and I was pretty close to the front, so except for this guy who kept sticking his head in my shots, I didn't mind at all.  It helped that the streets wound around in a figure eight, so the bazillion people who came weren't all trying to crowd into the same area, but I still write it off to Japanese civility.  I've lived in other places (which will remain unnamed) where smaller crowds had much greater potential to trigger.  Just sayin'.

My third and final dance festival was the Bon Odori in Hibiya Park.  Although I hate crowds, the thing that really made me want to stay home - or go back there early - was the heat.  I basically hadn't fully dried out since I first arrived at Harajuku that morning, and when I got to Hibiya Park, it was after 6.  From the first dancer I saw I wondered how they could dance in those costumes in such heat - it was crazy!  I decided another shaved ice was in order, this one possibly even bigger than the first.  The lady who was making it just kept putting more on there, layered with syrup.  I kind of loved her for that.

I got there just in time for the start of the dancing, which took place around Hibiya Park's focal point, a fountain...it worked really well to have everyone dance around it, sparkling with color in the dark.  It was really cool to watch it go from one stream of dancers to a river, within the space of a few minutes.  People would just join in, and I almost joined them.  It was a fairly simple dance, and I think I could have followed along, but suddenly, being there alone, I felt shy...

Shut up.  I'm actually far less likely to do wild and crazy things when I'm alone.  It means there's no one there to bail me out (legally, mentally...whatever the case may be), so I sat it out, at least for this year.

After my shaved ice and a kebab (not really Japanese festival food, but I didn't care - it was tasty), and watching the dancers for a while, I was ready to head home.  I sat for a minute to rest my feet before walking to the train (which was only 4 stops from Akiba, but I was too dead to even consider it), and an obaasan sat down and talked to me.  We talked about the dancing, yukata (the cotton kimono everyone was wearing), the English lessons she takes at a church (she's not a member, but they are really nice to her), my job as an art teacher, and the fine arts lessons she took when she was much younger, which were not very expensive, before I finally begged out.  So mark that down as my third "outside my comfort zone" moment of the day...look at all the progress I'm making!

Seriously, though...I hate it.  I don't know the kids, I don't have any friends, it's hot and humid, I don't know the food well enough (which is why we won't talk about how many times I've eaten at CoCo Curry in the last three weeks), I'm still figuring out what the heck I can fix with just one gas burner and where to shop for groceries that I know what to do with, my school uses spreadsheets for all of their planning documents...it is seriously a drag adjusting to all of this shit!  During my bus duty - which lasts an hour and involves supervising anklebiters screaming and running around and kicking balls all over the place - I might have been cursing myself for leaving Mongolia, I miss it so much.  The rational part of my brain keeps reminding me that UB wasn't easy when I first got there - and neither was anywhere else I've been - but most of all this feels like when I first got to Korea.  I was homesick, I didn't know what to eat, none of my coworkers reached out to me - hell, my Dark Lord and Master scared the shit out of me for four months! - and I was definitely not prepared to teach a bunch of anklebiters.  However, I came to love it so much that I went back three times, and each time leaving was harder than the last.  Maybe it's not a sign of anything that this feels the same...but maybe it is.  That's where my hopes are, anyways.

Springtime for Deviants

Kyoto is famous for its springtime.  Having come from Mongolia, I feel that this is justified fame.  Walking around the last two days, it is just chilly enough to want a jacket - perfect for early spring.  Now, if only the sakura would stop being a bunch of divas and do their thing, my life would be complete.  (Seriously.  A friend was in Yokohama last week and they had sakura.  What gives, Kyoto???)

Besides the weather and the sakura, spring has one more thing going for it here - there are two simultaneous geisha dances that happen throughout April.  Although I'm not as crazy about geisha as I was when I came in 2005, it still bothered me that I hadn't been able to see a proper dance performance.  Oh sure, I went to Gion Corner that first time, but it's definitely a tourist thing without the strength of tradition behind it.  So it's possible I may have unintentionally swayed Five to pick Kansai over Tokyo for this exact reason.  Being a good sport, she said she was up for anything (or at least anything I was willing to organize).

Yesterday I meant to be waiting when her bus got in from Osaka.  Thanks to my obsession with sword pieces it took me longer to get to the bus stop than  I thought it would, but we managed to find each other (one positive thing about being a tall, fat, ginger in Asia - you make a great landmark), and made our way to the guest house.  No sooner had she gotten settled than we had to set out for the theater.

Of the two dances, I chose to take us to the Miyako Odori - it's just a little bit older than it's competition.  Traditionally it's held at a theater in Gion, but the Koubu Kaburenjo is currently under renovation for earthquake proofing.  Instead, it's happening at the Kyoto University of Art and Design.  At first I felt a little sad that I didn't get to see it in situ (so to speak), but the art teacher in me shut that thought down when I got a look at some of the student work at the theater.  Besides these manga panels on the windows there was a booklet of student work for sale that had some pretty legit anime-style illustrations, and I found myself thinking that instead of an online Masters of Art Ed I could come study here.  Five had to go and point out that I'd already paid the entrance fee to be accepted at UN - Kearney; I reminded her that the bigger plot hole was that my knowledge of Japanese was almost entirely made up of animal names and character catch-phrases.

Actually, now that I'm imagining it, that could be really funny.  Okay, plan...X, I think I'm up to X...write a manga about a teacher who comes to Japan but can only speak anime-Japanese.

Alright, so the actual performance.  They don't let you take pictures, so I left my camera at the hotel.  It's a shame, though, because I would have had some incredible shots  Instead, you get me and Five's selfie with the poster.  The theater was amazing.  Having let Engrish and The Voice (our music teacher) sucker me into working on the school musical, I am beginning to get the vaguest understanding of how much work it is to put together sets and costumes.  Shunjuzu theater had been given the full treatment - if I didn't know that this wasn't the actual theater for the Miyako Odori I don't think I would have realized it.  The two galleries to the sides of the floor where we sat had musicians in them - all geisha, I believe - and there was a stage running the length of the left side of the theater to the main stage.  This is where the dancers made their first entrance, shuffling out and moving in unison better than any marching band I've ever seen.  Literally every one of them was breathtakingly gorgeous, and they were wearing matching kimono and obi.  The first time they stomped their feet in the dance, I think my heart stopped.  It was perfect.

After the opening performance came a pas de deux -  can you apply ballet terms to geisha dances?  Cause I'm going to do it anyways - who were joined by others.  I tried to figure out what was going on, but honestly didn't care.  The dancing was graceful and elegant, and the set was a simple river painted on a huge curtain of (I'm sure) silk.  This dance finished and was replaced by a scene of autumn red trees, and another small group of dancers.  It wasn't until the third performance that Five figured out that the seasons were the theme...I, on the other hand, quick thinker that I am, had to hear Five say it.  That one nearly did us both in.  A lady - maybe a nun?  She was wearing a veil - was dancing alone in her hut while snow fell across the rest of the stage.  She paused and looked across the audience to where a "man"...

Let me just say how much I love the fact that in traditional Japanese performing arts, not only do men play women, but women also play men.  Or at least they do during the Miyako Odori.

...and a woman were rising out of the trapdoor in the side stage.  I imagine they were supposed to be telling the story of her misspent youth, wearing kimono that undoubtedly cost more than I make in a year, but both of us had a hard time paying attention to this one.  Blame it on Five's trip from Mongolia the night before.  Anyways.  The finale involved all of the dancers, electric lanterns, and cherry blossoms dripping from the ceiling - so if we don't get much else in the way of sakura, we at least had that.  It was everything I'd hoped it would be, and although at first I thought that a one-hour performance wasn't long enough, it was so well done that it was worth every yen.

Shenanigans the First: Turkish Delight on a Moonlit Night

If you travel, you know how much it sucks to get your flight delayed.  Ever since the debacle surrounding my abbreviated visit to Greece in February, I've been dreading the flights to and from Istanbul.  Ulaanbaatar is in the process of building a new airport even further outside the city, because it's current location has a big problem that I've talked about before...the wind.  It seems like every other trip I take one of my flights gets delayed thanks to UB's winds.  This time, the wind was couple with a shit ton of snow that worried me when I woke up, but since the airport website said the flight was on time, we packed the kids and our luggage on the bus and set off for the airport, and had eaten our cinnabons and were just chillaxin', waiting for check-in, when they announced the delay.  Since the plane apparently had yet to leave Istanbul this was infuriating, but we did what we could, ordered a new bus back to the school, left everything in my classroom and scattered for the 12 hours we had to wait until going back.  It was NOT exactly the most propitious way to begin our spring break, but once we finally got on the plane and got going, it was pretty much smooth sailing, minus a couple of adjustments.  These mostly took place on the first day.  We got to our hotel and all the kids were oohing and aahing over how cool Istanbul looked, and once everyone got cleaned up we went to the Blue Mosque...just in time for prayer.  Several of the kids were curious about the prayers, but prayer time is the time when the mosque closes, so we went up the street for lunch, passing the Hippodrome (whose obelisk we all admired as we talked about chariot races), and came back later, to find a ridiculously long line.  Rather than wait, we decided to hit it another morning.

We took the tram across the Golden Horn to Beyoglu.  My original plan was to walk up the hill and visit galleries along the way, which would make the hike a bit less of a pain.  Since we were running late, we were going to take the funicular from Tunel, but then we couldn't figure out how to buy the damn passes, so we ended up hoofing it, and at a faster pace.  I've done that before...although there was about 70 pounds less of me back then, and I wasn't accompanied by 12 teenagers who (rightly) wanted to stop and see everything.  We did stop at one gallery - one of the girls asked about Jews, and when we stumbled across a synagogue-cum-gallery, I figured it was too serendipitous to pass up.  I particularly loved the notebooks they were selling with scenes of Istanbul and the lyrics to a certain They Might Be Giants song.

Finally we ended up at Galata Tower, a medieval stone tower built by the Genoese, and a good landmark, if, for example, you were going to let your students explore a little.  I ran up the hill to the Mevlevi Museum which - humd'Allah! - still had tickets for that night's sema, and in fact gave us two free tickets for me and my partner-in-crime, Time Lady.  When I got back I joined my kids in line for the tower, which had some stunning views but involved more pushing and shoving than a Sunday afternoon at the Gubei Carrefour (because somebody told some of the tourists to go the wrong way around the tower).  Afterwards we relaxed a little at the Lavazza next to it while some of them went shopping, and I had my first panic attack when two of my girls wandered off without getting the meet-up time.  When they finally made their way back we had dinner and looked around a little more before going to see the sufi dancers.

This is one of those things I didn't see my last time in Istanbul.  I've seen dervishes before - it's been nearly ten years since I started dancing, after all - but I've never been to a sema, and I wanted the kids to have as authentic an experience as possible, rather than really cool costumes under a blacklight.  The semahane was beautiful.  The music started with a voice droning out a chant, to which the dervishes entered the room.  It was joined by a nay, and they began to bow and move around their space, until finally, the other instruments joined in and the dervishes began to whirl.  Other than that, the occasional click of a camera or a cough were all you heard.  They moved so smoothly, and their gestures were so evocative, and we felt ourselves fall into their trance.

As we waited outside the museum before the sema, someone looked at us wearing our matching hoodies, and asked if we were there on a mission.  I replied that we were there to learn, not to teach.  We walked back from Sultanahmet to the Antique Hostel, past the Blue Mosque lit up like a birthday cake while a full moon glowed above us, and I felt how true that statement really was.  And it was only day one.

Tsagaan Sar Celebrations

Well, we're finally getting to a holiday - just a long weekend, really, but any port in a storm.  The last month has been exhausting and if you haven't been able to tell by my random facebook posts and my tone on here, I've been a little...blah.  Last Saturday's Winter Palace visit didn't happen.  It's closed on Saturday (wtheck?)  And it turns out the wrestling I was hoping for is on Sunday, when I will be in Harbin, and even if I weren't, tickets sold out - you have to wait in line overnight in order to get them.  Overnight?  In this weather?!?  No thanks.  Disappointing, but no.  So I've been kind of disappointed but I'm thankful tomorrow's Friday.

The holiday in question is Mongolia's new year celebration, Tsagaan Sar.  It's one of the two big holidays celebrated here, so it's a pretty big deal.  There were all sorts of things going on at school this week - we had national dress day for Monday AND Tuesday (I didn't take any pics; I was sick Monday and couldn't be bothered Tuesday).  Last night the owner of the school treated us to a nice big dinner, so grub club was canceled.

The Mongolian teachers put together a presentation for our edumacation, and one of the things they pointed out was that it is auspicious to have a big Tsagaan Sar meal; if you don't, it means you will be hungry in the coming year.  I made sure to load up my plate with plenty of delicious khushuur and buuz.

To that end, the kids have been involved in a food drive for the past few weeks.  There are plenty of families that don't have enough, so the senior class has been coordinating a collection for them.  Here they are tallying the final results and organizing them for distribution.

Back in November the school collected Movember money, and some of that went to our Mongolian sister school.  They came to school today and performed dances and songs for us to say thanks.

They had the most amazing assortment of costumes.  Someone told me this afternoon that their dance coach makes them.  What a Herculean task that must be - I've stitched a belly dance costume or two in my time, and I cheat by using ready-made skirts.  I can't imagine trying to sew one of these beautiful costumes, but less all of them!

I love seeing the way Mongolians take traditional dress and update it to make it fashionable.  These dresses were probably the most gorgeous I've seen, although the cashmere companies here do their part, too (fashionable AND warm).  The performances were amazing, and it was a great chance to try out the action setting on my new camera...I got some great shots, if I do say so myself.  Next time, I'm going to go easier on it, though - I had 600 some pictures to sort through this evening.

Ironically enough, I won't be taking further part in the festivities.  I'm finally going to make it to Harbin to see the ice and snow festival.  And I just realized today that Tsagaan Sar coincides with Lunar New Year as Celebrated by the Chinese, so it may be a very loud vacation, but I am excited about the chance to see the fireworks, and my new camera backpack made it JUST in time, so I am ready to kick some travel butt.  Stay tuned.