I do like the food here, but when I think about the readily available foods in the US, I start to get cravings. Anything with cheese would be good right about now. I have not come across pepperoni here yet, so I'm assuming it does not exist. Ranch dressing – need I say more? The ice cream I've had here does not taste like ice cream. Strangely enough, you can find Snickers anywhere here and Coca-Cola/Pepsi are very easy to get here also.
Today, I saw my first snake here in Mongolia. Don't worry – I was not in any danger.
The locusts here are very different from anything I've seen. When I was walking around one day, there were several loud clicking sounds surrounding me. I though they were demons or something, especially because I did not know where they were coming from. Anyways, I finally looked up above me, and figured out that these things were hovering in the air. They can travel long distances without needing to touch the ground.
I added some photos to this posting of a bug that we found. I have no idea what it is.
We had many days off this week because of national Naadam. We were provided with sunscreen but I still acquired a sunburn that would make the red ranger jealous. Usually there is a big family get together for the holiday, but my mother's mom is ill. My sister told me that during Naadam, its common for families to eat a sheep. Since there weren't many people here, I figured that it would not happen. The next day when my dad drove home, and all of the sudden a sheep appeared. Then it was dragged onto the porch and killed. So far, this has definitely been the most fascinating and disturbing thing that I have observed here. Not that animals don't get killed in America. I grew up in suburbia, so for all I knew, animal meat came from plastic containers. I personally think that if Americans needed to actually kill the animal in order to eat meat, many people would eat less meat or even stop eating meat altogether. I sometimes get queasy from seeing blood, but I watched the whole thing. It took pretty much the whole day to take off the skin, separate the organs and cut up the meat. The weirdest part for me was seeing them wash out the intestines, stomach etc. If I were slaughtering an animal, I would have just thrown those parts out. Some of my other friends already had eaten animal intestines already, but this was my first experience. They put everything together and boil it in a large soup pan, and I got a sample of everything. I tried not to think about what organ I was eating, but eventually I will want to learn which part is which. Along with the main dish, I drank the broth which was really good. I ate everything that they gave me, but for some reason the last couple bites were very difficult to keep down.
The Naadam sports in UB were on almost every channel, but I mostly just saw the wrestling. The way the horse races were televised, it was hard to follow what was going on. I didn't see any archery – not sure why. The final wrestling match was pretty entertaining. It lasted about 40 minutes because they took many breaks. In a strange way the long pauses made it more intense. I did not want to look away lest I miss out on the moment of victory. There were 512 wrestlers at the beginning, so its a pretty big deal to win the tournament.
I'm glad that I brought everything that I did, but the most valuable items that I took with me have been my hiking boots, a rechargeable LED flashlight, and an MP3 player. I have been spending a lot of time outside because I will not be able to do any of that during the winter. Then I will switch to reading books and hopefully learning how to play the horse fiddle. I don't think that they are too expensive, but I haven't had a conversation with anyone knows much about them. I probably won't get one until I am at my actual site, so I'm crossing my fingers that there will be people that will help me learn how to start playin
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