Okay, so a blog before I leave Mongolia. Final paper is done, but presentation tomorrow. I'm second to go, which I think is a pretty decent position.

When I left off it was about Bayanhongor, before we got to our families. So, after that lunch we went out to our families. The area was pretty rugged. My family lived on the plain, in a circle of pretty nice rock formations (some kind of igneous stuff, like in a lot of Mongolia I've seen). There was the family I stayed with and another ger, my host mother's older sister and her husband, and their kid, around 13 or so, was there part of the time. My family was excellent: Battuleg and Delgermaa, their kids were there for the first few days and then went back to school in the province center were we flew into. They had a larger ger their that they stayed in, so the one I was in with their parents was smaller, a "three-wall," so I guess sixteen feet in diameter or something like that. Battuleg was great, much more outgoing than Batbileg, my host father in Dadal. Both of my parents liked to practice language with me, and liked my Russian-Mongolian phrasebook. Sometimes Battuleg and I would go through my English-Mongolian dictionary and try to talk about things. That bag had a lake, and Battuleg liked to talk about the Great Lakes (Five Lakes) so I learned about words for birds and fish some, for example.
The second day or so I was there Battuleg took me with him to take the sheep to the river to drink. Every morning you separate the sheep with lambs from the other sheep and goats, and take them to water alternately. We took the sheep with lambs, which took a little while, there were still quite a few very young lambs. In the morning I found a little newborn one, they can be hard to spot though I later realized that of course the mom stays pretty nearby, and you can tell by her behavior pretty readily what's up.
The horse I used there (we had a lot more freedom with horses) had a tail that was all matted together, like a huge dredlock. He was good, pretty strong (it is a weak time of year for horses, it was still early spring there), but slow. When you went over a walk at all his tail would really hit the back of his legs, sometimes ending up in front of his back legs. Once the others came by really suddenly and I used another horse, the one my host dad had been using, and I also got to ride the Mongolian saddle then. I was wearing tennis shoes, so the wood of the saddle dug into my legs a little, but other than that I liked it a lot. The problem is that your legs are pretty high up and against the wood.
This time the other students were closer. I only did language with them every other day, which was cool, and they didn't leave me out of their rides and activities. Buyant, who was my langauge teacher before, the ornithologist who has spent a lot of time in the UK and thus has a hilarious accent and lexicon, was nearby and arranged lots of good stuff. We visited other gers together, including Tiago's where they had just slaughtered a sheep and fed us the intestines and liver, as well as the ribs and other usual parts. My family actually ate yak the whole time I was with them, including the excellent dairy products. The figures I've seen for yak milk is that it is over 15% fat or something. Anyway, clotted cream (urum), sour cream (tsutsgee) and aruul, hard milk curds are great. Also we ate a lot of bortzig, and I helped my mom make it once, a process that involved huge quantities of yak butter and sugar. I think that my favorite food in Mongolia was there, anyhow.
We also visited the canyon, which was pretty cool. The river there was still full of ice, but a lot of it was actually below the surface, which created a really cool effect. Good birds there too, we watched a steppe eagle for a while.
A big part of Bayanhongor was the goats. One day my family combed twenty, a few days before that I was at their neighbors/my mother's sisters' combing goats with them most of the morning (while others were in language class). The deal there is apparently just sell your product in the aimag center, some people had gone towards China in the past but that hasn't been profitable in the last couple years. The price is somewhere around four dollars a kilogram. The day of twenty goats yielded around nine kilos.
A few days before we left we went to the bag center, where they arranged a rodeo for us. My host dad was there and helped catch the horses. The deal with horses is that they run around practically wild, there is a stallion that is never caught, the male ones caught for riding are castrated so they can go with the herd. The stallions are very wild looking, very long hair. When a new riding horse is caught, one of the first things you do is cut its mane, actually. Very short.
The rodeo had three events: lassoing (Mongolians use the uurga, a pole with a loop of rope on the end, so that when you twist the pole it tightens), picking something off the ground while galloping, and bronc riding. The competitors choose horses for each other to make it the most fair. It was good, but the last event was kind of short and some of the horses not so wild. Maybe two good ones though, worthy of the July 4th Stampede.
After that we had a goat horhog, the real Mongolian barbeque, where you cook the meat with hot stones. Excellent. Goat meat has a really interesting flavor. Then we went up by the lake, where some of the other students were, and past the old monastery (didn't go in, the one lama there is also a politician and was busy) to see the rock paintings. There were some good Tibetan inscriptions by the ger I was in, but these were the full out thing.
The last day it snowed, and we had a ride planned, which we did anyway. It was pretty cold going, and our friend wasn't even there. But we stayed in his ger to warm up. The ride back was much better, most of the snow had melted and the wind was much more tolerable. Buyant was trying out a new word, "epic," so this series of events was dubbed "wicked epic."

We drove back to UB, stopping at Kharkhorin, site of Chinggis' capital. We spent the night in Arvaiheer, also an aimag center, which seemed to have a little more happening than Bayanhongor. In Kharkhorin we stayed in a ger camp that was pretty nice for a couple of nights. We saw Erdene-zuu, the monastery there of course. It is the oldest and one of the top three in Mongolia, built in the 16th Century on the site of the old palace complex, which was destroyed with the rest of the remaining buildings from imperial times by the Manchu. Enclosed in a fence of ... stupas (the number has special significance) there were around a hundred temples, but most were destroyed in the 30s. There are at least three still there. They are still trying to rebuild another one, for now there is a huge ger there acting as a temple. There is also the temple and monks' living area built in the Tibetan style (the old temples are in the Chinese-influenced style), where we also saw the praying area. Kharkhorin was a good place for hiking around, the ger camp was in a nice valley. We had a fire one night and some Chinese journalists there hung out with us for awhile and shared their beer. So perhaps we will appear in a Chinese documentary about Mongolia in coming months. Continuing towards UB, we stopped for lunch in a place with good dunes, and then there was a sandstorm. We spent the night in the ger camp at Hustai National Park. This is the Prezhwalski's horse reintroduction site, and the park has been heavily financed by the Dutch. We had a ride through the park which included takhi (P's horse), elk, and some good rock art: deer stones and man stones. The former are earlier and are slabs with incised elk or deer, the latter are from the "Turkic" period and are statues of mustachioed men.
When we got back to UB we were with our host families again, and continued our lectures. Talk about it later, have to end this one here.