A Month on the Farm - Updates

Updates from Mongolia, featuring my recent cultural understandings and the food we’re eating.

I write this after cleaning myself for the first time in a week and washing my hair for the first time in two; I feel fresh and spry and ready to take on the evening. O.J., the cat, is squashing me and suckling on my hand while I try to type… alas he is purring too loudly for me to take him off. I have officially been in Mongolia for a month and my adjustment period is coming to an end as I learn to navigate the lifestyle and culture here. My cow-milking update is that it took me 2 hours to squeeze out 5 L, which Minjee does in 5 minutes, and I discovered all sorts of new cramps my hands could experience.

Things I miss:

Friends, family,

Colorado mountains,

Chocolate, also bacon,

And my guitar.

The people that come through the farm become fast friends since we spend every day and night together. At this point I’ve been here longer than anyone else, although one guy is visiting briefly after being here for five months last winter! There was a French couple here only for a few days, visiting 6 years after their first time working for Minjee (our host, pronounced Meen jih). They brought beautiful insight and refreshing perspectives on travel, such as that they exclusively travel via ground transportation and refuse to fly—thus introducing them to local methods of transport and creating opportunities for cultural connections. It inspired me to consider this as I go forward, embracing slow travel and a more environmentally friendly (and budget friendly) way to accomplish my goals.

The last week or so we focused mainly on building a floating deck for Minjee’s winter ranch on the hill. The foundation we built will definitely probably hold for hopefully at least a year but makes the engineering graduate in me cringe. Standards for construction here are minimal, so I can’t count the number of times we said something was “good enough.” She told us to build the foundation out of old railway wood, sometimes rotted throughout, and all different lengths and widths. In the capital city she could only buy three different sizes of timber for her deck. The dimensions for the timber she bought were, in theory, 30x200 cm, so we built the foundation accordingly. Mind you we built it on a hill and out of crumbly cinder blocks that we took from her neighbor’s failed wall.

We quickly noticed that some of the wood was cut too long, some too short, and none was straight or 30 cm wide. Thus we redid the entire foundation, eating up a whole morning of work. We played Tetris until all the pieces of wood looked “good enough” and called it. She didn’t have the right size drill bit for the screws she bought, so we ended up just nailing everything in place… once again, the engineer in me cringed a little but I accepted that this is how it’s done here. Speaking of cringing engineer, the lighting fuse in our little house was falling apart with wires spewing out of both terminals and the lights not working, so I fixed it and it made me all fuzzy inside not from electric shock but because I'm actually using some of what I learned.

OJ suckling

Antlers at the neighbor's

More antlers at the neighbor's

OJ and Bonnie

Getting the bull market-ready

On tha truck

Painting the water shed

The breaker I fixed :)

The deck

The view from the deck!

Yoga on the completed deck

Minjee's new phone (size comp)

I sat on fly paper

Walkin

OJ

Goat skull

For me it all of this has highlighted the Mongolian tendency to think short-term. I think it may come from the farm mentality, wherein certain work is laid in stone due to weather, but challenges are tackled as they come up and with the resources immediately available. Here are some instances I’ve noticed where short-term thinking presided.

-          Minjee’s starter on her car is likely failing and sometimes the car doesn’t start, but she doesn’t replace it because it is not an immediate priority and will take too much time. Also with driving, they tend to drive fast on bumpy dirt roads, slamming the brakes right before a pothole, instead of driving slower to maintain the health of the breaks, suspension, etc.

-          Using old wood for the deck instead of new. When I asked her, she referenced that when her old home burned down, she pledged to not use new materials for things anymore because it was more of an emotional investment—she didn’t want to risk paying so much for new materials only for them to potentially burn down in the future, even if it meant the deck wouldn’t last very long. I think that will stick with me forever.

-          Minjee’s future plans change on a daily basis. She might build a house with her boyfriend, or maybe they’ll get married soon, or maybe she’ll move all of her horses and cows 150 miles to her boyfriend’s ranch, or she could start an AirBnB with her winter location yurts, or she could create a new hosting page for people visiting Mongolia…. The list goes on. It's reinforcing my belief that it's okay to not know what you're doing, as long as you have good intentions and a strong work ethic.

We've done a lot in the last two weeks, so I'll talk about some of them here:

We spent several days making cheese last month and got to try it for the first time at dinner a few nights ago! It tasted just like Gouda, as we intended and was very firm and dry. The French in the group were ecstatic.

Minjee took us to Darkhan to take care of some necessities for certain people in the group, like finding a SIM card or buying warm layers to prepare for the incoming cold weather. We went to a thrift store to find the jackets and socks, which you would never have been able to find if you didn’t know where it was—it was in an unlabeled industrial building on the third floor. The hallway was lined with closet-sized thrift stores, and we were the only people there. The clothes themselves were so cheap, for example $5 for a down jacket, and some had the most nonsensical English words on them. I had to dig deep to find the willpower to not buy anything, reminding myself I have no room and need nothing despite the hilarity of the items.

We then went to a tiny grocery store on the first floor and I bought an unknown fruit which they call “fruit of rabbit kidney.” It was somewhere between a flat peach and lychee and I loved it. On the drive home we sang along to Mongolian ballads and watched the dappled light as it highlighted the steppe, the hills, and the lakes.

I feel like I should explain some of what we eat as well! All our food is seasonal and fresh from the farm, so since I’ve been here we’ve had a fuck-ton of zucchini. Also some cabbage, cucumbers, onion, beets (which I’m learning to adore), and sometimes carrots. I never thought I’d be so excited to learn it is now tomato and eggplant season. Wooho!

Every day, some of us go to milk the cows while others make bread from scratch and either bake or fry it on the small wood oven outside. This morning we also had cheese that Minjee made from milk that sat around in the house for about a week; it started to smell bad so she boiled it, let it sit, then separated the curd from the water and mixed it with smashed garlic and dill. It was amazing and sat surprisingly well in the ol’ stomach. We usually have some sort of jam that she buys from town as well. Since it was cold yesterday, she made us Mongolian tea (really more of a porridge), where you fry flour in oil then add salt, black tea, and raw milk. She also added rice, making it something like a rice pudding, and we all slurped it down.

For lunch and dinner, we either have “wet” or “dry” food (soup vs. not-soup). There is zucchini involved literally every single time, either fried or boiled, and usually garlic and onion. Sometimes we have carrots and cabbage too. For protein, Minjee has a freezer in her milk shed full of giant pieces of butchered cow and sheep and old Fanta bottles repurposed for milk. Yesterday, I spent 15 minutes using a very old handsaw to cut through bone in the meat for the soup and I’m stronger for it (I think).

In Mongolian cooking people use a Nomadic pot called a Kazan that resembles a ginormous cast-iron wok for everything, and I adore it. The Kazan goes directly on a wood-fire stove and Minjee likes to use sheep-tail fat as a substitute for oil, giving the food extra nutrients and flavor, and leaves the big fat chunks in the meal to help keep our teeth strong. There are times when my gums can’t take the chewing anymore and I have to tap out of a meal to go find dental floss, but once again I’m stronger for it. Sometimes, she makes us traditional Mongolian dishes such as Khuushuur (smashed dumplings), soup dumplings, Tsuivan (fried noodles), or recently Mongolian tea as well.

Mongolian Kazan Pot

Meat freezer

Meat in the Kazan

Soup I made :)

THE CHEESE!

Fruit of rabbit kidney

Fruit of Rabbit Kidney Pt 2

Louisa milking the cows

Anyhow the point is I’m eating probably better ingredients than I’ve ever had in my life, and I’m learning lots about cooking, especially when it comes to meat and accompanying flavors.

My dreams here have been insane and intense, and sometimes heart-wrenching, I think from processing all that's new around me. I’m definitely starting to realize how long I’ll be gone for and it makes me incredibly grateful to be doing what I’m doing and learning what I’m learning with the support of my friends and family.

I really have to pee so I think I’ll end it here, thank you for reading 😊