Tom Pastorius, the Vice President of our North American offices, sent in this post from Mongolia. I hope you enjoy!

Tom at a Temple in Mongolia

There is one question that you dont want to ask Projects Abroad Mongolia volunteers, and that is “why Mongolia?” They hear it from the moment they sign up and forever afterwards.

Why indeed. You could go somewhere easier to fly to, you could go somewhere with better food, you could go somewhere where you speak the language. But, you can’t get any further out there than Mongolia. Or, as one volunteer put it, “you could go further, but it would have to involve the moon.”

Well, here’s why:

1. Ulaanbaatar rocks. Take a cultural mountain city, with its swanky bars and restaurants (like, say, Denver). Now go back 150 years, so you see real cowboys walking the streets. Substitute skyscrapes for Buddhist temples. Add in a small but friendly ex-pat scene and a 90% discount off of everything. That’s UB.
2. The people. Modern Mongolians LOVE the west, from Russia all the way to the USA. They watch our movies, listen to our music and buy our clothes. We share similar views about a lot of cultural issues. It’s not hard to make friends with Mongolians. Just don’t insult their cell phones, because they are gadget OBSESSED.
3. The (summer) weather. Nothing like a dry 70 degrees every day to get away from the teeming sauna of New York City.

4. The horses. You won’t find a cheaper place to ride than Mongolia. And you won’t ever run out of wide open plains to gallop across.

5. The temples. From countryside monasteries to city-based temples, Tibetan Buddhism is coming back strong after the Communist attempt to stamp out religion. Some buildings escaped destruction and many were been rebuilt in the 1990s. The question is, how far off of the beaten path do you want to go?

Jessye recently came into the office talking about a movie she had seen that was set in Mongolia. So I am having her start a new segment where on the blog were staff members review films from countries where we have projects. Watch out Ebert and Roper and take it away Jessye!

By Jessye Crowe-Rothstein

I dread going to the video store because every time I do I end up standing there blankly staring at the hundreds of titles I’ve never heard of, and lacking any faith that I will make a good decision on what to rent. Last week when I found myself at Blockbuster in this exact situation, I chose a foreign film called Mongolian Ping Pong. I figured a movie with a little kid and a rainbow on the cover would probably suit me better than most of the action and terror new releases, so I gave it a try.

Mongolian Ping Pong is a beautiful film which features absolutely stunning landscape, and watching it gave me a much better sense of what it must be like for our Nomad volunteers to live with a family out on the steppe. The story revolves around a young boy (whose name I won’t even try to remember or spell) who finds a ping pong floating in the river near his family’s ger. Not familiar with the game of ping pong and having never seen a ball before, he and his friends and family go through numerous hilarious theories of what the ball could be, and what use it provides.

The film touches on the Nomad lifestyle as well as the influence of modernity on these dwindling tribes, as the ping pong ball, a television, a motorcycle and many other modern commodities find their way to their front yard. The story itself is a bit slow but very sweet, and I couldn’t stop exclaiming throughout the film how beautiful the scenery was. It was also neat to hear a bit of Mongolian – a very unique language.

These are also themes and issues volunteers will come across and live with on our Nomad Project in Mongolia.

Has anyone else seen it?

Rob, a Programme Advisor at our Headquarters in the UK, is probably one of the funniest staff members here at Projects Abroad, who is known for his wit and knack for perplexing our German office. I asked him to write a little something about his time in Mongolia last summer and in return we have our first Top 5 list. Enjoy!

Mongolia

I spent July and August of last year working as part of the Projects Abroad Mongolia Staff team. It was a time I will never forget; indeed I constantly make references to it, because, I suppose, I think it will make me sound interesting. In reality it actually just makes people think I’m weird, but I console myself with the fact that this is because Mongolia has a very mysterious, some might even say strange reputation to the majority of people in the Western world.

So, to celebrate this, here are my top 5 oddest things about my Mongolia trip:

5. The Mongolian Climate
As David Attenborough repeatedly told anyone who watched BBC’s Planet Earth, Mongolia has a very dry climate because all its moisture gets sucked up by the Himalayas. The lack of moisture means that the sun’s rays do not heat up the surrounding air, leading to the most bizarre summer days when you can be blisteringly hot standing in the direct sunlight, but the moment you move into the shade you are reaching for your Kashmir sweater. In winter, however, this works to your favour for, although Siberian winds are pushing the mercury down to -30 degrees Celsius, it feels more like a tropical -10 degrees.

Terelj National Park, Mongolia

4. Mongolian meals
Because of this cold climate, it is rather tricky to grow vegetables out on the Steppe, and your average Mongolian has cleverly negotiated this hurdle by, well, not really eating vegetables. Instead Mongolian cuisine revolves around meat, and lots of it. Vegetarians should not be put off by this – we now have many host families who can cater for the vegetarian diet. However this wasn’t the case with my own (lovely) host family who served me up an impressive first meal of carrots and a lump of fat. They were clearly very proud that they were serving up a vegetable to the Western guy, and I was clearly so impressed with their cooking that I got an extra lump of fat!

Rob with his host family

3. Mongolian wrestling
The three day Naadam Festival falls in July, and the whole country goes crazy for the national sports of horse-racing, archery, ankle-bone shooting and Mongolian wrestling. Mongolian Wrestling is a great deal like Sumo Wrestling except there is more arm-waving and less buttock-slapping. For the next month myself and all other male volunteers were challenged by pretty much every Mongolian we met to a bout of wrestling. And could any of us beat a single one of them?! I personally witnessed several crushing defeats, including Krishna and Sophie Jane who were both floored by toddlers on our trip to Khustai National Park. Actually I DID eventually learn enough from my battles to beat one Mongolian, but I think she was quite drunk by that point in the evening.

Rob wrestling a yak
2. Mongolian dancing
You would expect a culture that has developed anything as hauntingly beautiful as Mongolian Throat-Singing to have some pretty wicked dances up their sleeves, and you’d be right. But in a country with a population of 3 million people, imagine my surprise when I learnt that the country’s best dancer was none other than our Projects Abroad Mongolia Director Oko Tugtuuny. Oko coyly admitted this to me himself, nearly 3 whole minutes after I had first arrived in the country. And by golly he wasn’t kidding, as everybody who witnessed his frenetic fusion of Michael Jackson and David Brent (ed. For our American readers this is Ricky Gervais’ character in the original “Office”) dance-styles will agree.

1. Mongolian volunteers
But by far the oddest part of my Mongolia experience was our very own Teaching & Projects Abroad volunteers! I had the privilege of being the first face that many of them saw as they came through the gate at Chingiss Khan International Airport at 6 o’clock in the morning and I had some of the strangest conversations in the taxi back to Ulaanbaatar. Most of these you could put down to jetlag but there were two in particular which will forever stand out in my mind. The first was a volunteer who was incredibly surprised because they had thought when they got on the plane that they were heading to Mongolia in Africa. The second was a volunteer who was seemingly very confused by any shiny surfaces that we passed. When I asked her what was going on she said that she was shocked to see her reflection because she’d been told that Mongolians hadn’t invented mirrors yet!