I returned to Mongolia 15 years ago after an absence of 13 years, save for the occasional 2-week leave from work, and that time I spent a semester and a half at a local university drinking endless cups of brown, watery 150 Tugrik instant MaCcoffee at the café strangely, or perhaps egotistically, named "In my memory", writing the first and so far the only book that got us into trouble with the local intelligence who apparently had little else to do than to pore through the ramblings of teenagers to catch the tell-tale signs of drug dealery. But I digress. When you visit a country for a short period, be it home or not, you hardly have time to immerse yourself in the spirit of the country and the city and feel the nitty gritty and dirty shiny of it all. So after 13 years, it took me a while to readjust and finally understand what the hometown of my childhood had become. The most striking, ubiquitous, and inescapable feature was and still, unfortunately, is the traffic. In 2008,
So it's already the 30th of December and my how time flies. Everyone's coming up with their list of 2009 notable events and such. And I thought about doing it, but I haven't really had much time to think about these sort of things lately. December 2009 has been a crazy busy month with no posts on this blog until today. Curfew November ended, and the dams burst. For a little while.
Due to the economic recession, the public sector holiday budget has been cut, resulting in fewer parties and/or public servants paying out of their own pockets to fund their NY celebrations. The private sector has been active NY-wise, but generally there's very little in terms of festive mood. It snowed yesterday, but not in a festive snowman-making way, more in a only enough to cover your car in snow and ice-glue your windshield wipers to the window kind of way.
So back to my list, if I had a list, I suppose OT agreement going through should top it, mainly due to the hype surrounding it. I, on my part, have not read the agreement, so I can't yet decide if I should be worried for the environmental doom and water shortage we're headed towards or excited for the glorious economic prosperity coal and copper could bring. Perhaps it's both. Ts.Elbegdorj became the President, the first Democratic president since democracy came marching in, and has subsequently been named the Man of the Year by some paper or another, resulting in another deja-vu of Obama's change-campaign and a nomination of a similar kind, albeit on a macro level. PM S.Bayar resigned, becoming the first PM to voluntarily step down from the post.
Speaking of Obama, while going through JibJab's playlist, I found this hilarious video, which has nothing to do with 2009 list but here it is:
Then there's H1N1, which everyone stopped caring about soon as the curfew was lifted. Everything was back to normal. The newspapers suddenly stopped their daily front-page coverage of the swine flu, and stopped ridiculing the Health Minister in their cartoon sections.
While the government's decided not to hold any official fireworks on the Square, they informed citizens that they were free to gather at the Square on NYE. To do exactly what, I am not sure, considering unofficial / private fireworks we could buy for 10,000 Tugriks last year are now banned (if I heard correctly). I'm for the ban really, considering the number of people who get their fingers blown off every year. Now for some cool, Starbucks put together a video of "All you need is love", performed by folks from 156 countries at the same time, to launch their campaign against AIDS in Africa. We are at 2m11s mark just between Palau and Rwanda, with a morin huurch playing a couple of connecting riffs.
You can watch the entire Mongolia video on Starbucks Love project site, with the musician Khishigtsogt performing the whole song on a morin huur, with some khuumii thrown in. Here's the link.
