Tsagaan Sar is over and everyone is back to work 3kgs heavier. The festival of family reunions and buuz and more buuz. For three days, you visit relatives and elders, going through what can only be described as buuz-ocalypse, promising yourself to never eat anything again EVER for the rest of your life. For you are now thoroughly buuzified to last you a lifetime and hunger is an unfamiliar territory you shall never visit again.
That aside, this year's Tsagaan Sar's Shiniin negen or the first day of the New Year lasted for two days. Something to do with the lunar cycle where the 24-hour lunar cycle is instead extended to a 48-hour cycle. So began the year of the white metal Tiger also called "
Тийн урвагч" .
These names just get better and better. I don't know how the first word fits into this context but the second word means
traitor in Mongolian. Every year has a name and last year's was something that could be interpreted as the Year of the
allergic Ox. I don't know if the meanings of these names have any reflection on the year's overall outlook, but if they do, there isn't much positive about this year. Why can't we, for a change, have a year with a cool name, like Year of the Tiger a.k.a. "
Super Ninja" (probably has to do with the fact that I watched "Ninja Assassin" yesterday, which was completely crap but entertaining the way only bad movies can be).
I haven't blogged for a while and a lot has happened. In the sumo world, Asashoryu has retired under threats of dismissal due to a brawl at a Tokyo nightlife district. What's next for the champ? Will he return to Mongolia and run in the 2012 Parliamentary elections, thus joining other wrestler-turned-politicians? Kyokushuzan Batbayar, former Sumo wrestler and a current MP, seems to approve of the Sumo federation's approach to the Asashoryu problem. In a recent interview at a Tokyo airport, when asked how he felt about Asashoryu retiring, he mentioned that the he is proposing a legislation to the Parliament in April to ban wrestlers with criminal records and on-going investigation from entering all national competitions. Mongolian press view the Kyokushuzan's comments as being "Anti-Asashoryu".
And weird news: Satellite parts fell from the sky in the countryside. Nobody is sure who the dead satellite belonged to, and
an expert in the Meteorology Center said, not very reassuringly, "there is no way to predict when a broken or malfunctioning satellite will fall." Original article here.
