Spit it out

One of my pet peeves in Mongolia: the chronic, incessant, all-around spitting. Mongolians spit everywhere, all the time. They also blow their noses too; just hock a loogie out in the middle of the street in broad daylight. As if stuck in an impossible situation where spitting it out onto the sidewalk was the only choice left for them to stay alive. They spit with passion and noise that seem to express a deep hatred of their salivatory gland secretions. Rid of it, we must be at the soonest, as with a bad one-night-stand, and hurriedly walk away never to think of it again. The way you would spit out a fly that accidentally flew into your mouth. Your mouth that was for some reason wide open, as you ran at full speed, to let a fly in. So there you are, sputtering like a clogged engine, leaving DNA traces of yourself around the city like a dog in heat.

There is such a deep hatred of saliva that drivers will stop their cars in the middle of traffic to deal with this problem right there.

Sometimes you have to be careful to dodge the spit, as the person walking in front of you might let one loose without a warning or a noticeable pause in his/her stride. Just a casual, matter-of-fact, speedy trajectory of bodily fluids from his/her face, only a step ahead of you. Pray that you are not walking downwind from the spraying.

I am ready to wager on the fact that the frozen spit cakes around the city lead to a few injuries in the winter. Next time you walk the streets of UB in the winter, look carefully for a few seconds at the street surface. The streets are patterned with spit-spots that will evaporate in the spring. Evaporate and most definitely enter your lungs.

For the time being, I would advise you to keep a few steps between you and the person in front when walking. You never know when he or she decides to shoot out some bodily fluids from their mouths