Long Weekend

So, report cards, and parent-teacher interviews are over. They went surprisingly well, and was regularly thanked for all of my hard work in educating their children. After two consecutive half-days for the interviews, we now have a long weekend, as Monday is Mongolian Independence Day. Today, the school's financial officer asked me if I was going to go see the wrestling on Monday. Immediately, my reaction was, "There's a wrestling tournament on Monday?" and "What better way to celebrate Mongolian independence than by watching what Mongolians love most - beating each other up." Of course, I have never experienced live Mongolian wrestling, so I began to investigate this event. I had to find out when, where, how much it cost, how to get tickets, and how many people wanted to go. After a quick poll, six of us decided to go to the event. I still had no idea how I could buy tickets. I asked several people, none of which knew anything about the event, before I got to the school's receptionist, Nasaa. Nasaa, in turn asked Ganbold (who speaks next to no English), who in turn picked up the phone and called the Wrestling Palace. First, I wondered how he knew the number so quickly, and second, I was fairly excited about the up-coming answer. Ganbold told Nasaa, who translated for me that we had to buy the tickets today at the Wrestling Palace for T 5000 each.

Andrew and I made the trek after our interviews were over. After a bus ride to UB Mart, we hailed a cab. We were picked up by a man in full military dress uniform. He inquired about where we are from. After we responded by saying "Канад," (Canada) he told us that he is Mongolian. I was a mite dumbfounded by this, and made the response (with some gesturing to his uniform), "I can see that." After some jovial broken Mongolian conversation, he dropped us at the Palace. As we went to the ticket booth, we we bombarded by scalpers trying to sell us tickets to tonight's concert. Since I only know how to say 'today' and 'tomorrow', I had to try to explain that I wanted tickets for 3 days from now. This didn't go so well, and I eventually discovered they ONLY had tickets for tonight. We eventually found the ticket booth, and after a similar conversation, I found a ticket on the window, pointed and said "zorga!" (six) The man was a little surprised, since there were only two of us.

Moral of the story: I'm going to live Mongolian wrestling on Monday.