To Catch a Goat (and then proceed to milk it)

Renee' and I are getting very close to winding down language class for this year.  In just a few more days we will embark on a two month reprieve of homework, and will have the time to catch up on some other things.  Jonathan is going to the LIFE conference in Orlando.  Renee' and Cori will accompany him on the trip home and visit with friends and family.  They will return with a friend from our church for a three week visit, afterwards.  While they are gone I will be doing several projects around here and taking a little backpacking trip (which I will blog about later). 

In any case, because this is the end of the year - our Language School decided to take all of the foreign students on a little outing to the countryside.  We had quite an interesting day.  We visited a Mongolian family who raises goats - along with horses and sheep.  In reality this is probably a fairly wealthy family (at least for one that lives in the countryside), because they had quite a bit a livestock.  Goat hair brings around $70 per kilogram for the farmer from the cashmere industry here.  This particular family has a lot of goats. 

They gave us a little demonstration of daily life for this family.  So a few of us were first of all tasked to catch some goats.  I have decided that they would normally do this from horse back using a long stick with a noose on the end.  However, I think they were much more entertained by watching us run them down like this:

 

Once the goat was captured, the herdsman lassoed them all together and various students were then given the opportunity to milk the goats.  I personally did not milk anything - but they were fun to catch.  We then enjoyed sharing food with our host family.  Hospitality is high value in Mongolian culture, so they shared hard cheese, yogurt , a sort of sour milk drink called botz (sort of tasted like really sour lemon flavored yogurt.  It wasn't too bad really) and homemade vodka (that reminded me more of what I imagine sheep sweat would taste like - not so good).  All in all a fun day.  Now only one more week of class - one day of which will be a test that I must now study for.  Here are a few more photos from yesterday for your viewing pleasure.

 

 

Comments

[Phillip Horner]

VODKA?

[bernie]

Just to clarify ...

Vodka is served to guests in Mongolian homes as a part of Mongolian hospitality. It would be quite rude to enter a home and not take a sip. The proper thing to do is to take a sip and it is okay to not drink the entire shot. (Although during the winter/new year holiday, one elderly Mongolian man fussed at me for not downing the whole thing!) The homemade vodka that I mention in this article is quite different the the Russian Vodka that is typical. It is of much lower alchol content, and is the reason the the introduction of Russian vodka to this country was so devastating. Russian Vodka has nearly twice the alcohol content, but people drank it the same way they did before - thus producing twice the effect twice as quickly. This it is a problem.

Anyway - lest anyone think we were sitting around downing vodka shots - we just had a sip of sheep sweat.