buuz and gay pride

Hi.
It's Sunday night here. I just finished making some football idiom games for tomorrow's class, am about to pass out...

Tomorrow morning I'm meeting my students at the Grand Khan Irish Pub. For those of you who might have forgotten that I'm in Mongolia, that's "Khan"- as in "Chinngis Khan."

Eagle TV, Baika's news station, is sponsoring an American Super Bowl party. Nevermind that the game starts at 7:00 am Monday morning, Ulaanbaatar time. The pub will be open, and diehard American football fanatics will be there to watch the game. Them, and my English class. I'll let you know how it goes.

It was a fun weekend. I went to the Mongolian opera last night, which was awesome, and today Manlai and some of his friends picked me up at noon to take me to his uncle's "summer home". We drove outside of UB, where the air is fresh, and I finally met his mother. She cooked us mutton and buuz (Mongolian meat dumplings).



I was home for about 10 minutes this evening when Zula came to pick me up. Out we went to Dublin's (yes, they love the Irish here) and then to "Level", a very trendy club off of Peace Ave. I think she is about the most wonderful person I've ever known. She's such an independent, thoughtful person. Very strong, creative, and tremendously intelligent.

Here's why I love her:
I use my laptop and LCD projector in my class. During a 10 minute break on Thursday, I was skimming an article on the NYTimes, and one of my students gasped, pointed at the words "same-sex marriage", and then covered her mouth as she started to laugh. Other students looked, and were very confused: "Same-sex marriage??? What is that?"

I explained, carefully and slowly, that one of the current civil rights movements in the U.S. is for the homosexual community. People are gay and lesbian, and they want to have equal rights as heterosexual Americans. Some of my students nodded solemnly, trying to be respectful, I think, but many of them -adults in their 20s and 30s- couldn't do anything but laugh.

I wasn't offended; it obviously was the first time, in their lives, they heard about the concept. It was totally, completely bizarre to them.

When I asked, already knowing the answer, if Mongolian law protected or supported the gay community, one of my students said: "I don't think we have gay people here."

So that's the backstory. When I met up with Zula tonight, the first thing she told me was about going to a gay parade and bar yesterday. Talk about an underground scene. One of her girlfriends invited her to the event, and Zula thought it sounded fun and interesting... so they went. When she studied in St. Petersburg, she had gay friends; this was, however, her first time in her life meeting openly gay people in Mongolia.

I loved getting to hear her talk about everyone at the bar - it was sweet because it was such a new experience for her (that she loved) and because she also had to search for the English words to describe it to me: "Some of the men were very beautiful. If you looked at them at first, they looked like men. But if you looked longer, you could see they had a kind of feminine beauty."
Mongolia has to be one of the hardest places in the world for homosexuals. It's people like Zula who will bring it around.