I Grew My Boobs in China (36 page)

“I’m so dirty! Do you think they have showers inside those little tents?” I asked.

“You mean, inside a ger? You’ll find out tonight!” Ammon said, as he knelt by the river to fill our empty water bottle. The impossibility of getting an affirmative answer came to me the second after I voiced the silly question.
Of course there isn’t a shower. How could I be so naïve?!

When we walked into our very first traditional ger, I half-asked, half-stated, “This is
really
what they live in?” Without warning, the memory of the five-bedroom apartment we’d looked at on our last house hunt came to mind. I remembered how much I’d whined and bitched over the notion of moving into an apartment. I detested Mom for it, insisting I’d rather move out than live with hundreds of people in the same building and possibly even have to share a washing machine.
Disgusting!
I’d thought.
I won’t even be able to say “come hang out at my house.” What would I say? “Let’s go to my apartment?!” Nobody will want to be my friend. Only homeless people live in apartments!
I could remember my feelings about it as if it were yesterday. I still had never lived in an apartment, but when I stepped into that ger, the memory of how skewed my perceptions had been shamed me.

My first visit to a local Mongolian home was a bit shocking. The ger was completely open inside, consisting of just one big, round room that held a sink, a colourful dresser, four metal-framed beds lining the felt walls, and a fireplace/stove in the middle. The roof was supported by reddish-orange poles in the traditional Mongolian style.

“So wait, how
do
they shower, then?” I asked, coming slightly out of my daze. There was no plumbing that we could see, only an upside-down bottle of water mounted over the sink.

“Probably from the same place where they got the water to fill that sink over there,” Mom said, pointing at the hobbit-sized hand basin in the corner. “From a well or something.”  

“This place looks like a fat teepee!” Bree said, really feeling the change in atmosphere. I sat on one of the simple metal beds placed along the wall and watched the flames in the tiny stove that had been lit before we’d arrived. The skinny, black chimney poked out of a hole in the circular ceiling. I enjoyed feeling its warmth.

“Very good! Strong built houses, but very light. Easy to take apart and rebuild,” Baagii told us as he crouched to add more wood to the little black stove. It would get significantly colder as the night wore on.

“How long would it take to assemble one of these gers, then, if they’re nomadic and moving all the time?” Mom asked him.

“It only takes one to three hours to build,” Baagii told her, turning on his heels to face us after placing the last stick in the smoky fire.

“Wow, that’s quick! Can you imagine being able to pack your whole house onto the backs of a few camels?” Mom reminded us about seeing a nomadic family in travel mode a few hours before. They had been transporting their ger on a couple of camels loaded with the orangey-red support poles and the ger’s felt cover. Horses, goats, sheep, and a couple of dogs had trailed along behind them.

“So those camels with all that stuff... that was a ger?” Bree asked, finally piecing it together.

“I think it’s so cute! I want to take one home,” Mom said, excited by the prospect.
Geez,
I should’ve settled for the apartment!

“Cute? Sure, but our bathrooms were almost as big as this,” I said, noting the whole five bits of furniture.

“So you should be grateful!” Mom and Ammon chimed in together.
I hate it when they pull that grateful, hippy-era stuff.
I thought, resisting their forceful tone.
I’ll draw my own conclusions, thank you very much!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That night I lay on my stomach on the colourful woollen rug explaining the day in my journal, even though it was hard to write when there was so much conversation going on around me.

June 28
^th
, 2005,
I always started neatly at the top left-hand side with the date. The top right was for the day count –
Day 55
. Only three hundred and ten days left. I wasn’t aware of any actual return date, but a year was what I had decided to use for the countdown.

Noortje, the Dutch gal, was a writer, and she also kept a diary. I really admired how neat and precise her writing was.

“What kind of paper is that?” I asked her that night.

“It’s just graph paper,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Wow.” I leaned over to Mom lying on her bed and said, “I need some of that.” Graph paper was much better suited to my particularly tiny handwriting. I hated how my writing looked on paper with regularly sized spacing.

Earlier that day we had stopped for lunch in a town which was like a very large camp of round gers, some surrounded by simple wooden fences. The town that stood out most in my mind was called “Moron.” I made sure to note that in my journal, along with Bree’s immediate reaction to its moniker.

“So this is where all the mongoloids and morons came from!?” she’d exclaimed.

“Breanna!” Mom scolded.

“I don’t get it, though,” I’d been sincerely confused, “Why are those words used as insults when the people here are so nice?!”
I’ll think twice before I use those words again, that’s for sure!

After I wrote
Visited:
at the top of the page between the date and the day count, I asked Ammon, “What was the name of this place again?” We were staying just outside the grounds of an old Buddhist monastery that was once one of the three most important in Mongolia. The monastery was surrounded by a few gers, some for the locals living there and some for visitors. Baagii explained that Buddhism was brought to Mongolia by the Chinese when they ruled the country.

“Amarbayasgalant Khild,” Ammon answered very slowly, so as not to leave any letters out.

“Wow! That’s so long?! Why would they need such a long name?” Bree asked. Given how small the villages we’d passed through were, they’d sure had long and important sounding names.

“I bet it’s the first letter of everyone’s name in the village starting from oldest to youngest.” I suggested. Baagii laughed at this idea.

“Can you spell it for me?” I asked, hoping to record it before another conversational tangent started, but it was already too late.

“What kind of grand name is amambbdjakilt anyway?!” Bree jumped in, to my dismay.

“Amarbayasgalant Khild,” Ammon repeated.

“Like I said, amammaaKILT. Oh, and I want to go to Scotland and see the men in kilts!” she continued.

“What kind of random---?!” I blurted.

“Yah, yah. That won’t be for a while!” Ammon said, already stressed enough by the task of negotiating our passage through the next country on our itinerary.

“Yah! Why don’t we go to Europe?” I wanted to visit all the blue-eyed hotties I imagined might be waiting for me there.

“Oh man! There’s a lot more to it than just ‘let’s go to Europe’. It’s not like you can just walk over there, you know. There is a LOT of planning involved!”

“Hey, yah. That would be fun!” Mom said. “But I thought we were going to Africa!”

“Nooo!” I objected.

“Why don’t we all just enjoy where we are for now?” Ammon fussed.

“I am. It’s great! I just want to see
everything
now,” Mom exclaimed, reminding me of a deer that had just spotted the first tips of green grass sprouting up after a long white winter. Ammon cupped his forehead in his hand and shook his head ruefully.

“Aye, yie, yie! You guys are nuts,” he groaned.

“You mean
those
guys. I’m the only normal one here,” I said defensively.

“Could we go overland to Egypt?” Bree asked.

“Egypt? EGYPT?! How does Egypt even come in to this? Do you realize that would involve places like Iran, Syria, Afghanistan---” he tried to explain before I cut him off.

“Whoa! Now
that
would be something worth talking about,” I said, surprising even myself.

“I wonder what kind of things we’d see there. What would the culture be like? What kind of architecture do they have?” Mom pondered those and other possibilities.

“Let’s just get to where we’re going first,” Ammon said again, but started pulling his map out nonetheless and forcing my journal to the side.

“Sky would completely kill us!”
I said.

We hovered around the tiny world map at the front of his guidebook by candlelight that flickered on our faces as we came up with all sorts of wild ideas and dreams, none of which had originally been my dreams.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

With my journal lying neglected beside me, I continued to reflect upon the day. I stretched out as best I could on my short bed. So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours that I’d become exhausted to the point of restlessness, like when you lose your appetite after being hungry for too long.

The monastery’s incense and candles had been overpowering, but as with most of the monasteries we’d visited, I’d rather liked it. In a strange sense, it had made me feel somewhat nostalgic for the Chinese monasteries we’d stayed in. It was as though the thick, smoky air was filled with spirits that surrounded me and I was inhaling them, welcoming them in one by one. I just hoped they were good spirits.

With the day’s sights and smells still vividly real, thoughts poured in a mile a minute. I thought about whether the monastery had produced the smoky candles in our ger.
Did they get them from China like most of the world probably does? Or does their deep-seated dislike for each other run deep enough to prevent that kind of trade?
I wondered who brought them all the way from the capital.
Was there some nomadic candle maker who carried his wax on camels and set out on voyages like the uncomfortable, ten-hour trek we’d just made to deliver his supplies? Then again, maybe the monastery makes its own candles. How would you do that? Is it like bees’ wax? What the heck, where does wax come from, anyway? Do they even have bees here? They must
, I concluded.
They have humongous fields of wild flowers
.
But does that mean there HAVE to be bees if there are flowers?

On and on my mind wandered until I eventually passed out from sheer exhaustion. I always found it both unnerving and fascinating that I could never remember the very last thought I had before falling asleep.
At what moment did sleep happen? Did those thoughts pass through into my sleep and become dreams? Or was I awake the whole time in a different universe?
This was not the kind of thing this trip was likely to teach me, but I sure was learning about a whole lot of other mind-boggling stuff.

Chapter 31

Where Nomads Roam

Bree spent the next few days walking with a slightly different tilt than usual and just a bit too much “wiggle wobble” for my liking.
That hair flinging has got to stop, and that eye twitching
,
too!
Do all cultures find winking attractive?
While we played cards in the evenings, Bree would often take herself off to a corner and pluck her eyebrows, despite the dim lighting.
I wonder why?
I’d think sarcastically. Undoubtedly, she was as frustrated by my scowls as I was by her not-so-subtle flirting.

We hadn`t seen Baagii much the first day, which was fine by me
.
We’d decided on the second day that it was only fair for us to pay half the price for Baagii’s service so we could more legitimately pick his brain, much to Ammon’s satisfaction. This also meant that he would travel with us during the day, because our van was bigger. This put him and Bree in even closer proximity, and drove me even crazier. Bree was thrilled with the new arrangement, and I could tell she was expecting more than just information for the extra cost. There was no escaping the two of them as they were tossed around in the back giggling. At the moment, she was hanging from her waist out the window, licking the air with uncontrolled excitement like a full-cheeked, howling dog.

“Are you SURE they didn’t film
Lord of the Rings
here?!” she shouted up to Ammon, momentarily pulling her head in from the window.

“Definitely not! It was New Zealand,” he responded immediately. He would know, too, as it is his favourite movie of all time. Maybe not, I thought, but as our vehicles chased each other up and over the hillsides in a kind of dance, I did feel a bit like I was in an adventure film.
The military jeep, camouflaged and worn, raced alongside us in the meadows, stirring up dust in a long, trailing parachute.

Mother Nature created a cloud masterpiece in the sky, the biggest easel known to man; God used whipped cream instead of paint to show just how happy He was. Despite the burn I could see developing from suspending my arms through the open window to take photos, I could not put our little Nikon down. There was nothing to mar the landscape in all directions and for miles after that, and then a herd of wild horses would emerge, larger than I ever dreamt was possible. They roamed free and had all the space horses were born to explore. This land was truly a horse’s paradise.

“Holy COW! I can’t believe how many there are!” Bree shouted from the back.

“This isn’t cows. That is horse!” Baagii corrected her exclamation.

“Yah, I know, but it really does look like cattle,” she shouted again over the many other competing sounds. It was always loud, with the rustling wind fighting the noise of the engine for supremacy.

“They’re beautiful,” Mom said. Lavish and vibrant, they ran in herds across the grassland or clustered by small lakes, completely free of human interference. The colts played carelessly but always stayed close to their mothers for protection. When they ran, their long manes whipped in the wind and their elegant tails flapped in their wake. It was hard to tell if they were running with or from us.