Last week Olgii combined it's 70-year anniversary celebration and Naadam with two days of parades, costumes, concerts, horse-racing, wrestling, archery, kok boru (horseback tug-of-war with an animal carcass), meat plates, huushuur (fried meat pancakes), and all-around merry-making. It was definitely a holiday for the locals and Ashlee and I were happy to join in the periphery.
As I have said before, the entire town has practically been quivering in anticipation of this celebration for the past few months. Everything was scrubbed clean (well as clean as things can be in Mongolia), buildings were repainted, and stores were pretty much sold out of vodka and soft drinks. The festivities kicked off in the old stadium grounds -- unfortunately the new sports stadium wasn't completed in time -- with a good old-fashioned Olgii parade.
The stadium grounds featured multiple sets of bleachers and Ashlee and I managed to snag a couple of spots near Bahitgul's family to watch the opening ceremony. The parade was relatively tame, but the bleachers got a little out of hand when a Kazakh singing superstar took the stage to give a heavily lip-synced concert. After about 15 minutes of pushing, pulling, shoving, and jostling, Ashlee and I managed to extricate ourselves from the crowd making sure that we stayed well away from the taser-toting police officers in charge of crowd-control.
While watching the concert, I realized that this was my first real taste (well, maybe second after Nayourz) of a truly local event here in Olgii. This wasn't something put together by a tourist company for foreigners. It was all about Bayan-Olgii and Mongolia.
After a few hours at the opening ceremony, Ashlee and I decided we were Naadam-ed out and we retreated to our little island of America. Don't worry though, the festivities continued without us. There were shouts, screams, toasts, singing, raucous dancing, and even fireworks well into the night.
The second day of celebration featured horse-racing at a spot just outside the city. As is traditional for Naadam, the weather looked a little nasty (gray skies promising rain and a stiff breeze), so Ashlee and I again opted out of spectating. No worries, though, because we sent a proxy. Our buddy, Andy, was joining us from a neighboring province where he has been working as a foreign correspondent for an online journal specializing in Central Asia. He went and spent almost 6 hours in the rather foul summer weather watching the races and taking pictures -- pictures which he happily shared with us in exchange for a few nights of room and board. If you want to see the report he filed on Naadam's horse races, click here -- he actually recorded the audio to this slideshow in our living room. After the races, the crowds filed back into the stadium grounds for wrestling, which we did watch.
All in all, it was pretty great being able to witness such a celebration. It was also really nice how we were able to control exactly how much we wanted to be involved in the festivities -- we were stoked that we managed to go an entire holiday without eating from a meat plate! It was also great spending time with Andy. He's convinced me that I need to get a better camera.
On that note, here's some pictures. Enjoy.
This guy is actually our landlord.
A cute baby dressed in wrestler's garb.
The Mongolian flag.
Crowd control by taser.
Ashlee with Bahitgul, her husband, Amosbek, and her daughters, Baljan and Maral.
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