Naadam

It’s a holiday!  Not a very active one, as evidenced by my spending the morning on a computer.  Today is the third and final day of the official Naadam (rhymes with bottom) festival in Ulaanbaatar.  There are also local versions of Naadam all over Mongolia, held at other times throughout July or possibly going into June or August, I’m not sure.  I attended one day of my local Naadam this past Saturday and got to observe the “three manly sports” of horse racing, archery and wrestling.  Horse racing shouldn’t really count as a manly sport though, because the jockeys are kids.  As it turned out, the real archery had taken place on Friday, so I also saw the kid version of that rather than the manly version.  The wrestling, though.  That was pretty manly.

Other than the sporting events, Naadam in my town was like a fair — there were games of skill or chance, like ring toss and darts, and lots of fried food.  Not a lot of variety to the food, just large quantities.  There were dozens of tents set up where you could buy khuushuur, a flat, fried dumpling with meat inside.  I’ve helped my host family make it at home a couple times, and it’s tasty.

Naadam involved a lot of waiting around.  I spent about 8 hours there and saw a total of probably one hour of action.  This seems to be true of the big Naadam as well, which I have been watching on TV with my family.  The wrestling tournament is much bigger in UB, though.  It looked like one or two hundred wrestlers were competing, compared to about 20 in my town.

Mongolian wrestling is pretty simple: whoever gets thrown to the ground loses.  The UB tournament has nine rounds.  I haven’t figured out the elimination system, because I don’t think there are 512 wrestlers at the beginning.  There are no weight classes, so you get to see matchups with 100+ pound differentials, which I think are the most entertaining.  The post-match ritual is pretty cool too.  The winner spreads his arms like a bird of prey and poses for the crowd before walking back to his opponent so they can give each other a respectful slap on the butt.

If you want to see pictures of all this, you’ll have to look elsewhere, because I didn’t get to take many up close.  Do a Google image search for Naadam and you’ll find some good stuff.

I’m not sure if my family has any plans for the rest of the day, but there has been some talk of possibly going to the countryside to ride horses.  I hope they were serious.