Hello all! So it might have been a little while, actually not that long, but I figured that most of you don’t want to read about my daily life, because to be honest it is quite boring. I wake up I go to work, I come home and I do other normal things (like eat, and my food is even quite boring).
But I went to the countryside this weekend, and I have heard that people like reading about my trips to the countryside. This time was not actually all that exciting. Basically all I did was work. We combed 15 goats, each goat takes about an hour to comb, these were the big old, billy goats. And yes combing is the right word; you don’t shear goats (surprising I know). One website I read about cashmere said that goats are combed and not sheared because of their delicate and sensitive nature. However goats don’t have a nature that is either delicate or delicate nature, I think it is more likely because for a goat to produce high quality cashmere it has to live in a very cold climate, and they are combed in March and April, when it can still get really cold so combing the goat leaves them with a coat. I find goats a little scary, of all the animals that are around here I think goats are the scariest. Sheep and cows are just plane stupid, goats are slightly smarter, but not that much. Cashmere is actually the under layer of a goats coat, it is the layer that keeps them from dying in the freezing winter, in Mongolian. It is also why Mongolia produces such high quality cashmere, because it gets so very very cold. So anyway in Mongolia goats are combed by hand, however apparently in other places there are machines that comb goats, I am not quite sure how that would work, I am still looking for a good picture online as to what a goat combing machine looks like. China, which produces the most cashmere, uses machines, I’m told. Here we take what look like long toothed combs and comb the entire tied down goat. Did I say all over, I mean all over until there is no more cashmere left, for an hour. It is long, and tedious, did I mention that they have 250 goats (though we were combing the really big goats so I imagine the smaller goats will take less time), the herder with the most goats in my soum has 1000 goats, even if you say they take one person (we were combing 2 or three to a goat) an hour a piece that is 1000 hrs, which is a lot of time. The obvious question is why. And the answer is money. Last year a kilo of Cashmere cost about 40 dollars (at first I had translation issues with my cp and thought she said four, but it was in fact 40) unfortunately this year the price is ranging between 20 and 25 dollars. Since cashmere is a major part of herders income this is a tremendous blow economically (nearly 50% less income).
Other interesting facts you might never have known:
Goats have dandruff, or at least dry skin, they need some serious moisturizer.
Ticks like goats (and Mongolia has ticks), I don’t like ticks.
To get vitamins Mongolians will make tea with goat and sheep dung. And before you get completely disgusted by this idea you should realize it is actually quite smart. A traditional Mongolian diet is devoid of vitamins. And by devoid I mean devoid, meat, white flour and some white potatoes sometimes don’t give you many vitamins, grass however I am sure has vitamins (it is green and leafy after all), but humans can’t digest grass. Goats and sheep can so taking their dung and boiling it, it is tea, will give people vitamins. None the less I am perfectly happy taking my multi vitamin. Also to get vitamins Mongolians use the sun (as does everyone else), consume lots of milk products and sometimes eat rare meat (I have never seen this but I have been told it was done in the past). Now Mongolians in cities have regular access to fruits and many vegetables, here we just have apples and some vegetables but they can also get (expensive) vitamin pills.
Baby goats looks like puppies (kind of) and sound like baby humans.
Big goats can jump 4 foot fences.
Cashmere is all light colored. It doesn’t matter if it comes from the blackest goat it is light colored. And even white goats have a cream colored cashmere.
I bought a bout 700 grams of cashmere and am currently picking all the guard hairs out of it. It is a very very long and annoying process and I haven’t even done 50 grams yet. But I am planning on make something fun with it, a scarf, a hat, socks, or something else – if I was more ambitious I would make a sweater, but my last sweater knitting experiences was not successful so I am going to stick to thinks I can make. It should be lots of fun to learn how to spin and then to knit.
Finally the English Olympics are this weekend (the weekend after the hodoo). Just to throw in a bit of irony, the Olympics were canceled back in March because of a major snow storm that never developed. But this morning, the morning we left for the Olympics, there was a dusting of snow. It is especially funny because I had been saying that when we finally get around to these things it was going to snow, and it did. I love Mongolian weather.
Actually I love Mongolia. It is an amazing country. It has some down points, but so does everywhere else. The people are wonderful, and the landscape is beautiful. I can’t believe I’ve been here for most of a year.
One final note on packages. I am super gratefully to everyone who has sent me something (actually I am super grateful to those of you who send emails too). I am well supplied with colored paper and markers now. If you are thinking about sending a package soon, please send it in the next couple of weeks. I am going to be traveling most of June and don’t want packages to just sit around waiting for me somewhere, it seems like a good way for them to go missing. Also there is a big holiday in July (July 10 – 13). Since the mail is still sorting itself out from Tsaagan sar which was at the end of February it is probably smart not to send anything from about mid June on (new stuff is coming fine now but I am still missing something that I thought was sent mid February, and I am quite certain it is at the back of a pile somewhere waiting to get sorted).
