Mongolian chocolate

Many foreigners are coming to Mongolia to teach the people here how to do certain things.
One of them was how to make chocolate!!!

The result is this one: Golden Gobi or Altai Gobi (in mongolian)
Very good chocolate, made with the help of belgian people.
I really like it :-)

Children day

Tomorrow is an holiday, this is the children day.
But the university is making a ceremony today

The children of the employees received big bags with sweets and games

They are all dressed very nicely, especially the girls

But the boys are not too bad :-)

They are very styled actually !!!

Then they are singing and dancing to receive more presents

They also make some drawing

And here a nice singer:

And a great dancer!!!

water boiler

at home I have a great water boiler.
when I start it I have a red light to indicate this is hot!!!

Actually I need to boil all the water otherwise it is not really drinkable…

But I really like my sci-fi water boiler :-)
small pleasures in a hard world :-)))))))

Kindergarten

Darkhan is the city which has the most schools in Mongolia after UB.
It has 10 higher education institutions, 25 secondary schools and 14 kindergarten!!!

The kindergarten are newly located in a nice car free street.

There are some banks where you can seat, this is nicely decorated, very nice to walk there.

On the facade of the kindergarten you have some paintings, with traditional mongolian sport, such as archery

wrestling :-)

And of course horse riding!

This is another one with some other type of decoration.
In the morning (but not too early we are in Mongolia) this street is full of parent with their children.
When the weather is nice this is full of couple and me!!!

a 1840 km week-end

Oh yeah it was a long week-end!!
So departure saturday morning at 4 in the morning (actually it was 5 because Mongolian people are always late …)

First we went to ub and on the way we met a boy on his horse. This horse is for the nadaam, he is prepared to be quick!

Then at 7 in the morning we had our first pic-nic.
What is nice in Mongolia is that you can stop everywhere you want to make a pic-nic, there is enough space and no barriers at all!!

The first thing we had visited is a monument for Chinggis Khaan.

This is a big statue of him, but very big!!!!

Here a closer view of him.

Inside there is a very big boot of him.
This is a traditional mongolian boot, very nice!

After that we went to Terelj national park, to see the turtle rock.
This is the mongolian I went with:
3 students and one teacher (the smallest woman :-))

You see this has the shape of a turtle

And after that, after a very very very long time in the car  we finally reach the beginning of the Gobi.

Gobi is a very big desert, so you have some sand dunes

But in the desert you have also some vegetation, like some small trees, some grass

But mainly sand :-)

This is funny because the steppe is stopping and hop the desert is starting.
And in Mongolia there are mountains everywhere and all the time!

And in the dune what you can do is jump and jump and jump!!
Wouah this is making exhausted :-)

For the night we have rented a ger for us 5.
This was very nice and very quiet.

And after that in the morning you can jump again!!!

On the way back there were some camels, with mongolian people wearing the del, the traditional clothe.

This is a sign that you can go to different places and this is very rare, most of the time you don't have any sign, so it's quite difficult to know where to go!

Well this was an interesting week-end but a bit too long for my taste…

But for the first time I have seen some Mongolian wrestling!!!
So nice :-)
Now I have to rest a little bit :-)

more pics there

Visit of the copper mine from Erdenet

With the two german guys I have been to Erdenet on Wednesday.
We first took a shared taxi and there we met an american girl from peace corp.
It took us around 2 hours to reach the city.

This is the 3rd city of Mongolia
And the city is quite compact compared to Darkhan
And it gives an impression of having more money because of the mine

But still we have all these russian style building everywhere, well different taste ...

In the street you always see people with the dell (traditional clothe), this is so nice!!!

Yeahhh a french guy, oh no this is a mongolian with a beret :-)
Many men wear this beret, very nice!!!

And during the day people are walking in the main street, it was also very sunny, so very nice !!

Russia, Russia ...

And so we went there, not for the beautiful city :-), but to visit one of the biggest copper mine in Asia.
Our guide was from the University of Erdenet.

 That's him Bayarjargal!!!

The visit was in this russian vehicle, very nice!!
And many things are russian because the mine was grounded with Russia and they still work in cooperation

Here this is the place where they extract the stones

They are digging very deep and every friday they are making some explosions

in the background you see the city.
For the moment they are very deep so the copper is not so good anymore.
When it will be very bad they will go to another place nearby.

For the visit we had some security clothes, very sexy :-)

And this is an other view of the mine, quite impressive !!!

And to extract all the things they have this monster trucks!!
To you see my size compare to these things!!!!

And it's us riding the world :-)

After that they have to extract what they want from the stones.
So they are having a lot of processes that I can't explain anymore...

But you have a huge hall where they clean, process, extract and that in a big noise!!!

The size of everything is very impressive :-)

They have some other part of the mine where they use the iron that they find to produce the tools that they need.
So here the people are melting it

You see that's the cooperation between Russia and Mongolia.
The blond one is mongolian :-))))

In this part they are doing the tools from the iron that they have melted.

And this is the copper. They need again to do another process to have the metal that we know.
The mine has around 60000 employees, with many department, the university, hospital, research, …
This is making the city to live very well!

At the university this are some mask that they use, I found that one very funny :-)
So we have visited around 2 hours, was very nice, something really different!
And after that again a shared disco taxi (with music on demand :-)) to go back to Darkhan!!!