Hello friends! This is my last post about our adventures in Mongolia. If you’d like to see more photos of our excursion visit my Flickr page. It’s back to all things photographic from here. As always, thanks for reading!
Pretty much since the day we arrived in Mongolia I noticed a lot of people kind of snacking on something. I thought maybe the whole country had an obsession with eating sunflower seeds.
Then on one of the days we were driving we picked up a hitchhiker (as you do – in Mongolia hitchhiking is actually a very safe, acceptable, and popular mode of transport). He was a nomad wearing the gray coverall-type garb that’s usually worn when working with livestock. He smelled of mutton and earth, had a smile missing a few teeth and seemed genuinely good-natured, although we did not exchange words due to the language barrier. Then suddenly he reached in his pocket and gave me and the husband each a small handful of these tiny brown roasted things. My husband immediately pops one into has mouth, at which point the driver and the hitcher started yelling for him to stop and show him they must be cracked open. The outer shell was thicker and harder than a sunflower seed, and before eating it I went to examine the small snack and what did I find? A pine nut!!!
I think they roast them in the cones, then pull them out to sell and eat.
From that point on I noticed that crunching on pine nuts was somewhat of a Mongolian past time. While standing in line, waiting at the airport or just walking down the street everyone seemed to have some pine nuts in their pocket or a trail of shells following them. Soon after, we stopped at a market to buy some. I managed to convey to the woman selling them, “how much?” at which point she held up one finger. I started to pull out a one-hundred tugrik bill, when my husband stopped and said, “No no, surely she means 1,000.” The lady takes the bill and pours a double dose of pine nuts into our bag. As we were walking away we realized that yes, she meant 100. Keep in mind the exchange rate is about 1300 tugrik to 1 USD. In other words, at $.73 we over paid for nearly a pound of pine nuts by 1000%. Imagine the surprise when I told one of our guides, Oogie, how much pine nuts cost in America.
Since this my last post, here’s a little gem sent along from my father-in-law showing how a ger is put together.
