mongolia

A Bathhouse in Mongolia

The evening my fiancée and I returned to Ulan Baator from our three-day excursion in the steppe, we longed for a nice hot bath. Two nights we had slept inside a gher (the Mongolian term for a yurt). And on the second full day we each took a "bath" inside an oversized pail laid out on the open Mongolian grassland. The following day we just jumped into a lake. Now, we both wanted a proper bath.

But our hotel had no hot water. Since the manager promised there'd be some in the morning, my fiancée decided she'd wait till then. I, on the other hand, could not wait. (Actually, what I craved desperately was the banya, a Russian institution which combines sauna and lunacy.) So I got the idea to go to the public baths in Ulanbaator, something I have done a few times in Japan and once in Turkey. Declaring I was insane she refused to come along, so she took a nap in the hotel room and I went by myself.

Mise-en-scène: the first public bath I chanced upon in UB.

When I entered the bath room, I had the effect of bringing to a sudden and inceremonious halt the uproarious confabulation that I had heard from the dank corridor outside. The ten or so naked Mongolians, all of them short & stocky or short & scrawny, just stared at me through the mist. Not in a hostile manner, just in a curious one. Westerners aren't rare in UB, but in the public baths they are apparently never seen. I repeated inanely the phrase "sain bainuu" (hello in Mongolian).

In the room, perhaps 25m by 20m, both the floor and the walls (up to a certain height) were covered by scummy blue-green tiles. It seemed these surfaces had seen many a soapy splatter and had been only seldom washed. Instead of being white, therefore, the lattice formed among the tiles by the grouting had turned mossy brown from a combination of mildew and plain old filth.

At the centre of the room was an elevated bath (perhaps 5m x 5m and about 3 feet deep), also tiled, the size of a small swimming pool. It was communal, like a jacuzzi.

Along the walls was a row of faucets, with rusting soap holders beside each one. In front of one of these faucets the Mongolians would squat as though about to defecate, scrape off some of the free soap pulp, lather some on their bodies and wash. After rinsing they jumped with gusto into the scalding hot water, first making lots of "aaooaah" noises and then eventually settling to relax complacently. Periodically, gusts of steam entered the room from a vent whose door would be flapped open by an invisible attendant.

As it was explained to me by a kind Mongolian using hand signs, the etiquette was to wash at the faucet first and be completely clean before jumping into the bath. But not being terribly fond of squatting naked like an Indian relieving himself on the green in a Bombay park, I decided to wash standing. Naturally, this deviation from the norm attracted more attention than if I had just squatted meekly.

I was carrying a bottle of my fiancée's shampoo, some effeminate scented thing smelling like oranges. After I worked a dollop into my hair, the scent wafted through the room carried by the steam and soon caught the attention of the already curious Mongolians. Of the four who came over to strike up a friendly conversation, none knew much more than a few words of English and Russian. (Mongolia had been a Soviet satellite state until the collapse of the USSR). But they were evidently inquiring about the strange atmosphere of citrus in their midst.

As I furiously worked the foam in my hair, and just as I was about to share some of the orange lotion with my good Mongolians, one of the quartet suddenly pointed below my waist and burst into laughter. I assumed, as the only circumcised person in the room, that I was something of a standout. Or at least I hope that's what they were laughing at.

But I became reasonably sure when one of them tugged at his own foreskin, jabbered jovially in Mongolian at the top of his lungs, and then proceeded to point at the tip of my manhood, coming within half an inch of me. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of the first week at boarding school, the whole room burst into laughter at the odd-looking organ. I had no idea what they were saying but joined in the laughter nonetheless and muttered in English, "Yes, I am a freak! Hahahaha!" The Mongolians, an uncircumcised people wedged in-between the uncircumcised Russians and the uncircumcised Chinese, probably don't get to see a circumcised member too often. (As far as I know, only Jews and Muslims are circumcised routinely.)

I was getting a bit weary with all the embarassing attention, so I thought I might deflect it by offering each and every one in my audience a dollop of shampoo. Apparently accustomed to washing their hair with ordinary soap, the Mongolians simply delighted in the orange goo. As the lotion foamed luxuriously atop their coarse black hair, they made approving noises which I can only transcribe as vaw vaw vaw. Soon all heads were lathered up, the atmosphere was oppressively citric, and the room reverberated with vaw vaw vaw.

After washing off the suds and lather, the Mongolians jumped into the bath and bad me to follow with brusque & enthusiastic movements of their hands. Which I did reluctantly, lest I offended.

Inside there was a party, with tea and something called airag passed all around from thermoses one of them had brought. Made from a brick of rejected tea plant parts, the Mongolian tea, or tsai, is served in a little bowl and taken with lots of salt, lots of sugar and a bit of rancid milk. Yes, it's pretty disgusting, I had nearly vomitted tasting some a day ealier out in the steppe.

But airag is even worse. This fermented mare's milk, surely with more than 10% alcohol content, tastes like a semi-curdled mixture of rotten milk, antifreeze, castor's oil and milk of magnesia. On the steppe, the Mongolians top it off with some horse's or camel's blood, so that the white viscous brew has a pretty red spiral at the top. Although I didn't get sick, I certainly felt queezy all day from having tasted a whole bowl of it. However, the airag I was offered inside the bath appeared to just plain mare's milk and Mongolian vodka, a drink deserving a lengthy obloquy all its own. Inside my bowl I found some unidentifiable lumps and two long hairs which didn't appear to be human. But heartened by the knowledge that the drink, being half vodka, was more likely to blind me than cause rumbles in my belly, I nonchalantly removed the hairs and went on with the drink.

Drinking their tea and airag while making the loudest possible slurping noises, the Mongolians broke into song. Not songs with words, but a melodious sequence of pure throaty reverberations, sometimes with a single drone note held for an interminably long time, maybe for 50 beats. As I the circumcised freak was being entertained by my Mongolian hosts, their conviviality produced fine but perceptible ripples in the bath water.

In the Fray/Mote, there have been several discussions of throat-singing and their provenance. Well, after having listened to an hour's worth of Mongolians singing most laryngeally, I can attest that they throat-sing. I'm convinced they've no other method of singing.

When I got back to the hotel, my fiancée asked me, "What happened to all the shampoo?"

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