We wake up to a rainy, mellow Arshan on Thursday. The air temperature in the valley better matches that of the incoming airstream this morning, so the winds have died down. The electricity is still out from the night before - we open the curtains for light, have a cold snack of pepperoni and bread and put on an extra layer of clothes to keep warm. When we cross the yard to the outhouse we can see our breath. Danil knocks a short while later and starts a fire for us in the whitewashed woodstove in the corner of our bedroom. This lets us boil a little water to cook breakfast, and make something warm to drink from the mountain water that we collect from the sink next to the banya and carry into our kitchen by the bucket.
For the first time in at least a week, I'm able to to sit down at a table and work. I transcribe some of my hasty language notes from the past few days into my study notebook, and look in the dictionary for some key terms I'm lacking. Pierre plays some guitar. The sound carries out into the yard, and Danil drops in for a few minutes to listen. He sits and plays us a Mongolian ballad. He tells us he hasn't played the guitar in about 15 years, but after a few minutes his fingers remember their way around the strings just fine.
Later, we pass him in the yard cooking some shashleek (shish kebobs) on an outdoor wood grill, and he talks hockey with us. The game between Canada and the Soviet Union in the 70s (1972?) is still a strong memory for him - especially how the Soviets lost. "But then Canada came and played here, and we won that time." I tell him that during a hockey strike a few years ago, CBC Canada played old games from the 70s to make up th dead airtime, so we've actually seen a few clips of those games.
"No helmets," he days, "and long hair. The more scars you had, the more money you earned." He mentions how shocked the Soviet commentators were by the fighting between players during the game with Canada, how they said "this sort of thing doesn't belong in hockey."
"Russians don't fight when they play hockey?"
"Rarely," he says. "It's not the norm."
Shashleek, he tells us, is a Mongolian word. Shash means 'thing' and leek means 'on a stick'. Ghenghis Khan's troops would cook their meat while travelling across the steppes, with the meat stuck on their swords and cooked over an open fire.
Even later that night, Danil drops by with a bottle of vodka, two-thirds empty, and visits with us at our kitchen table for about an hour or so. He talks to us about Mongolian history and culture, and I do my best to keep up with his words and to pass on the gist of things to Pierre. Also, in my haste to be a hostess of sorts, I commit the faux pas of pouring the vodka into glasses.
Danil stares at me for a moment, as though I've just emptied the bottle down the sink. He clears his throat. "Women never pour liquor," he explains. This, it turns out, is a Mongolian/Buryat thing. "They don't drink either. They sit at the table and don't talk. Talking and drinking is for men."
His words are much more gentle and polite in person than on paper, and I'm more than happy to not have to drink.
Danil still has family living in Mongolia, just below the border that runs east-west a short drive south of where we are. They are separated from each other by the randomness of country borders. By the time the bottle empties, he's talked his way through colonization and life under the communists, and has sung a few acappella Mongolian songs. The electricity comes back on halfway through his second song. When he and Pierre empty the bottle, he offers to go and get another.
"I can drink two of these myself," he says. I believe him, but it can't be very easy on his 50/60 year old body, even if he does only do it on special occasions. (They have friends visiting today).
"He wants to get a second bottle," I tell Pierre. "I'm going to tell him no. My head is sore from translating, it's late and I feel like a bag of hammers."
"OK," says Pierre, and he turns to Danil. "Thank you very much, that's very generous but I will hold off for tonight. I like the vodka, and I can drink more,but it's late and we should get to bed."
Danil looks to me for translation. I know that if I tell him what Pierre said, it won't make sense to him, and he'll see it as an invitation to good-naturedly harangue him into drinking more. If we tell him I'm tired, I know that it really really won't matter to him and he'll just get a second bottle.
"Pierre says thank you," I say to Danil, "but vodka makes him very tired. He cannot drink like you. He thinks it is time for bed."
Danil laughs and pats Pierre on the shoulder. Danil seems happy to have more tolerance than the young'un, while Pierre's is glad that Danil takes the refusal so well. I don't bother to explain - I'm just happy to be getting to bed. Being in charge of the conversation has its perks.
We don't see Danil at all the next day, doing any of his normal chores, so we assume he must have a considerable hangover.
The cottage is still very cold on Day 285 - we do our laundry by hand and hang it out to dry on the clothes line. Danil's wife, Larissa, drops in and starts us another fire. It starts to drizzle - we bring the laundry back in and drape it over whatever is handy: the metal bed frames, the kitchen table benches and the strings that hold up the curtains. We walk down the main street, eat at a snack shop and buy tickets for the next day's minivan trip to Irkutsk. When the sky clears up, we walk to the nearby datsan, a tiny Buddhist temple near the edge of town.
The temple is different from what we remember from Thailand and Cambodia, and the style, we're told, is much closer to the Tibetan style of Buddhist temple. There's a building with a colourful room and altar. There are two small stupas that people walk around, following the direction of the sun in the sky. We poke rubles into the prayer wheel and spin it the requisite number of times.
We walk back into town, and decide to make one last stop at the mineral water fountain and enjoy the ribbon trees.
Arshan is a kind of resort town, known for its mineral waters. We go most days to enjoy the free, naturally carbonated water, and bring a bottle or two home for drinking. The tub the water taps drain into are red with rust from the natural minerals in the water, and the water itself runs clear when it first pours into a bottle, but by the second day it starts to take on a reddish tinge. People travel a long way to drink the Arshan water, to bathe in hot springs, to breathe in the healthy mountain air, and to generally hike, rest and heal.
Nearby are trees covered in strips of ribbon and cloth tied to their branches as a kind of prayer flag, another sign of the Tibetan-Buddhism so prevalent in town and in this part of the country. The ribbons are linked to the healing waters, and seems to play a part in the healing process for the people who come here, no matter how young or old.
On our walk home, drink mineral water from our bottle and notice a sign for a performer coming to the local bar. The poster promises music in Buryat, Russian, Mongolian and Turkish. From the photo, the looks like it has the potential to be slightly new-agey - a dark eyed man with long black hair is photoshopped next to the head of a wolf - but we decide to try it anyway.
The show, however, is much more fun than the poster implies, and the whole event reminds me of a wedding at the local Legion. Groups of friends sit around small formica top tables, and sip beer while they wait for the show to start. Quick bartenders zag back and forth behind the bar, like printheads on old dot-matrix printers. A pair of multi-coloured disco balls light up the ceiling near the stage and a smoke machine chuffs out a bit of atmosphere every so often.
When the music starts, the singer kicks off with a few slower ballads set to synth music. The long hair from the poster has been tamed down into a tidy mullet. The first song is in Mongolian, the second in Buryat - his pitch is perfect and the songs are very catchy. When the singer takes a 15 minute break to rest his voice, the crowd dances to Russian disco from the 70s and Russian pop from the 80s. After the break, the signer keeps the pace and crowd going with (what I assume are) some Russian favourites, all set to a danceable beat. He has a cordless microphone and is able to walk down the aisle of tables, past the neon lit bar fridges to serenade tables, often just in from a smoke break and ordering a few more sundaes for the children at the table.
The show starts at 10, and by 11:30 we head home, the crowd still dancing and singing. There are no street lights in the town, so we find our way down the bumpy sidewalk with the help of the headlights of the occasional car that drives past.
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