How to Milk a Reindeer

After 12 days of bumping around all over Mongolia in a Russian van with two Brits and an INSANE driver, I am back in Ulaanbaatar for one last night before I catch my flight back to Beijing tomorrow night. The last week and a half has been pretty nuts. Mongolians are by far the friendliest and most generous people I've ever met. For the last twelve days, it's been a mix of camping and staying in family gers (also known as yurts, which are traditional Mongolian felt homes), which has been mostly fun, although a little cold. The food has been...okay. I'm not a big cow's milk drinker to begin with, but over the last week and a half, I've had the *pleasure* of trying: yak milk, fermented mare's milk (you read that right, HORSE milk), reindeer milk (I didn't even know you could milk a reindeer), and salty cow milk. To make sure it was a balanced diet, I was sure to try marmot meat, an assortment of different milk curds, and Mongolian vodka. And to top it off, it seems that at every ger I stayed at, there was always a box that will forever be known as the "random body parts" box, full of different animal parts that were ready to be eaten; can I interest anyone in a nice slab of yak liver or sheep stomach lining? I consider myself to be fairly open-minded when it comes to trying new foods, but the mare's milk and stomach lining was pretty difficult to choke down. Unfortunately, there always seemed to be a happy smiling Mongolian staring at me, waiting for me to finish whatever delicacy they had just handed me, which means that there was no sliding the food into my pocket/trash can/my horse's mouth.I'm pretty pooped, so this is going to be a short one, but Mongolia has been great. For all my moaning and groaning about how blech UB is (and i still stand by that), Mongolia has been a fantastic experience, both as a traveler and as a researcher. I'm sad to be leaving Mongolia tomorrow night (I'm actually feeling a little teary at the thought of it!), but I definitely think I'll be back again in the not too distant future.