tsagaan sar

today was the first day of the mongolian lunar new year. here it's called "tsagaan sar" which means "white moon". it's a three day holiday when people visit family and honor their elders. i had the privilege of going to my friend's grandma's today. we ate mongolian potato salad, mongolian meat dumplings, and some roasted sheep meat. tsagaan sar is usually a time when people are forced to eat dumpling after dumpling after dumpling. thankfully today there were many people visiting at the same time, so i was able to get away with only one dumpling. it was tasty, but i'm still thankful it was only one. :)

here's the roasted sheep rump sitting on the table.



this is called "ul boov" and it's a stack of bread like things called "boov". it has sugar cubes, nuts, mongolian butter stuff, and cheese curds on it. families put this on their table for the 3 days of tsagaan sar, and the number of layers shows how respected the family is. (at least that's how my mongolian teacher explained it to me, but it's very possible that i'm missing part of the explanation) it's always an odd number of layers. i thought that no one eats any of the sugar or nuts until after the 3 days of the holiday, but today some of the kids were allowed to eat things. i have a feeling the exception was just because they are so cute. :)