A Visit to Mongolian Yurt
2 min readA Visit to Mongolian Yurt (Part One)
No matter which yurt you happen to visit, you will find that as soon as the kind Mongolian people hear your footsteps they will go out and give you a big welcome. To show the welcome, they will place their right hands on their chests and bow down lightly. With “How are you?”, they let you in. Usually, the host will have male guests sit on the left and female guests on the right, while he himself sits in the middle.
The moment you take your seats, milk tea and different kinds of milk products will be served. After a while, a special course will be ready for you, which is finger mutton. They are eaten with fingers/hands and a knife instead of chopsticks. Meanwhile, the host will present you with a hada (a long piece of silk as a greeting gift) and a cup of local wine. When giving a toast to the guests, the host (and his family) will sing a Mongolian song. As the folk saying goes, “No feast is without singing.” All people on the grassland, men and women, old and young, can sing folk songs. When toasting their guests, they will show their kindness only by singing folk songs and playing the stringed instrument called a horse-head-shaped instrument.
A Visit to Mongolian Yurt (Part Two)
The Mongolian people have lived on the vast grassland for a long time. They are good at both singing and dancing. So you can enjoy both their traditional dances and their modern ones with lively music as well as strong and powerful steps. Now let’s get into the yurt and be their guests. Let’s start with milk tea. The host breaks the brick tea into pieces and put them in a kettle for boiling.
When the kettle starts boiling, the host pours fresh milk into it. A cup of milk tea will warm up a herdsman coming back from a snowstorm. A bowl of tea and a bowl full of stir-fried rice, or several pieces of milk curd and some large pieces of mutton would make a delicious meal. Mongolian dairy products include clotted cream, the outer cover of clotted cream, milk tofu/curd, milk wine, cheese, cream, butter and so on.
The dinner is served by meat or wheaten food. While you’re on the grassland for a visit, it would be a great pity if you did not try finger mutton. The mutton is prepared like this: first, clean the lamb and cut it into big pieces and then cook them in water. After twice boiling or when it is half done, you just cut them into small pieces with a Mongolian knife and then eat it. Local people think that half-done mutton contains more nutrients.
