Entertainment
The cut on my knee seems to have made up its mind. It started healing fairly well but later in the week it needed stitches, healed well, needed stitches and now seems to have settled on healing well. Last Saturday, Jocie had taken me to the hospital for stitches but when the bandages came undone, everyone (there were three doctors hanging over me plus some additional nurses here and there) seemed to radiate happiness. It was ok and didn’t need stitches. Not that they were easy on me. I was dragged through the hospital twice, first to the second floor, then to the fifth. Initially to find a place to take off the bandages, then to a place were the doctor that was set to stitch me now applied ‘happytape’.
In the afternoon, we visited a show of national folk music and dance. The extensive mix of throat singing, orchestras, dances and contortionists was very good. The two only misses being a forty piece orchestra doing a waltz and a march and the opening act: some 30 men and women dressed up in animal skins dancing to modern techno music.
Saturday night, as something of a precelebration to Bec’s birthday on Monday, we started drinking at Gin and Bec’s place. Guanz, a tour guide who will probably take us up to Khovsgol in a couple of weeks was there too at the beginning of the evening and he talked Henry and myself into going to a wrestling match at the wrestling palace.
Wrestling is NOT as exciting as you might think. They start of with some 64 wrestlers, traditional costume and all, until three hours later or so, through a knock-out system, only one wrestler is left standing. Today, ‘Tree’ won.
The first couple of rounds were the most interesting. Wrestlers took chances, differences in strengths were obvious and occasionally resulted in spectacular crashes. But what was most interesting, was that many matches were taking place at the same time. Groups of wrestlers would constantly bump into each other or into the wooden fencing built around the ring. Henry and I were clearly not the only ones who weren’t enjoying ourselves to the max. This five year old kid sitting next to me started to punch me in the side halfway through and kept going for an hour or so. Then again, maybe he aspired to be a wrestler.