Today was quite an exhausting adventure.  I finally got to see the fabled countryside.  The place where my family does all of there alleged “gardening” outside of town.  I woke up bright and early prepared for the outing, the night before Jarga came into my room exclaiming “tomorrow we go to countryside, you go to see.”  I soon found out my family did a lot more then “gardening” and I would be doing a lot more then just “seeing”.  So off we went following the picturesque river outside of the soum.  The dirt roads dipped and dived going around crazy “S” turns and steep inclines, my older brother navigated using the roads it seemed only as a suggested path.  Every once and a while there would be a sickening clang from underneath the car and I would jump, the kind of clang that back at home you’d hear then immediately pull over to check to see if your vehicle was missing parts.  I was the only one phased by this and we continued onward, now I know why Mongolians are such resourceful mechanics. 

            After a long bumpy ride we arrived at “countryside” a ger nestled in between hills amid vast swathes of farm fields.  The rows and rows of vegetables extended for miles.  This is not what I thought of when I read the word gardening.  My older sisters served me tea and showed me around while my brothers went to work, fixing the pumps that brought water from the river to water the crops and repairing various agricultural equipment.  After my tea I wanted to help and get my hands dirty, I set off helping Jarra fix the teeth on one of the tractor plows.  In the 90 degree heat I decided to lose my shirt when I started working up a sweat.  After that I helped Mogi wash the car we arrived in, this ended with a lot of splashing laughing and fist shaking at Mogi.  When we finished Jarra gestured for me to hop in one of the Russian trucks, I jumped in and almost all of my extended family hoped in the back.  We drove a couple miles down a dirt road until we came to a far field where potatoes were apparently pretty far along in the growing process.  The rows of potatoes extended beyond where my eye could decipher them.  As I was led out into the field Jarra gestured for me to bend down, when I was almost eye level with the potato plant he snatched at a nearby weed and yanked it from the earth.  “Now you!”  he said.  Ok, I thought weeding is at least something I can’t screw up.  After about twenty minutes of weeding I was thirsty, getting sun burnt, covered in flies and apprehensively dodging large spiders that kept scurrying out from under the weeds I pulled.  I looked up at the never-ending row of potatoes and cursed them.  Potatoes were the most abundant things I’d eaten besides meat since arriving in Mongolia, not to mention I didn’t even really get particularly excited about them back in the US.  I stopped, stood up and looked around me and as usual I got the same reaction whenever I look around in Mongolia, I’m blown away by the landscape, the beauty of our planet, and the sheer scope of how small I really am.  I bent down and kept on weeding.  Six hours later I stumbled back to the truck dehydrated, sun burnt, bitten, tired, and achy.  After that potatoes started tasting better.