From mid-September to about mid-October (or when it starts to snow) we have a harvest market in the square outside our apartment. We are moving from autumn into winter and the preparations required to be ready for winter are obvious here, and interesting to an Australian who can basically live outdoors all year round. We were able to get our vegies here for a month. We brought up big on tomatoes and filled the freezer with home-made pasta sauce. Locally grown fruit is limited to watermelons and a variety of wild berries (blueberries, cranberries, hawthorn berries, seabuckthorn berries). I have bags of blueberries in the freezer for blueberry muffins (they turn the muffins purple, but they still taste great). I made a cranberry sauce/compote that is sweet but still has some kick. The berries have a long journey in from the countryside, so we hope that when we cook them in jam etc the alcohol content is burned off! Initially I didn't have enough confidence to go the market by myself and ask prices, but somehow during the month we walked past it at least once or twice a day and eventually I found myself using my limited Mongolian to buy things and we did really well. Most of the time people show me the price on a calculator or a mobile phone, as I still have trouble hearing numbers when they are spoken. Once a vendor only had a pencil and a scrap of cardboard, but we still managed to figure out the price!
My Mum visited us from mid September until mid October. She enjoyed the markets and took lots of photos. So we have rare photos of Chris and Michelle together in Mongolia! It snowed last week and the market shut down (I wouldn't want to be hanging out there overnight with temperatures going down to -10 at night now). It was good for a little while to be able to purchase local food. I still can't imagine growing all my food and then preserving it for winter - which is what a lot of people have to do here. I have been told that once all the local Mongolian produce is sold, and it will go pretty quick, we will be back to Chinese and Russian imports again.
During her visit Mum liked hanging out at Naran Tuul - the Black Market - so we arranged several visits. You can basically get anything at the Black Market. I have seen about 20% of this market, and I have seen: shoes, clothes, fabric, hats, sunglasses, gloves, kitchen equipment, toys, electrical, neon signs, CDs and DVDs (Mama Mia was on at the local cinema recently, so ABBA was blaring out of the CD store when I went past), insulation material, rolls of felt for gers, carpet, quilts, lino, antiques, horse saddles, batteries, light bulbs, inner soles for shoes, electrical cable (big rolls of it), rope, suitcases, handbags, backpacks, baby equipment, fancy light fittings (including chandeliers). The picture below was taken in the second hand section. We get a lot of great second hand leather boots and jackets from Europe. I have picked up some great shoes in the second hand section - Keira is now wearing a pair of ECCO kids boots that cost me $15!
