Volleyball and Disco time!

I have been exhausted, sorry for the delay. And lots of spanners were thrown into the works.

Saturday we drove to the soum centre, so our office could play volleyball against the soum centre office. We lost but it was a really fun game to watch. It was held in a very old school hall with floorboards that were all falling to pieces.

After volleyball was a disco that was organised by the soum centre. I wish I had have written this earlier as the details would have been a lot more real. It was an hilariously fun night. I kept being forgot – everyone assumes someone else is looking after me and no one queries anything. So I wandered around the soum centre (village) until I heard booming music and followed my ears to the sound. I was correct. Albeit incorrectly dressed. I had been told to bring nice clothes for the disco but of course in my flurry of unpacking from Russia/repacking for this trip, I forgot all about it. All I had was my stupid North Face pants and a Lorna Jane gym top with thongs. I didn’t really look the part, especially in between cocktail dresses and suits. Too bad. I was there, which was good enough.

I took my thongs off because it’s hard to dance a shitty waltz with a guy who can’t dance, when you have thongs on.

So I was bare foot, dirty haired, hairy legged and clothed like I had emerged from the forest.

Not to worry. It was SO cool. It was a big dance hall with BIG loud cheap speakers that BLASTED everything and ruined whatever sound came out them (and my ear drums!). They would play a waltz song and a guy would ask a girl to dance. And they would dance a two step waltz til the song was over and then share a sigh of relief and sit back down. Then a pop song would BLAST out the speakers and everyone would bounce up and dance to Lady Gaga or some other recent hip hop song.

Then a lady would turn the electric keyboard on and start the automatic sound and then play a one handed tune to the automatic music. It was bloody terrible! Partner dancing was done to this too. Everyone would sit and watch the dancing and judge everyone on how well others danced. Everyone was terrible! Including me as I just couldn’t get the steps they were trying to do. Luckily most people didn’t want to ask me to dance – yay! It was like being in year 4 at primary school doing dance lessons in the school hall again. But better, because it was way more entertaining. It was awkward to start with, knowing that everyone else felt the same way. But once you embrace it, you realise it doesn’t really matter.

Once that realisation struck, I went nuts. Who cares, right! If no one else is going to party, why not BE the party? So party it was. A song would come on that we were allowed to ‘single’ dance to and I’d go crazy, having great fun pepping everyone up and dancing in the middle of the circle being entertaining. Oh man, I was totally in my element! One song came on that no one else would dance too, and I’d already started so I couldn’t back down. So what else to do, but take the whole dance floor? AND THEN I got a helper! This Mongolian guy who can break dance to the moon and back! We danced together the whole song, everyone watching and cheering. Love it!

The night went on and on and on like that. I took my bottle of Bundy Rum that dad brought over with me. I’d saved it because I knew the vodka would run out eventually (this was the 4th night). We started handing around the vodka and one of the girls took charge and was the distributor. She hid it like it was a school disco an we weren’t allowed to dance. It was so cool. Everyone LOVED the rum. In hindsight, straight, hot Bundy rum tastes a BUTTLOAD better than hideous cheap vodka. What does that say about the vodka here?!?!?!?!??!………………………………………

Above: one of the more awkward partner dances; the soum governor trying Bundy rum; proof I was actually there!

I piked once the night was over and went to bed. It was a good decision because everyone else was up to all hours drinking more vodka and airag.