What is the ger?

As kitchen may be the central room in our home, Ger is the center of life in Mongolia. This is a one-room house, where you cook, sleep, kill and prepare muttons, sew deels or bed sheets, play cards, drink vodkas, cut wood,... In short, where you do everything, especially during winter. From  20th october to may,  it is so cold outside that you cannot do anything.. except if it is inside.

The ger is the heart of Mongolian life. You live there with your parents until you get married and you have your own ger. Usually the youngest child will stay with the parents for a while, and take over the parents' business: sheeping, running the shop, or doing the same job... No matter you are a nomad or live in Ulaanbaatar in an apartment going to University. Tradition there is for everyone.

Though the world is opening to a modern life style, (everyone has a mobile, some ger in countryside have tv, young people go to internet cafés to play online) they commit to their traditional way of living, except in the capital city, where buildings blossom out.

Ulaanbaatar

In countryside, you are a nomad, which means, you have a winter house and a summer house.
If you live in the village, during winter you live in a ger, which is hotter than their house (built with wood). You add some material to make it better isolated from the outside cold, and you have prepared wood. During summer, you move out the ger and move in the house. It is also a one room house, but less hot, as summer is indeed hot there.

If you live in the countryside, in the grassland (mountains/steppes), you live in a ger but at two different places: one for summer in the valley, close to water, in a fresher place, where animals can have a good green grass. During winter, you move in the mountains, where you have no wind, and where you cannot have avalanche (there is huge amount of snow there in winter, very dangerous for animals).

winter ger

 As it is the only room, you find absolutely everything everywhere. Food under the bed, hanging on the "walls", "sofas" become beds at night. It is very hard to sit and sleep on it, there is no real mattress so get ready to be uncomfortable. During a 6 day-trip at the end of october, I slept one time on the floor, and I slept better there than on these beds. However, as they are very polite, they will offer you their own bed and they will sleep on the floor, so just go with it.


 Sometimes you can find a fridge, but as they don't have electricity or just with a battery it is not plugged ! It is just a way to keep the food inside smth.
They cook everything on the stove, which is the heart of the ger, and without what we could not survive in Mongolia. It is first a way to keep the ger warm during the day, ad during the night of course it's getting cold as everyone is sleeping and no one refills it with wood/coal. So on morning good luck to the first one that has to wake up ! For those like me who has to go to the "bathroom" during night, well my advice is not to try to wait and think you can wait til morning, because you know you can't, so just go very fast, don't think, take just a warm coat and warm shoes, and go outside !
They also use the stove to make tea, cook food, boil water for the laundry, etc.

In general, you just have to realize that they have no comfort like us: they don't have water, they don't have electricity, they don't have any intimacy. We used to go very often maybe three times/week to tha water supply with our can. Every single thing taht we do at home, there it is difficult: wash your hands. Well try to wash it when you have to pour water on your hand at the same time. There is a Mongolian way to do it: take water into your mouth without drinking it, and spit it slowly on your hands to wash it. That sound obvious? well as long as I haven't seen that, I wouldn't have done that.

During winter, I used to go outside with a big empty bag and put snow in it, to make it melt and make water out of it. Because during winter when you are far from any village, there is just the river to get water, but in winter, it is - 30°C and the river is all ice. No way to get any water from it. That was one of my daily activity when I was living in the mountains. I spent also a lot of time cooking pasta from flour and water. There is again a whole way to do it. We also had to find wood and cut it, etc, etc. But you have to imagine that these activities were done during - 30°C, and I can tell you that is very very cold.

For the Mongolian New Year, (same time as the chinese new year), they will all clean it, decorate it, put the best tissues around, maybe change the floor, etc. We did it last year, and I can tell you that's a hard and long work.