Mongolia🇲🇳What happens in Kovsköl stays in Kovsköl

In Kovsköl, I was greeted by a super diverse and cool group of travelers who had celebrated Naadam there and were now waiting for the rain to pass, which meant two days of card games. Here, I discovered that the cardgame I had learned in Kyrgyzstan turned out to be a real Russian card game called Durak, which came in handy a week later when we had to learn the Mongolian version from two guys who didn’t speak English. For the evening, a huge bonfire and a marinated and BBQ’d piece of meat weighing at least ten kilos were planned. The meat was already there, and there was more than enough according to every measure, so my contribution was broccoli, which was received as a true delicacy since Mongolia doesn’t do vegetables. And that appreciation was well-deserved because I had paid five euros in tughriks for two withered, blackened broccoli stalks. Since I hadn’t dared to imagine beforehand that the “broccoli” would be so well-received, I had also brought a bottle of Chinggis Khan vodka just to be safe. All of this resulted in an evening where I only saw what we had experienced that night (apparently) in the photos the next day. And “what happens in Kovsköl stays in Kovsköl” definitely applied to this evening.

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