Ari's Planet

When you sleep surrounded by every dairy animal known to man you might think that cheese would be easy to come by. Let's see, Yaks breathing down the door of the ger. Cows munching their way across the hills. Horses deciding that galloping is better done another day. Sheep ignoring your car until they bound off in a rough approximation of those counting sheep cartoons. Last, but not least, goats doing, well, trying to make more goats. Yes, all these animals make milk. After you have drunk it, boiled it, curdled it, turned it into butter, made it into yogurt and hung it from your rafters, what else is there to do but make cheese? Ahh, but such things do not occur on the steppes of Mongolia.

There is an outake from the Borat movie Cultural Learnings of America to Make Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat is in a supermarket at the cheese aisle asking what each item is, while the store clerk politley replies, each time, that it is cheese. In real life, this is funnier than you can imagine. There we were, 3 Dutch girls who live off of their local cheese and bread and one American spoiled by long supermarket aisles and friends with a taste for cheese, out in the middle of Mongolia, trying to find something to eat that wasn't a version of boiled mutton. What more natural thing than to try to pick up a few blocks of some yummy Mongolian cheese at the local town market? Our tour guide stands by the counter and asks in her perfect native Mongolian if the shop has any cheese. The shopkeeper replies, quite seriously, "Cheese? What is cheese?"