Mongolians

The other day, while on Facebook, an invitation to chat popped up. It was Akhtar, the president of the student union from AIT (the Asian Institute of Technology) in Bangkok where, last March, I had given a talk on reading photographs and acted as a judge of a photo competition. Akhtar joked that he was occasionally checking my blog in order to see whether I had written something about AIT. While we were chatting pictures of my few days at AIT were flowing through my mind, especially one picture of Akhtar, two of his fellow students (one male from Pakistan, and one female from Mongolia) and me enjoying a superb dinner on the terrace of a very nice restaurant on the campus. While I had met Pakistanis before, I had, until then, never met anybody from Mongolia so this student was my first Mongolian ever. I was a bit astonished because I had always thought that Mongolians stayed all their life in Mongolia (except of course the ones who run Mongolian restaurants all over the world). Well, quite obviously not. A few days later, at the swimming pool of my Bangkok hotel, I met my second Mongolian, a deeply tanned tourist, who smoked lots of cigarettes and said that he loved the Thai sun. The world is really changing, I thought to myself, Mongolians seem now to be everywhere which, by the way, is no small feat given that there are only 2.5 million of them (this I learned from my third Mongolian, an interpreter, whom I met a few weeks later in Switzerland).