Visiting a ger

We went out on a trip last weekend with a Mongolian ethnologist, who arranged for us to visit a family in a ger. Ulaanbaatar is a big,sprawling city, but it is surrounded by hills and very quickly you are out in the countryside. The valleys are flat-bottomed and very dry - long ago, this was part of an inland sea, so I'm guessing that's why between the mountains it is so flat.
Gers are round, white tents, which are designed to be solid and stable enough to withstand the constant winds, warm enough to withstand temperatures of -30 degrees Celsius, but also easy to take apart and transport so that, when your animals have used up all the grazing locally, you can move on to fress grass. A "journey" in old Mongolian writing is about 10 miles, the distance you could go with your carts and animals in a day. Everyone refers to their house as a "ger", even if they live in a flat in the city.
We trundled over the grassland through the mountains for a good hour before our ethnoligist decided that the family he was looking for had packed up and moved on .... so we just stopped at the next ger we came to and the lady invited us to spend the day. It was really fascinating - how everything is stored, how everything is laid out and arranged, the rituals of who sits where .... The door of the ger is always to the south, and inside there is always a Buddhist alter, which is always at the north side. The husband sits beside the altar; the wife sits on the east side, which is also where all the kitchen stuff is. The children or guests sit on the west. She was really chatty, and sang us some Mongolian folk songs while she made us tea. She was making dried cheese when we got there, and gave us some to eat with our picnic. Her children had all left home and gone to Ulaanbaatar or Australia, and husband was away racing a horse. We had a great day going for walks and talking to her (through the ethnologist, who interpreted).
At about 4pm, her husband reappeared. The horse was an orphan and so was a favourite - apparently orphans in Mongolian families are always favourite children - and it had come in the top 5, so he was well pleased. We offered him some of the cake we'd brought for a picnic, and he took it outside and fed it to the horse, and then brought the horse to the ger door so we could admire it. It was amazing to see the telepathy between them. The horse just looked embarrassed at all the attention and tried to hide behind him.
There are gers everywhere - in the city, there are huge "ger districts" where people who have migrated from the countryside have set up their ger on the outskirts of town. I think now half the population of Mongolia lives in the valley of Ulaanbaatar. You can climb up a hill and see the whole city at once - and then imagine a massive country, the size of western Europe, with that many people scattered across it ........