Naadam celebrates the "Three Manly Sports" of wrestling, horse racing and archery and is started with a large opening ceremony which was pretty amazing. Women are now allowed to compete in archery, but not wrestling or horse racing. The opening ceremony included dancing, singing, wrestling, youth flag presentation, military groups, a band and 2-string horsehair violin orchestra.
Playing this violin seems to be a form of Mongolian culture. The
sound is mellow and beautiful and it takes great skill to be able to
play one of these considering it only has 2 strings!
The little boy in blue was just learning the dances and was so cute. He captured every heart in the audience!
This is our Branch President. He is a wrestling coach and was involved
as a judge in the wresting matches. It was pretty neat to see many of
the people dressed in their traditional deels--both men and women.
All the wrestlers circled this platform before entering the
demonstration field. We are not sure why, but it was very interesting
to watch all these huge Mongolian wrestlers go through their traditional
rituals.
The match is over when one person is thrown to the ground. This was only demo and we didn't see any of the real matches.
I obviously was not in the wrestling competition, but this was a good picture of the platform.
No comments:
Post a Comment