Solar eclipse

August 24, 2008 by Karin.

I think I was more excited than most people about the solar eclipse. Excited enough to learn how to say it in Mongolia: nar sar khirtekh.

Lots of tour groups were taking tourists out west into the countryside especially for the viewing. The woman at the neighboring hotel told me we were too far from Siberia to experience it properly. And someone from our Habitat group said we it wasn’t possible to watch an eclipse without a sheet of pin pricked construction paper. Still, I hoped.

Our group was leaving the Flower Hotel after our first dinner together when the doormen gestured us toward the bunch of Japanese guests gathering in the parking lot. It took us two seconds to figure out why they were making such a fuss and holding their cameras up at the sun.  



 I stared at the sun for a while, trying to make out some sign of the eclipse but had to give up. I needed to massage the sizzle out of my eyeballs.

While we stood around trying combinations of sunglasses over eyes and cameras over sunglasses, Chris pulled out a rectangle of magic glass made especially for eclipse viewing. It didn’t look like much but anyone who looked through it would gasp with amazement. It didn’t take long for the local kids to get word of the magic view and they moved to the front of the group, grabbing the glass from adult hands, passing it to one another. Meanwhile, a few Japanese tourists formed a line beside us for their chance to look through the glass. 



And that was how our group bonded that first evening.   

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