Mongolian wrestling, called "bokh" in Mongolian, is one of the historic "three manly skills", which include Archery and Horseriding. The Wrestling Palace downtown holds wrestling matches every weekend.
The format of the competition is a bracket system, where many pairs of wrestlers square off in the large arena simultaneously, and the losers are eliminated while the winners then fight other winners.
Since I was told that these things can go on for 6 or more hours, I didn't arrive until about 3 hours into the competition. By that time, four pairs were left.
It's kind of like sumo wrestling, but the wrestlers are mostly not that immensely fat. The objective of the match is to get the opponent's upper body, knee or elbow to touch the ground. There are no weight classes, and one of the pairs we saw had a great size disparity.
When they enter or exit the stage they perform a falcon dance - running with their arms stretched out slightly backwards, like a falcon taking off.
We were the only non-Mongolian people in the crowd. It was hard to understand what was going on, since it's a very subtle sport. Often times, the crowd would erupt into loud cheering while we didn't even notice that anything had happened.
They also had a raffle - prize money would be given to a lucky ticket holder according to ticket number. While a friendly Mongolian man behind us translated for us, I found myself being able to understand most of the numbers being announced!
Two more hours passed, and we were getting bored. Joanna started a betting game, and we each chose a person to win the tournament. She won the bet, and she used her winnings to buy us beer after the match finally ended, well into the 6th hour.
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