30days30years

NTV

Yesterday when Danny and I were on the bus en route to his apartment we got talking about German chancellor Angela Merkel who has visited Mongolia this week.

“Oh yeah, I read that on the news” was Danny’s response. “Huh?” I thought. You don’t read something on the news you read it in the paper or see it on the news.
So I quizzed him.
“Oh I read the news on NTV once a week.”
“Really? Can I come watch you?”
“Sure.”

So today we headed to the NTV studios in the Zaisan District. It sits next to APU a beverage manufacturing factory that makes fruit juice and beer. There is some connection between the two businesses because when we arrived we were ferried into the APU staff cafeteria for lunch with the other journalists.

It was the best Mongolian meal I’ve had since I’ve been here. Meat and rice not cooked in fat (yippee), pickled carrot and stale bread (You can’t have it all). Bloody delicious.

We then walked over to the studio with a young journalist called Sarah who works six days a week. She is one of the only people in the office who can speak English so does a lot of translating of Western news into Mongolian. She also writes the news that Danny reads which he then has to edit to make it more grammatically correct.  

NTV has surprising good facilities. The station only started about five years ago so it is all pretty modern. They have seven journalists, four cameraman and two editors to put out a couple of hours of news a day, both national, international and a small component in English.

Still the facilities are pretty funny. The room they do the voice overs is not sound proof so while Danny was reading his scripts there was ambulance sirens blaring in the background.

They dress Danny in a jacket that has some kind of satin trim to it so he looks like Hugh Hefner on his way to a Playboy Mansion party. And they give him a comb over, I think to make him look more Mongolian. Mongolians are blessed with thick locks of hair so balding is not a common thing. Danny has a slightly receding hairline so they comb it over to hide it. It makes him look about 20 years older.

Sarah seems incredibly eager to learn and after Danny’s bulletin she was asking me for some tips. It was a difficult process because her English is so limited. I was trying to tell her her content was too dense for people to understand but I think even that got a little lost in translation. Hopefully she took something away from what I said though.

Strangely I also noticed this on the wall of their office too: