Dear All

This Wednesday (today) we have the film "Mr.Bean's Holiday" as Cultural Evening in Cafe Amsterdam. We will start at 8PM as usual.

We have three very interesting lectures in a row for coming weeks'  Cultural Evenings, so for today something light that does not need a lot of concentration. 

Welcome everyone for good laugh and beer!

Dear all,

This Wednesday (tomorrow) in Cafe Amsterdam we will have a talk by photographer and environmentalist Amy Sexton. She will show some of her photos in a presentation. It will be also an introduction to her photographic exhibition in Cafe Amsterdam starting the same day.

About Amy Sexton, her lecture and exhibition:

Conversations and photographs with strangers breaks down barriers and creates opportunities for positive change. Amy Sexton started a photographic project in 2008 on “100 Strangers”, with a view to documenting and sharing those 100 stories and pictures. As an environmentalist in Mongolia on a one-year Australian Youth Ambassadors program, there has also been the opportunity to explore and document the environmental and social issues faced in Mongolia through work and travel. It has also presented unique opportunities to gather the stories of Mongolian people, their context and their lives, creating little bridges of understanding between photographer, stranger and viewer, and making strangers not so strange.

People in Australia, Mongolia and elsewhere selected each of the photographs presented in the exhibition through a participatory process.  The result is a collection of photographs of Mongolian people and places and is not only intended for exhibition here in Mongolia, but also for those who are unable to travel here and still be part of an international community with an interest in the country, its people and stories.

Team Cafe Amsterdam

Vertical Limit 
   

A high-adrenaline tale of young climber Peter Garrett, who must launch a treacherous and extraordinary rescue effort up K2, the world's second highest peak. Confronting both his own limitations and the awesome power of nature's uncontrollable elements, Peter risks his life to save his sister, Annie, and her summit team in a race against time. The team is trapped in an icy grave at 26,000 feet - a death zone above the vertical limit of endurance where the human body cannot survive for long. Every second counts as Peter enlists the help of a crew of fellow climbers, including eccentric, reclusive mountain man Montgomery Wick, to ascend the chilling might of the world's most feared peak to save her.

This Wednesday in Cafe Amsterdam we have a very intersting talk by Mr.Jonathan Schlesinger who is working on research about the Manchu Era in Mongolia.                                                                   The topic of the lecture is: "Environmental Protection in Mongolia during the reign of the Manchus". It will start at 8PM as usual.

Jonathan Schlesinger, a young scholar from Harvard has spent the last few months going through the National Archives in Ulaanbaatar researching the environmental history of Mongolia. As is well known Mongolia might be the first country in history that established natural reserves like Terelj and Bogd Uul . But what is less known is that they were established during the reign of the Manchus, who ruled Mongolia from distant Beijing. Why did they do it in the first place? And what interest did the Manchus have in establishing protected areas in Mongolia? How where the protected areas enforced and what kind of penalties where in place? And were these rules obeyed or was it rather like today?

Jonathan Schlesinger who is writing his PHD thesis on the base of his findings, will talk about that and a lot more... About corrupt aristocrats, who enforced the rules against common people but were only too happy to hunt in Terelj themselves... About Chinese peasants who came in the summer to hunt for mushrooms and were promptly imprisoned and send back... or about the fur trade which very quickly exhausted the number of fur bearing animals near lake Khovsgol. 

Team Cafe Amsterdam