The Nine Nines

Welp, even though I've been freezing my butt off for two or three months now, winter only officially starts on Tuesday, when the sun is going to set at about 4:20, and with that begins the Nine Nines. The Nine Nines refer to the way Mongolians traditionally measure winter. They believe it lasts eighty-one days, which breaks down into nine sets of nines. This is how they classify them:

1. The First Nine- Milk vodka congeals.
2. The Second Nine- Russian vodka congeals.
3. The Third Nine- The tail of a three-year-old ox freezes.
4. The Fourth Nine- The horns of a four-year-old ox freeze.
5. The Fifth Nine- Boiled rice will thaw.
6. The Sixth Nine- Roads (where they exist) blacken, as in the snow melts off of them.
7. The Seventh Nine- Hilltops blacken.
8. The Eighth Nine- The ground becomes damp.
9. The Ninth Nine- Warm days set in.

The Ninth Nine will end sometime in Mid-March. Even back in Maine you'd be lucky if that were truly when "warm days set in," so I'm not holding out too much hope, especially since Zoloo's father claims that this is going to be the coldest winter in one thousand years. "The coldest winter since before Chinggis???" I asked incredulously. "I guess so," came the response. Ө янаа! At least it's been relatively warm the last few days.

So what else is new? Well last week there was a ginormous teacher's sports competition. Each department formed its own team and vied for the title of most athletic. Four different games were played: ping pong, tug-of-war, basketball, and volleyball. It was actually pretty fun (even though I hate basketball), but I was a bit shocked by how seriously a lot of the teachers took it, as well as the school administration. Classes ended hours early two days in a row for the sake of this event. That's cultural differences for ya. We actually fared pretty well. All my teammates expected me to be awesome at every sport for some reason, so I participated in all four. I completely let them down in ping pong, getting eliminated in the first round, but Muugii, another English teacher, took third in the women's section. I sucked pretty bad in volleyball too, and we didn't win a single match. I did much better than I expected in basketball, however, where we also took third (see our exhausted line-up above). Where I really shone, however, was tug-of-war. We came in second, only losing to a team with twice as many men as we had. It would be cool if American teachers did stuff like that, as long as they could keep from getting so intense about it. There was a lot of foul play in many of the events, especially basketball, away from which many of us walked with bloody scratches.

Not much else going on. Christmas is next week, so we're all figuring out what we're gonna cook for that. I'm planning on doing some more mac n cheese as well as a pumpkin pie, thanks to some key ingredients sent over by Mummuh LaMarche (velveeta and canned pumpkin... mmmboy). Jagaa is doing pretty well. She's slowly getting the idea that I don't like it when she poops or pees on the carpet. I also managed to find her a collar and a leash this weekend. She's been reacting to both of them surprisingly well. This raising a puppy stuff sure is a lot of work, though I've heard it gets easier. As for now, it just adds to the ever-growing list of reasons I wish Kaede and I lived together already. We'd make a pretty good team with the little rascal.

Hope you're all done your shopping! Stay warm!

John Russell owns a dog???

Yup! And her name is Jargalnokhoi! Look at her!

Or Jagaa for short. Or Puppy Khan as my family has dubbed her. I decided a real Mongolian name would be nice for a real Mongolian dog. Mongolians tend to get their (people) names by taking two words and sticking them together. My main counterpart is named Zolzaya, which means "Luckdestiny." My male counterpart's name is Altansukh, or "Goldenaxe." Pretty badass huh? My mother's name is Shinekhuu, or "New Son," even though she's a daughter. My teacher from this summer is named Bolortuya, or "Crystalbeam." So what does Jargalnokhoi mean, you ask? Why, Happinessdog, of course!

Here's the story. On Thursday night Bob was walking home from work when he saw the most adorable little puppy shivering and getting teased by children. The helpless lil gal wandered out into the road, right in the line of traffic. As a car came speeding down the icy street, Bob found himself running out and snatching her up. Once he'd saved her from getting run over, he was unable to set her back down, feeling the way she shivered in his arms. So he took her home, cleaned her up, gave her some food, and set about figuring out how to find her a nice home. At school the next day, he showed his fellow teachers and all his students pictures of how cute little Jagaa is. Everyone really wanted her... until they found out she was a girl. You see the concept of veterinarians, let alone that of spaying, doesn't really exist in this country, especially outside of UB. Therefore, a female dog basically equals puppies. Lots and lots of puppies. Puppy after unwanted puppy. Even with Bob offering to pay for the spaying, no one would bite (ha!). Until he ran into this sap that night at our weekly dinner. He showed me some pics (including the one above), and there was already something about Jagaa I really liked. Afterwards we went back to Bob's and I met the little critter. She's got a lot of energy, but you play with her for a while and she'll chill right out and fall asleep on your lap (see pic below... though that's actually Bob's lap). Something in me decided, what the hay, you're here for a year and a half, you've got a good support network at your site to take care of her whenever you have to leave town, and you can figure out what to do with her when you leave once you reach that point. So I brought her home that very night!

Having a puppy has been... interesting so far. You don't have to know me very well to know that I'm more of a cat person. So in addition to training Jagaa to be a good dog, I'm trying to train her to be a good cat. The biggest difficulty, you might guess, is getting the girl to pee outside. I guess it's more than I really ought to expect, what with the poor bladder control puppies have. I'm gonna designate a place in the house where I'll set down newspapers and hope that, if she can't hold it until I bring her out, she'll at least do it there. I tell ya, winter in Mongolia is a rough setting in which to raise a puppy. Standing outside for twenty minutes or half an hour waiting for Jagaa to pee would not rank among the most enjoyable parts of my day. Actually, what with my new wondercoat and other warm accessories, it's not so bad for me. I just start to feel bad for her. It's been between fifteen and thirty below all weekend, and after a minute or two in that, she starts to look pretty miserable. She hops around from foot to foot so she doesn't have to touch them any one of them to the frigid ground for too long, and she spends a lot of time searching for a way to sit down without having to put her ass on the snow (she has yet to find it). Anyway, we've been making some breakthroughs recently, and I figure once she starts to get the idea, getting out of the cold will help motivate her to do her business more quickly.

Needless to say I don't really know what I'm doing (thank god for the internet, as well as Kaede, who has a great deal of dog-rearing expertise), so if you have any experience training puppies, especially in a third world country, holla at me. Also, Choibalsan ain't exactly teeming with PetSmarts, so if you feel like sending a package, please include some fun puppy treats and toys and whatnot for Jagaa! She'd really appreciate it. One thing that might be especially useful is that bitter spray you can use to help teach her what not to chew on. Cuz right now, she chews on EVERYTHING.

Blue Christmas

So Kaede and I received some bad news yesterday. Apparently her school decided to postpone her winter break by three weeks, which means she won't get here until mid-January. We were really looking forward to being able to spend Christmas with each other (even though she was actually gonna get here two days after Christmas... close enough), but now I guess we'll just have to start planning for a Martin Luther King Day celebration. She will get here in time for January 22, which, hard as it is to believe, marks six months that we've been together, so that's something. I'm pretty bummed though. Coming back to site after the fun-and-fancy-free atmosphere that ruled in UB for two weeks has been quite difficult, and so this is just adding insult to injury. Oh well. My counterpart Zoloo just gave me some nice pics her brother-in-law took when Kaede and I went to have dinner with her family in UB recently, so at least I can look at those for the next six weeks. The one above is the two of us with Ochka, Zoloo's adorably sassy niece.

And of course, when it rains, it pours. Another sad thing happened this week. Franz, one of our VSO volunteers, left Choibalsan for good yesterday. He was supposed to be here for the whole two years I am, but a variety of forces conspired to keep that from happening. It's a real shame, since he was one of my favorite people here at site. It was very sudden too, so we barely had a chance to give him a proper goodbye. We did get to go out for dinner and sing some karaoke one last time. That was nice.

On a slightly more neutral note, yesterday I got to help the students from my school shovel the roads of the city. There aren't very many plow trucks round these here parts, so apparently that's a task that gets delegated to students and workers. It was kinda nice to do some manual labor, even if it was in the freezing cold, but I mostly enjoyed it just to see how much fun the students were having. I have a feeling if American students were asked to do a similar task, they wouldn't be quite so peachy about it. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but, seeing as its only December 9, I'm sure it'll happen again.

Here's a pic of me and Pookie (as we all affectionately call Franz) on his last night in town. We'll miss ya buddy!

Хагас жил

That's "khagas jil," which means "half a year," which is how long I've been in Mongolia now. Six months. Holy eff. And since it's looking like Peace Corps Mongolia is becoming a twenty-five month program, that means that in a week or two, I'll be a quarter of the way done my service. A QUARTER!!!!! Not to rehash the same wow-time-is-crazy-in-Peace-Corps litany that I've expressed a million times on this blog, but I simultaneously can't believe I've completed such a significant fraction of my service and yet haven't been here the whole two years already. Absolute insanity.

I flew back to Choibalsan from Ulaanbaatar today. How perfect that the first time I return to Chinggis Khaan International Airport is exactly six months to the day after flying into the country. The flight was short and pretty, and it made me wish I was a millionaire so I could fly myself back and forth whenever I wanted. It was unbelievably easier than that damned interminable bus ride. An hour and a half with an inflight meal versus fifteen hours with no leg room? Not even a fair fight. They should slow the plane down just to keep it from being so ridiculous.

So I was in (and around) UB for over two weeks, which makes it really weird to be back in Dornod, especially considering I spent pretty much that entire time with Kaede (see pic above... she's so happy she can't even keep her eyes open!). Oo yanaa, it's rough being here without her now. We had a really great time after having gone so long without each other. We watched Hitchcock films and cooked delicious meals and walked around town and ate soup at 24-hour soup restaurants (gotta love Mongolian fast food). Lots of good times were had in general, and my adoration for the girl was only reaffirmed, which makes it all the harder to be away once more. Fortunately, if everything goes as planned, it'll be barely three weeks til we see each other again. As a university teacher, she gets pretty much the entire month of January off, and she's looking to spend it here with me in sunny Dornod aimag! I'm the luckiest guy in Mongolia!

In addition to Kaede, I got to see all the rest of my friends from the summer. The majority of volunteers come in for PC's mammoth Thanksgiving celebration (which was delicious and coma-inducing), and those from my group who wouldn't have made it in normally came in anyway, for the week that followed was In-Service Training, or IST. The seminar itself was fairly helpful, if also quite demanding and mind-numbing at times, but it was definitely worth it for the chance to catch up with everyone who comprised my life this summer. Of course, our lives are radically different at this point, but everyone seems to be hanging in there. It's sad that we aren't guaranteed to see one another again until MST (Mid-Service Training) which will be in August. A lot of people head into UB for spring break, and most whom you don't run into then pop up at some point in the summer, but still, it's a bit sad.

The tough part is ahead; basically that's what this all means. For Mongolian volunteers, getting through the first winter is often the biggest hurdle of one's entire service. You're far, far away from the overwhelming majority of the people you love, you're still probably settling into work, cultural and linguistic difficulties continue to abound, and you're colder than you've ever been before in your life. It's only December 5, but the days are already dipping below zero with mustache-freezing regularity. Fortunately my new coat could protect me in even the most nuclear of winters, and my apartment is still plenty warm, so I'm not too worried about the weather stuff.

I probably ought to have more to say. I'm sure I do. But the thought of it is kinda exhausting to me right now. So I'm just gonna go ahead and sign off. Love you all, miss you all. Hope your holiday season is gearing up jollily. As you can see below, it is in Ulaanbaatar.

Баяр Баярлалаа-Өгижийн мэнд!

That's my crappy attempt to say Happy Thanksgiving in Mongolian. Probably makes no sense, mostly because I never really figured out how to make a gerund, but it'll just have to do.

So whoa, it's been a while since I posted. I'm becoming quite the deadbeat blogger. And actually a fair amount of interesting stuff has been happening these past few weeks, at least comparatively. Let's see if I can list 'em out real quick.

• I went with Marg (an Australian VSO volunteer/all-around Wonder Woman) to a place the locals call Diviiz, which is their way of saying Division 5. It's an abandoned Soviet base of sorts about 10 km out of town which many of Dornod's poorest citizens now call home. After millions of livestock died in last year's devastating winter, many Mongolians lost their means of survival, so they moved into derelict buildings like the ones at Diviiz. When they arrived, there was no water nearby, no school for miles, no food to be easily accessed. With the help of people like Marg, they now have a kindergarten for the younguns (it's adorable! made of two gers!), a well, a greenhouse, a chicken coop, and many other awesome necessities. It was pretty inspiring to a lazy volunteer like myself.
• I traveled with some friends to a place about 90 km west of Choibalsan where there used to be a city which was built by the Khitan Empire. Nowadays all that's left is a single tower, maybe sixty feet high, and the foundations of a few walls. After living in a place like Egypt, this ruin was not all that impressive, but it was neat to see something a thousand years old in a country whose inhabitants barely built permanent structures until the last hundred years.
• We visited the local power plant, which provides electricity for three aimags!!! It was built by the Soviets and was actually quite interesting. We didn't know if we'd be able to get a tour, so we just showed up and asked. A moment later, we were donning hard hats and walking through crazy big boiler rooms and whatnot. I felt like I was in an episode of The Simpsons (even if it wasn't a nuclear plant), which, if you know anything about me, you'll know was a very exciting way to feel.
• I came to UB (in spite of some crazy Peace Corps flight arrangement mishaps... I had to take the bus instead of getting to fly... UGH!). Next week, we have a week long training seminar, as I may have mentioned before, but thanks to some very light work I've been assigned here for my school, I got to come in a week early. As luck would have it, Kaede found some similar work in the city, so we've been hanging out and cooking lots of delicious food together, which has been wonderful.
• I bought the warmest coat in Mongolia's largest black market, which is one of the largest markets in Asia. At least they told me it's the warmest. And since, standing around in single digits temperatures I find myself sweating even if I don't zip the thing up, I'm inclined to believe them.

I probably missed some stuff, although I'm sure it was on the boring side. Sorry I don't have any pics of any of this stuff with me. I didn't bring my computer to UB, so I'm at an internet cafe right now. Anyway, I should get going, but I hope you all have a very happy thanksgiving!!!

I don't like making blog posts without pictures, so here's what I found when I did a google image search for "Mongolian Thanksgiving." As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the holiday, but I think you'll agree with me when I say it's a pretty sweet pic.

There is now a thirteen hour difference between Mongolia and America!

This post is copied nearly verbatim (with a few obvious changes) from one I made two-and-a-half years ago on the Pete and John in Cairo blog. I'm just that lazy.

The East coast, that is. Which is the way it's supposed to be. You guys just stopped observing Daylight Saving Time, and us Mongolians never observe it, so it actually is a thirteen hour difference between these two places. And while that makes it sound like we're farther away than we thought, it actually means we're closer, since in fact there's only an eleven hour difference in where the sun is relative to us. It's just eleven hours in the wrong direction, so says the man.

So yeah... just thought you all should know. Here are ten other quick fun facts about Daylight Saving Time.

1. While Benjamin Franklin didn't invent it, he was the first to propose anything similar, albeit sarcastically. In 1784 he anonymously published a pamphlet in France which suggested that shutters be taxed, candles be rationed, and cannons be fired at sunrise in Paris to encourage people to get up earlier and take advantage of the daylight hours.
2. William Willett was the first to develop the idea. He came up with it in 1905 on one of his daily pre-breakfast horseback rides. It made him sad to see how many of his fellow Londoners slept through the best part of an English summer's day. Additionally, he was a little miffed to have his golf game cut short at dusk each evening. He never saw his plan come to fruition during his lifetime, but one year after he died in 1914, the Central Powers became the first nations to implement DST. By 1918, it had taken much of the world by storm, and Willett is aptly remembered by a memorial sundial which is permanently set to DST.
3. Contrary to popular belief, DST actually increases energy use! While it is true that there is a decrease in energy costs used for lights, there is a much greater increase due to the greater amount of cooling required when awake during those hotter parts of the day.
4. DST hurts primetime broadcast ratings.
5. One of the biggest negative impacts of DST involves its effects on the body's circadian rhythms, which can be quite severe and last for weeks. Kazakhstan cited such complications as a primary reason for abolishing DST in 2005.
6. The esteemed Canadian writer Robertson Davies said of DST, "[I detect] the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, to get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves."
7. To combat some of these difficulties, some parts of the world skew their timezones westward, effectively establishing permanent DST. That is, their clocks always read ahead of mean solar time.
8. Most countries near the equator don't observe DST, for the obvious reason that the sun's cycle doesn't vary all that noticeably. Countries like Brazil, however, where the Equator runs through part of the country but a sizeable portion is far enough from it that the sun's cycle changes significantly, the farther parts observe it while the nearer parts do not.
9. I don't like Daylight Saving Time.
10. Perhaps most interestingly, and here I must quote the Wikipedia article to which I am fully indebted for this entire post, since it is described almost too well there, "In the normative form, daylight saving time uses the present participle saving as an adjective, as in labor saving device; the first two words are sometimes hyphenated. Daylight savings time and daylight time are common variants, the former by analogy to savings account. Willett's original proposal used the term daylight saving, but by 1911 the term summer time replaced daylight saving time in British English." Wow. Fascinating!

"I like to kill somebody in my free time."

The past week has been dominated by a series of various vaguely Halloween related activities. They've been far more amusing than authentic, but whatever. It's pretty neat to see people so far from America getting excited about our most bizarre of holidays. Excluding, perhaps, Groundhog Day. We'll see how they deal with that one come February 2. Anyway, I kicked the whole thing off by judging another school's Halloween competition on Saturday morning. It was very long and drawn out, and by the time I'd been there for four hours, I really wished I'd grabbed some breakfast first, but it was nice just the same. There were some particularly interesting performances, the highlight of which was definitely a zombie séance set to some weird spooky new age music. The zombies gathered in a circle around a silver coffin and a pile of flowers, the latter of which soon birthed a nun carrying a giant cross. She used this to bless each of the zombies, ending by waving it at the coffin and saying something like "Jesus is loving you!" What happened next you ask? Why a flowery zombie Jesus erupted from the coffin, of course! And what did the other zombies do? Why they lifted him onto their shoulders from where he emitted perfectly timed spirit fingers in a most demonstrative way. And how did he bring this all to an appropriate close? BY LEADING THEM ALL IN A SLOW MOTION NEW AGE ZOMBIE MACARENA! As the MC said afterwards, it was truly terrible (the title of this post is another hilarious construction made during the performance). I felt like I was on some kind of hallucinogen. Bob took a video. Hopefully I'll get it up here at some point.

On Halloween proper, Geoff and I taught a special holiday lesson to our ACCESS class (the one from which last post's picture comes), and then we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas in the film club, which everyone loved (how could they not?). That was about it. Also, I ate lots of chocolate chip pumpkin cookies (see below), which I made with the canned pumpkin my mummuh sent me and with mummuh's famous recipe. They turned out amazingly well. It was almost like I was home. Almost.


The last event in the Halloween festival came on Tuesday when we celebrated it at my school. The party was pretty haphazardly thrown together, but it managed to be a success just the same. Almost entirely as a result of bobbing-for-apples, most likely. When people asked me what games Americans play on Halloween, that's the one that jumped immediately to mind. Funny thing is, I'd never played it before that night. But thanks to all sorts of blindfolding and hand-tying and other trickery, the kids loved it (see pic below of Aagii and I fighting for the only apple in a big ole bucket).

In other news, next week we have a one-week vacation to mark the end of the first quarter. I wish I could go west to see Kaede, but apparently there's some work to be done around here, and anyway I'm gonna see her the next weekend! The week after Thanksgiving we have Inter-Service Training (IST), which is when we get to choose a counterpart to bring into UB (no easy matter, which is the understatement of the year... ask me directly for more details on THAT fiasco) for a seminar on English teaching methodology and grant work, but Kaede and I both are going in a week early for other work-related reasons. That means we get two weeks together! Needless to say, I'm very excited.

I hope you all had a Happy Halloween back stateside, and that the election results haven't spooked you too badly. Bwahahahaha...

Exquisite Corpse

I just had my ACCESS course. Every Monday night, I teach English to a small group of motivated students from some of the poorer families in town. It's arranged by a program called ACCESS, which was started by the American government. I don't know a lot of the details of how or why or when though. Anyway, it's pretty much my favorite part of the week. The kids are so motivated, and it's nice to have something I get to plan on my own. Above you can see a picture of me teaching them. It was Halloween, and I went as a lumberjack. I normally dress much more professionally. Tonight we played exquisite corpse, which is a game with which I'm sure you're all familiar. It's when everyone take turns writing a story, one line at a time, and you wind up with something really disjointed and ridiculous and funny. I thought I'd share a few of the cuter ones with you all.

1. There once was a little boy named Danny. Danny really wanted to get a puppy. He was always thinking about it. Once a day his father said if you study good, I will buy puppy. But he doesn't agree. She is crying for 3 days because. So she wanted happy. But she thought it is not possible. She just wanted to stay at home and never go out. So she did, but she ate all the food in her house, and then she died of starvation.

2. Bob & Mike are very best friends. They live in Dornod. One night they go to the river. They saw very beauty girl. They fall in love. So Tom wanted to marry her. But she didn't agree to marry him. And she run away to another country. The first country she came to was called China. In China, every man wanted to marry her. And they all smelled so good. Suddenly she become monster... She is very sad because she become monster. She looks like witch... Suddenly her mom saw she. She surprised & afraid.

3. Rabbit is cooking a pie just now and decorate home because tomorrow will be Halloween. She decide to collect all animals at home and celebrate Halloween with animals. But animals don't like to celebrate Halloween. Because Halloween is very scary they scared so they went to at home. When they were going suddenly one man came and told that there was a ghost on their way. "I'm not afraid of ghosts!" I told them. "Ghosts aren't real. I'm not afraid of things that aren't real." He think I am grave person? Because he is a man.

4. Not once upon the time now one dog lived. The dog named Jack. He lived with a small family with people. But one of family member hates Jack. "Why do they all hate me?" Jack cried. "I'm a really friendly person! And I love everyone!" But... He doesn't want to do it. His opinion it's so very bad thing. And he cried and his soul is broken.

Classics.

"John is sissy. Wussy John."

Something my lovely counterpart Zoloo said about me today. But to be fair, I asked for it. Two nights ago I was making dinner and inadvertently stabbed myself right smack dab in the middle of my hand, stigmata style. I was showing the other teachers my wound and telling them about how it had been a challenge to bandage it before I passed out, so woozy do I get in such situations. They seemed a bit shocked and asked me what someone like me was called in English. "A wussy," I said. "Or a sissy, though some people think that's sexist." It caught on.

Halloween draws near, and it's a slightly bigger deal around here than I would've expected. Except for Christmas (which everyone kinda thinks is a synonym for New Year's), it's the only American holiday Mongolians really know anything about, even if there's a lot of confusion as to what actually takes place. We were supposed to have a little Halloween party this afternoon at school, complete with a costume contest, bobbing for apples, and Halloween bingo, but it was decided last minute to postpone it until Tuesday. That sort of thing happens a lot around here. I'm just glad I didn't wear my cowboy outfit to work!

The biggest thing on my mind recently is that, as of a week or so ago, I've been here longer than I spent in Cairo, which was my last major experience abroad. That's pretty amazing, especially considering what a tiny fraction of my Peace Corps service I've completed. What is slightly more impressive to me is the fact that I've now been in Mongolia longer than I've ever been in one country without leaving before. By a long shot. I was in Egypt less than two months before I went to Europe for Easter vacation, and my remaining two-and-a-half months there were split pretty neatly in half by a trip around the Middle East. As for my time in Holland, we were fortunate enough to hit up a new country every couple months or so. It'll be five months in Mongolia on November 5, a week from tomorrow. Craziness.

To celebrate this milestone, here's a pic from my time in Egypt. Keep your eyes peeled in early April, which is when I'll break my record for longest time out of America, surpassing the ten months I lived in Holland.

Stripsearched! Cleansed with vodka!

Hey pals. So I went to UB last week for the VAC conference, which was pretty cool I guess. It definitely was a lot like a student council meeting, which had me hearkening back to my high school days. There were some interesting issues on the docket however, chief amongst which were why Peace Corps can't give lady volunteers extra money to pay for feminine hygiene products (equal rights?), details of taking days off during the school year if you're TEFL (no more than five), and potentially changing from a 27-month Peace Corps country to a 25-month one, though this too was TEFL specific. It looks quite likely, that last one. You see, since school ends in late May, many TEFLs have to make up bogus projects to hang around Mongolia for their last summer until they COS in late August. So we're probably gonna change that. Which means there's a good chance I'll finish up in late June 2012 instead of late August. Cool?

The most interesting part of the trip, however, came during the mind-numbingly long ride out. About an hour or so in, the bus came to this enormous tent with a bunch of medical vehicles parked next to it. We were unloaded, divided by gender, and shuffled into tents where we were handed a coat hanger each. A little confused, I watched as all the Mongolian men started taking off their clothes. I tried not to let my shock get the best of me and quickly began removing mine as well. We didn't have to strip naked (nor were we searched... it just made for a flashy title), but most of our clothes were taken away from us and, well, I don't know what they did to them. Sprayed them for foot and mouth disease I presume, though they smelled the same when I got them back. While we waited, a woman came in and gave us cotton swabs with which to wash our hands. Said swabs reeked of vodka. Too perfect. Finally, she came in with a spray bottle and sprayed some mediciny fluid into our mouths which we were then instructed to spit into a cardboard box in the middle of the room. All the while, the Mongolian guys are talking a lot about the gadaad khun ("foreign person") and laughing themselves silly, perhaps partially because I was just about the only guy who'd neglected to wear long underwear, so while they were all sitting there mostly covered up, I had my hairy, pasty whites exposed to the cold, breezy tent, as well as to all of them. Amazing.

Because of the delays associated with the quarantine, it was looking like I wasn't going to make it into UB until nearly midnight, so I decided to hop off the bus at Bayandelger and surprise my host family for the night. They were so pleased. They lit a big fire in my old ger, made me some meat soup, and put me to bed. The next day my mom and I walked around the town and saw all the people from the summer. It was great to be back, though nearly impossible to believe that only eight weeks had passed. It was especially strange to be there without all my American buds, most of all Kaede. Everyone asked me about her and smiled to hear that we are still together.

Friday in UB happened to be consolidation, which is when Peace Corps tests its emergency evacuation policies. As a result all the people from the towns surrounding the capital had to come in for the weekend, which was really nice, as I got to see even more friendly faces than I'd anticipated. We had a jolly good time, as the pic above demonstrates.

"Mongolia is a very poor country and is relatively far away from everything."

That quotation comes from a newspaper article that was brought to my attention by fellow M21s Ryan McGibony and his lovely wife Katie Leitch. The article is pretty amusing on its own, but that line is just priceless.

Oh, and here's a pic of Aagii with one of our very silly seventh grade classes.


So it's been slightly longer than average since last I posted, and if anyone besides me noticed that, you probably didn't care. Which is a good thing. I suppose the main reason for that is that not much of interest has happened recently. The biggest deal was, last weekend, I had my first CouchSurfers here in Mongolia! It was pretty awesome. Their names are Valérie and Stéphane, and they're a really interesting and lovely couple from France who are in the midst of a one-year trip around Asia. They drove from southern France to Finland, left their van there, hopped the train out here, will head down through China and southeast Asia, come back through China, hit up all those 'Stans, and then return to their van and, eventually, la France. When I wasn't fuming with jealousy, I got the opportunity to bone up on my French, which was awesome, though it was simultaneously frustrating, amazing, and hilarious how impossible it was to sift out the Mongolian words. I had a whole conversation with them about Mongolian houses without realizing I was using the Mongolian word for house instead of the French one. No wonder they seemed so confused.

Having them here gave me a good excuse to see a lot of the city which I hadn't had the motivation to on my own just yet. We walked down to some crazy cool old Soviet monuments (see below), chilled by the river, and even saw a little theater. Unfortunately, the theater was freezing cold and filled with loud, whistling, inattentive children, rendering an already unintelligible play all but enraging. Another bummer was that I got somewhat sick during their stay. However, they were totally wonderful and it was actually quite nice to have them here taking care of me. They even cooked me delicious French meals that were easy on my stomach. They left on Wednesday, but I hope to see them again, perhaps at their pad next time. I'm gonna have to hear the stories that come out of this trip of theirs. Hopefully I'll have a few more of my own to share as well.

Well, as I said, not too much to share. I'm headed to UB on Wednesday for a seminar. It'll be nice to go back to the big city, eat a burger, see some fresh faces. And it'll probably spice up the blog a bit too!

The British are coming!

Saturday night I went out to dinner with my counterparts. One of them, Moogii, had just gotten a one million tugrik bonus (about $750, five times my monthly wage) for being with the school for five years, so she treated us all to quite the feast at a local Chinese restaurant. Aside: pretty much all the nice restaurants in this town are Chinese, and many of them are really freaking good, though quite different from what you'd find stateside. Saturday was a cold, bitter day, but nevertheless I was totally unprepared for what we saw when we left the place...

SNOW!

On September 25! Definitely the earliest I've ever witnessed it in my life. They were big, wet, heavy flakes, and they didn't even make it through the night, but we certainly hadn't seen the last of the stuff. On Monday morning, I woke up and looked out my window to this:


That day was bitterly cold. Literally one week prior it had been in the seventies. I figured we were in for the long haul at this point, that it was already time to start asking people if they were wintering beautifully, only for every subsequent day to be remarkably warm and comfortable. I guess the lesson here is: Mongolian weather is insane.

In other news, a couple days ago, several English people came into town. They're part of an exchange program that sent my counterpart Munguu and half a dozen or so other Choibalsanites to the UK this summer. These folks will be here for a couple weeks, learning all about life in Dornod, ostensibly. I get to meet them tomorrow at our library English club. It's always exciting to talk to other foreigners in this place. I'm certainly not the only one pumped for this experience. Zoloo has been talking about it a lot. A few days ago we were discussing it and somewhere in the conversation she said "the British are coming." I couldn't control my laughter, and everyone looked at me like I was crazy, so then I had to explain all about the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere and Longfellow's poem and how it sounded like Choibalsan was being invaded. A good excuse for an American history lesson, I suppose.

Tuesday night was the opening "ceremony" of Choibalsan's brand new fountain. They threw this bad boy up in a couple weeks, and it's quite the spectacle. Color-coordinated lights and all sorts of crazy cool jets. They were all lighting up and shooting out, vaguely in rhythm with Mongolian and Russian songs booming out of some terrible quality speakers, a standby of any large Mongolian gathering. Townsfolk were gathered all around, but no one looked all that impressed. Bob and I stood around for a little while, marveling as much at the technology of the fountain as at the countless other more useful ways the money might have been spent. If the fountain is like any other in this country, it'll probably be in disrepair by this time next year, which means this may be one of the only times we see it running, being as we are on the verge of freezing temperatures. Oh well... it was still mighty purty.

Just about this time last year, I was waiting patiently to hear where the Peace Corps would be sending me, finishing a long summer of working at Handy Boat, and gearing up for my ten-week roadtrip around the country. I simultaneously can't believe that was only a year ago nor that a year has already passed. I feel like I've lived at least that long since I came to Mongolia, when in reality it hasn't even been a third of that time. Absolute craziness. Here's a picture of me from the beginning of that unspeakably awesome trip, about to engage in a round of fisticuffs with a Québecois lighthouse keeper who rubbed me the wrong way. Clearly a lot has changed, mostly with regards to hair.

"Are you falling beautifully?"

"Beautifully. And you?"

"Beautifully falling."

This is a translation of a common interchange in Mongolia at this time of year. Falling in this case means passing your fall. I suppose autumning would be a less ambiguous term, but I kinda liked the poetry of my translation. The only response anyone ever gives is saikhan (сайхан), which means "beautiful" or "beautifully." Fortunately, when I say it, I mean it. This has always been my favorite season, and while the foliage here leaves much to be desired (and really makes me miss Maine), it's still quite pleasant.

But as much as people are saying this to each other, I fear we're not far from wintering, and our saikhans will probably be a little less genuine then, as if such a thing as beautifully wintering is even possible in a country this cold. Autumn arrived out of nowhere a week ago. Temperatures had been in the 70s and 80s pretty consistently, when one morning I woke up and... BOOM! FORTY DEGREES AND WINDY AS ALL HELL. Since then it's been downright chilly, dropping below freezing at night, or so the weathermen say. Many of my friends in other parts of Mongolia have already seen snow. Although here in Choibtown, it's actually quite nice right now. I just got back from a run, which was a pretty good time, although it was also one of the more eventful of my life. Children have a tendency to barrage foreigners like myself with "Hi!"s and "Hello!"s when we walk by. Most of the time I go running, they just stare at me dumbstruck. But this time, they went the other direction. For a good half a kilometer, I had a dozen or so adorable Mongolian children chasing me, smiling and laughing and shouting "Hi! Hello! What is your name!?" Then, when I got to the little wooden bridge leading out of town, I noticed a new ger had been erected on the far side, and there were several official looking cars and men wearing those white full-body suits for dealing with diseases and toxins. At first I was all, "whaaaaa???" But then I remembered this whole foot-and-mouth disease deal. If you're big on Facebook, you may have already found out that it has escalated somewhat since last I wrote. My aimag as well as Sukhbaatar, the next one south, have been fully quarantined now. All travel into, out of, and within the two provinces has been restricted for an unspecified amount of time. These men at the other side of the bridge were enforcing said quarantine. Turning people away and spraying the feet of those they let in. Thankfully that's the point in my run where I normally turn around anyway, so it was no problem for me. I hope this quarantine ends fairly soon, as I am supposed to go to Ulaanbaatar in mid-October for my first VAC meeting. Peace Corps seems pretty confident it will. And no one around here seems too phased either. Though people don't really leave that often anyway, and air traffic is still open, so I guess there's not much reason to be.

In other news, in spite of my wonderful counterparts, school continues to be somewhat frustrating. After having three classes I was supposed to team-teach fall through today, I realized something had to change. Currently I'm supposed to team-teach once a week with each of my nine counterparts. It's a scheduling nightmare. Beyond that, they cover the entire range of English lessons at my school, which means one period I'm teaching upper intermediate English to eleventh graders while the next it's basic greetings to eleven-year-olds. And only showing up in each of these classes once a week, I feel more like a guest star than an English teacher. It's not very conducive to, well, anything really. So I've come up with what I feel is a much better plan. Instead of working for one class with every teacher each week, I'll team-teach many classes with just one teacher for three weeks at a time, and then switch to a new counterpart after that for the next three weeks, etc etc etc until the end of the school year. This way I won't get so confused with logistics, and I'll also get a better feel for how each teacher is working, thereby allowing me to give more useful feedback and help them improve their skills more fully. That's the hope, anyway.

Also, I won't feel quite so transient and useless and INSANE.

So that's most of what's up. Spent the weekend with the sitemates again, as usual. Sang some mean karaoke on Friday. Took another nice walk to watch the sunset on Saturday. That same day, Merrie ripped her Achilles' tendon, so she had to go to UB on Sunday, and she's probably gonna be sent to Thailand for a few weeks to get surgery (all Peace Corps Mongolia surgeries are done in Thailand... facilities aren't up to par around here I guess). Hopefully it'll go smoothly and she'll be back in Choibtown with the gang before long. On Monday, Bob and I bottled the first homemade beer we've brewed since I've been here. Looking forward to having a taste of that in a few weeks, once it's finished carbonating and fermenting and all that good stuff. Below, you can see Bob posing with a traditional Mongolian energy drink by the name of Sex Drive, which claims to "enhance blood flow to vital organs" and is infused with "horny goat weed" (you ought to be able to read all that on the can if you click on the pic and zoom in). I wish we'd brewed that stuff.


Finally, if you've been video chatting with me on Skype or Gchat much recently, or if you've been planning to do so in the near future, you're gonna have to wait until October 1. When my fried Danny picked up my modem for me (you can only get the fastest modems in UB, and he happened to be there a few weeks ago), he had to sign me up for a plan. He couldn't get a hold of me at the time, so he just signed me up for the smallest one, which only allows 4.5 GB of data transfer over the month. I'm currently at like 4.1 GB, so I gotta ration the crap out of the next eight days. But I've signed up for 10 GB for all subsequent months, which should be plenty, so I guess I'll see you then!

I've had a few requests for more pics of Choibalsan, so here's a view of the center of town at sunset. Behind the trees and cows, there's some restaurants and shops and hotels on the left. On the right is the wrestling palace. A pretty squat affair, as you can see. But it's home!

All in a day's work for... FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE!!!

First, a light-hearted, poop-related story. So if this sort of thing grosses you out, maybe you should skip ahead a paragraph. Yesterday was movie prep day at my apartment, so a few teachers came over to watch Big Fish, which went over really well. Now my toilet hasn't been working for a few days, but this is the first time I've had guests since it broke. It's nothing too serious; the handle has just come detached from the actual flushing mechanism, so you have to reach into the tank and pull up the plunger to release the water. I forgot to warn them about this, and several of them used the bathroom over the course of the evening. After they left, I went in to have a pee... AND THERE WAS A HUGE TURD SITTING THERE! A BIG OLE PILE OF IT! IT LOOKED LIKE A FREAKING COW HAD BEEN THERE! As I shut the lid and pulled up the plunger to force the thing to flush,I gagged and groaned in shock and disgust that they would be so embarrassed as to leave their poo there rather than ask me what to do about the situation. When the toilet had finished flushing, I lifted the lid to go ahead with my own business... AND IT WAS STILL THERE! You see I have one of those nasty European style dealies that is more like a platter with a puddle than an actual toilet. Amidst more moans and groans, I began to repeat the process, when suddenly something dawned on me. Something terrifying. Something debilitating. Something unfortunate. Most of all, something humiliating. I recalled that I'd taken quite a large dump just before they'd all arrived, and that the smell had lingered in a rather unusual manner, even by the standards of this unfortunate style of toilet. I recalled that, what with the need to reach into the tank to flush, it was necessary to put the lid down, and that I could not remember having pulled it back up to see if I'd been successful. It occurred to me that, while most of the time the water pressure is more than enough to take down even the mightiest of turds, on occasion this country has caused me to have some extremely massive bowel movements which require flush after flush after flush, and as I did just that, it was becoming apparent that this was just such a bowel movement. And so I went from being positively disturbed by the indiscretion of my counterparts, to being more embarrassed than I've ever been in my life. Four incredibly sweet and proper Mongolian ladies had to see my nasty old poop, and to add insult to injury, they couldn't even operate the toilet to flush it down. Worst of all, these are the people to whom I must turn when I have problems at my apartment, so now when, in a few days, after some of the embarrassment has subsided, I tell them I need to get my toilet fixed, they're gonna be like, "Yeah, we know." Sigh.

Besides that, life has been generally not so embarrassing. This weekend I basically just hung out with my sitemates (see picture above). I've been getting more and more settled into my new life here, and I'm enjoying teaching some classes. Two days ago I offered my first English course for the other teachers at the school, and that was fun. I played "Hello, Goodbye" again. That song is just too perfect. Yesterday, I signed up for Access, a program at the local library that offers English courses to the poorest students in the area for free. I did it mostly to keep me from being bored and missing Kaede, if only one night out of the week, but also largely because I'll be glad to have a class that is truly my own, that I get to plan and teach on my terms. Team-teaching is great, but I also want to develop my solo skills.

The biggest event of the week came on Monday, when I found out Aagii had been fired for not having a teaching certificate. I was shocked and saddened, especially when I heard that normally that's not a big deal; many teachers begin their careers without a certificate and then get one later. It only matters this year because some inspectors from UB are coming, basically to size the school up and make sure everything is in compliance with national requirements. I saw Aagii later that day, and (understandably) he looked incredibly upset. The unemployment rate is enormous in Dornod, and finding another job would not be easy. Plus, he really loves to teach, and now this excellent opportunity to begin living his dream had been torn out from under his feet.

And then, the next day, he was back at school! There's been a minor break-out of foot and mouth disease in Dornod, which has made travel a little more difficult. The police have set up checkpoints coming in and out of the aimag where they spray the soles of your shoes to keep you from trekking the disease in (don't worry... it's really only dangerous to animals). Doesn't sound like much of an inconvenience to me, but apparently it was enough for the inspectors to cancel their visit. The third year in a row they've done so. I guess that's how stuff works around here. Whatever, I'm just glad Aagii got his job back!

So life goes on. No big plans in the near future. As usual, love you all, miss you all. Hope your autumn is coming on nicely. Here's a pic of a sunset/moonrise I watched over the steppe this weekend.

The Posh Corps

Aagii, one of my counterparts, the one whom I helped get the job as a matter of fact, came over to my place tonight to watch Toy Story (I forgot how awesome that movie is). A couple of us teachers were preparing a list of vocab words to go with it when we show it in our new English Language Film Club this weekend. Last week we watched Grease, which was much more sexual than I'd remembered, although it was a hit nevertheless. But film isn't the point of this story. The point is, Aagii got here early, and he brought along a photo album. Honestly, after eating mutton and drinking vodka, showing people family photos is your average Mongolian's favorite pastime. A lot of Aagii's photos were of his college friends. As I mentioned in my last post, he graduated quite recently. I asked him where they were living now. "Most of them are in UB," he said. "So why did you decide to come back to Choibalsan?" I said. This is the story he told me:

"Well this friend," he said, pointing at one of the men in the photos, "one night we were very drunk, and he..." Aagii didn't know the word, so he made a fist and abruptly shoved it toward his knee, where I noticed a sizable scar for the first time. "With a knife," he said, smiling. "He stabbed you?!?" I was incredulous. I'd heard that Mongolian friends will rough-house when drinking, but I'd thought it was limited to (relatively) harmless wrestling. "What is word? 'Stab'?" "Yes." "Ah yes, he stab me." Shocked, I asked if they were still friends. "Yes of course," Aagii replied, as if I'd been crazy to ask. Anyway, he concluded by saying that, since he did not have health insurance that was good in UB, he was forced to return to Choibalsan to have his wound treated. Fortunately he doesn't seem too unhappy about it. I said to him, "Aagii, if we ever get drunk together, you aren't allowed to stab me in the leg." He laughed, and I added, "although I do have insurance." "Ah yes, I have insurance too!" "Does that mean I can stab you if we're drunk?" He chuckled and told me I could, but I doubt I'll take him up on it.

The last week here has been okay. The highlight was definitely this weekend, when I went with most of the teachers from my school to the countryside for a retreat. We talked and ate and drank and played cards. Saturday afternoon was beautiful and hot, so we went down to the river and swam around. Well I swam. As I may have mentioned before, very few Mongolians know how to swim, and most fear water that rises above their waist. On the other side of the river, however, there was a mountain. Not a big one, but the first one I'd seen since coming to Choibalsan. Obviously I wanted to swim across and hike it. I was not alone in this desire. Aagii was also interested, and he even suggested that we strip our clothes off on the far bank and climb the thing naked! I would've done it, but a few of my female counterparts got up the nerve to join us. We waded across the river, which is very shallow, and in spite of the terrible mosquitoes and rocky ground, hiked barefoot all the way to the top. It was majestic and primal and awesome. The picture above is from the summit.

School is going okay. I realize it's only been a week, but I've been getting a little frustrated by how little work I have and how expendable I feel. But in the last few days I've taught a few classes and my schedule is beginning to fill out, so I'm doing better in that regard. And it's hard to get too annoyed with so many wonderful people to work with, as well as such attentive and motivated students (especially compared to some of the brats I had during training this summer!). One interesting cultural difference I found in my workplace: today I went to the primary school for the first time to observe the fourth and fifth grade English classes. I was sitting in the fourth grade English classroom when I noticed something conspicuous sitting in the bookshelf. I went to have a closer look and was shocked to find... a Mongolian nudie magazine! Many pictures had been cut out, but I'm pretty sure they were all of people who were dressed, probably to teach clothing vocab. There were naked women everywhere, including one softcore picture of two couples copulating on the same mattress under an overpass. Could you imagine the parental backlash if something like that popped up in an American classroom, fourth grade or otherwise??? The magazine's greatest transgression, however, was a picture of some random woman who was labeled as Pierce Brosnan. How dare they!

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been struggling recently with the realization that I'm living a pretty damned easy life here in the Peace Corps. I've got lots of sitemates to keep me company, I've got a nice job with motivated students and teachers who speak excellent English, I've got running hot water and a refrigerator and access to peanut butter and brown sugar and Bailey's Irish Cream and all sorts of fruits. And now I have internet too! My life is so cushy, some people deem this type of service as "the Posh Corps," and I think that's pretty fair. Especially when I remember that some of the people I trained with are living hours from the nearest native-English speaker in gers in tiny towns with no running water and difficult jobs and the knowledge that in a few months they'll be chopping wood every day to keep from freezing to death and waking up every morning to frozen toothpaste! What enormously different experiences we'll have. I just finished washing my clothes in the bathtub, an activity I relish because it is the one remnant I have of how difficult some chores were this summer. But even that is a hell of a lot easier now that I have a big tub to do it in rather than a little bucket, with hot water at the twist of a wrist and a sink for rinsing. Oh well, as I said last time, I'm not taking it too much to heart. It's just kind of... funny.

You'll notice I've made a few changes to the blog. Mostly the picture above (it's finally one I took), some of the colors, and a new tab, geared toward people who are interested in visiting me out here. Which if you like awesome, totally unique places, should include you.

So there's one major detail that I've been omitting in this blog for the last couple months, at first because it wasn't quite so major and I was uncertain about which way things would go, and more recently because I just felt it was private I suppose. But now it's become such an enormous force in my life, probably the most enormous in fact, that this blog just seems like a big lie without including it. And that detail is... I have a girlfriend! If you remember from that long post a while back, I mentioned a girl named Kaede with whom I was playing a lot of cribbage and who was with me when we were nearly dismembered by that goddamned dog. Well, somewhere between card games and animal attacks, we got to really liking each other. It was kind of an unfortunate time for that to happen since we only had a month left at our training site. Kaede is also a teacher trainer, so we knew that there was zero chance we'd be placed together, and in a country this enormous and poorly connected, very little probability that we'd be anywhere reasonably close. As a result of those and other variables, we originally planned to play things by ear once we went to our new sites. But as that date drew closer, we fell more and more for each other, and the whole idea began to seem absolutely ridiculous. I really did not come to Mongolia to be in a long distance relationship, but in the end it just felt right.

It's been rough since we got to site. Kaede is ten hours west of Ulaanbaatar, which makes her about twenty-four hours away from me (which believe it or not, is not even half as far as she could be). Additionally, we're forbidden from leaving our sites except on work-related business for the first three months of service, making any chance of seeing her all but impossible. We talk every day, but the minutes for our phones are kind of pricey. We both got internet at our places so we could Skype, though it only works some of the time.

Anyway, point is, in spite of all that, she's totally worth it. Kaede is smart and funny and gorgeous and talented and interesting and adventurous and good at cribbage and I haven't felt this way about someone in a really long time, if ever. Maybe it's the altitude or all the fermented mare's milk, but I'm pretty sure it's her. Alright I've probably said way more than I need to about this, but the point is, I really like her, and I miss her like crazy, and for some ridiculous reason, she seems to feel the same way about me. It's nice. Really nice. If you've got any long distance pointers, holler at me, cause I'm pretty inexperienced with this sort of thing.

And because I know everyone's gonna beg me, here's a picture of Kaede, the only way I've seen her for the last few weeks... over a webcam. Oh, and by the way, her name is pronounced KAH-eh-deh.

Ойлгохгүй, мэдэхгүй, хамаагүй

So I've been here a week, which is remarkable considering how relatively little I've done. After the frenzy of the end of PST and then Final Center Days, it has been nice to relax a little before the start of the new school year. After I arrived, I spent the first few days setting up my apartment and exploring the city. It's totally unlike any place I've ever been. Choibalsan basically consists of apartment building after identical apartment building, occasionally broken up by something vaguely resembling a town square (the picture above is one of the biggest exceptions... an artificial lake right near my apartment building). Every few blocks or so there's a restaurant and a supermarket and an internet cafe, etc etc etc, so that it actually has the feel of some sort of a dusty, less crowded Manhattan on the steppe. It's growing on me quite nicely, although every time I read about the mountainous parts of this country, it makes me sad.

My apartment is small but quite nice. I think I hallucinated the fleas, which is a very good sign, for my physical if not for my mental health. I've got a pretty nice set-up at this point. The school has provided me with everything from a refrigerator to a rice cooker. Sometimes I lounge on my comfy couch while listening to the music coming out of my Bose speakers (brought from home) and gazing out the window at the beautiful sunset and wonder if I'm totally missing the Peace Corps experience. Then I forget about it over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a hot shower, though usually not at the same time. Usually.

I did do a few interesting things before school started. First off, on Friday, I met the VSO volunteers in Choibalsan. It should come as no surprise that Peace Corps is far from the only organization to send volunteers to Mongolia. VSO, which stands for Voluntary Service Overseas, is a British-run organization that recruits from all over the world to send volunteers to many of the same countries PCVs go to. The main differences from Peace Corps are that VSO volunteers tend to be more experienced in their field, they don't do a homestay or learn much of the language (in fact they usually have a full-time interpreter to take care of those sorts of difficulties), and the length of their stay is variable, rather than having the required two years like us. Anyway, Choibalsan currently has two of them, Velan, an older gentleman from India, and Easterlina, a woman in her twenties from Kenya. They both seem really cool, and it's nice to have the extra English-speaking company around, although our site is probably the least in need of it.

A couple days later, Velan and I went with my counterpart Zoloo out to the countryside. Velan, who knows Zoloo because he also works at my school, had told her that he wanted to ride a horse. The people we were originally going to see were unavailable for some reason, so we started heading toward a place where our driver knew some people. On the way, we saw a man riding a horse and herding sheep. Zoloo told us that sheep horse are very calm and so this one would be good to ride. We pulled over and asked this man that none of us knew from a hole in the wall if we could ride his horse. He was extremely obliging, and even gave Velan and me some pointers. Afterwards, we went to the driver's friends' place, and they fed us and gave us tea and treated us like family. Mongolia is a wonderfully hospitable country. It was also amazing to see people living so close to the land, so close to the way Mongolians have been living for thousands of years. They were totally off the grid. They had a little electricity from a solar panel, just enough to run a weak lightbulb and a small black and white television. And still they seemed exuberantly happy with life.

School started yesterday. The first day of classes in this country could not be more different from the way it happens stateside. To start off with, there was a big ceremony with speeches and songs, including one of each by me. I mustered up enough Mongolian to say something meager about why I was there, and then I treated them all to a stuffy-nosed rendition of "Wonderful World" by Sam Cooke. Y'know, the one that goes, "Don't know much about history, don't know much biology." Vaguely relevant, just how I like it. After the ceremony, students got a class about Chinggis Khaan and the history of Mongolia, followed by a live broadcast from the president of Mongolia. Then, there were a few "normal" classes, but no real work was done. People all got to go home early. It literally is treated as a holiday around here, to the point where people go around saying "Happy Holiday!" all day long. It's kinda nice. I probably would've liked it more if I hadn't had to perform.

Today, I went into school expecting to teach some more classes, but apparently Thursday is the day the school gives the English department (the picture below includes all of us plus a few stragglers... oh, and Velan's in there too) off to regroup and plan things for the rest of the week. I'm sure it'll be nice to have in the future, but today we just worked out every painstaking detail we possibly could of the rest of the year. We were all understandably tired by the end of the day, but there was a meeting all the teachers had to go to. Our director was pretty angry because several teachers had gotten quite drunk during the celebrations yesterday, and while that's fairly common around here, it would seem our school takes a hard line on it. The director said that she wanted to fire those people right then and there, but she put it to the floor to see what the teachers thought of it. No one really voiced an opinion, big surprise, so she decided to call on one of us individually. Guess who it was! ME!!! I was pretty taken aback, so I just responded that I didn't understand, a stock retort in an awkward situation around here. But clearly I did, and she called me out on that, so I said that I didn't know. She demanded I not give such an answer, so I said I didn't care, which made all the teachers as well as her burst into hysterics (the three of them sound somewhat parallel in Mongolian: oilgokhgui, medekhgui, khamaagui... they also form the title of this post). I felt too uncomfortable to find it that funny, but I was relieved that I'd derailed the situation. In the end she decided just to dock their pay for three months, which was kind of nice, I suppose.

Oh, one more thing. While I haven't felt like I've made much of a difference in my classes yet, I did manage to be at the right place at the right time and give my altruistic motivation a good jump start. One day last week while exploring town, a Mongolian man about my age came up to me and asked me if he could speak English with me. I said of course, and we launched into conversation. He told me he'd recently graduated from university and was having a lot of trouble finding a job, but that he really wanted to teach English. I told him that that was a shame because his English was excellent (it truly is, some of the best I've heard in this country), but that my school was hiring and he ought to come apply. He did, and he blew the competition out of the water. And the school hired him! So really all I was in this story was a liaison, but it felt really great to help a nice guy get a job. Y'know, all warm and fuzzy. Hopefully it won't be the last time I get that feeling around here.

"You are like a child."

Welp, here I am, sitting in an internet cafe in my new city. Choibalsan seems pleasant enough so far. My apartment is on the fourth story, and I have a pretty good view south. This is literally the flattest, emptiest place I've ever been in my life. It's kinda beautiful in a way. The ride yesterday (see the post office bus which brought us above) was exceptionally long, and my ass was aching by the time we finally got in at 11 PM, fourteen hours after we left Ulaanbaatar. I sat facing backwards, which afforded me the opportunity to watch the mountains get smaller and slowly recede in the distance. It was almost as sad as it was gorgeous. Nevertheless, I think there is a certain charm in this landscape, and at least I'm only a kilometer or so from the Kherlen Gol, a very pleasant river, and the same one I visited back during training. It's Mongolia's second longest.

In spite of the length, I didn't mind the ride so much. Probably as a result of my iPod, the views, the amount of stuff I had to think about, and Munguu, my fellow teacher who accompanied me. We had all sorts of good conversations, about everything from god to alcoholism to special education to American music. Apparently I'm far more inquisitive than your average Mongolian, as at one point she said to me, "You are like a child. You ask so many questions!"

Also, my Mongolian mom has been texting me like crazy since we got our new phones, and she wanted to know when I'd be rolling through our old training site. I told her, expecting she just wanted to be aware. But when we were driving through, she called me. Unable to understand what she was saying, I handed the phone off to Munguu, who had the driver stop the bus. Realizing what was happening, I apologized to the thirty plus other passengers and told them that my mother was "too good." I don't know if they knew what I meant. A few minutes later, my sister, some other relatives, and my mom come rolling up. She runs out, a thermos of hot milk tea in one hand, a bag of fresh-made cookies in the other, all the while apologizing that she didn't have time to make me a real meal. It was amazingly sweet, and it was great to see her. About a minute later we were back on the road.

In other incredible kindness related news, once Munguu and I got to my new apartment, five of the other English teachers with whom I'll be working were waiting there (below you can see Zola, one of them, presenting me with airag to welcome me), having cleaned it and set it all up for me, as well as made me buuz (steamed dumplings) for dinner. It was very sweet, and they all seem quite friendly. After that I pretty much went to bed, which was nice except I think I might have fleas. This morning I got up and started unpacking and setting up. My apartment is small, but I like it. I have a stove and an oven and a shower, and allegedly I'm getting a TV, a fridge, and a washing machine sometime today.

Well anyway, just wanted to update and let everyone who cares know I'm safe. I go into work tomorrow to get acquainted, and classes start on Wednesday. I can't believe this is all really happening.


Oh, and here's a video of Andrew and I (with some help from Sarah) playing our milk tea song at swearing in. Enjoy!

Ice Cream Dump Trucks

Well, tomorrow morning bright and early I leave for my new home. I've spent the last week in Ulaanbaatar, swearing in as an official volunteer (see above picture), saying goodbye to friends, and getting to know the city. I'm surprised by how much it's grown on me. It's definitely dirty and run-down, and pickpocketing is rampant to say the least (a friend of mine nearly got his money stolen right in front of me!), but it has a certain charm that's hard to define. It's also been very nice to eat cheeseburgers and pizza and Mexican food and all sorts of other things I haven't had in a while. A couple days ago, I ate probably the closest thing Mongolia has to a Buffalo wing... these breadstick type things stuffed with Buffalo chicken served with a side of bleu cheese dressing. It wasn't the same, but I'll be damned if it didn't taste good. One of the really unique things about this city is that, every now and then, you'll hear what sounds exactly like an ice cream truck melody. Your inner monologue will immediately stop whatever it was rambling on about and scream "ICE CREAM!" You'll follow the noise like a moth to a flame, only to find... A GARBAGE TRUCK. That's right, to alert people to put out their trash, the garbage trucks play very pleasant little diddies of the exact same style as American ice cream trucks. It's cruelly hilarious, or hilariously cruel. Fortunately, I'm not much of an ice cream person, so it doesn't irk me as much as some.

It's been very, very sad to say goodbye to all the friends I made this summer (see pic below for the last gathering of my fellow trainees, plus one of our language teachers), but I can't wait to get settled in my new apartment. I'll write something when I get there. With my new home, I also have a new address and a new phone number, but Peace Corps prefers us not to post those on our blogs. Most of you who read this have probably received an email with those items included. If you haven't and you want them, send me a request, and if you're cool enough, I'll forward it along.


Oh, and here's Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers," cause it's just appropriate.

That is soooooo cool.

This is legit a video of one of the Mongolians that trained me to teach English here this summer. As many of us found out recently, he used to be Mongolia's first Elvis impersonator! Anyway, you should check this out. It's kinda long, but it's fucking great, and it'll give you some insight into Nargie, one of the badassest trainers in the history of the Peace Corps. I'm gonna miss the crap out of that guy.

Oh, and the story behind the title of this post: I was so glad to see in the interview portion of the video that Nargie uses his trademark term, "sooooo cool." He literally says this all the time, and it's fucking awesome.

"Please don't send me to Choibalsan."

That is a direct quotation from my site placement form which I filled out for the Peace Corps two or three weeks ago. It probably comes as little surprise then that, as I was informed today, my new home is...

CHOIBALSAN!!!

Yeah, so apparently they didn't listen. The main reason I didn't want to go to Choibalsan, which is Mongolia's fourth-largest city, is that there are absolutely zero mountains. And I really like to hike. Won't be doing that for a while. Dornod, waaaaaaaaaay in the East, the aimag of which Choibalsan is capital, is the flattest part of Mongolia. Oh well, I have a good attitude about the whole thing. I'm sure I'll make the best of it. And hardship is a key part of the Peace Corps experience. So they say. Here are the ups and downs of my new home...

Pros:

• GREAT SITEMATES... both the people from my group going with me and those who have already been there a year are AWESOME. From my group, there's Merrie, an older woman who is a university trainer. She's really fun and funny and kind and I'm sure will be an excellent person to have around. There's also Danny from Nevada. I believe he's a health volunteer. I don't know him all that well, but every interaction I've had with him has been pretty swell. Outside of the city, in smaller towns in the same aimag, there's Pico and Jason. Pico is one of the funniest people I've ever met, and Jason is also a really cool guy. I hope they both get to come into the city fairly regularly. As for older volunteers, there's Jeff, Bob, and Amanda, all of whom were trainers for us this summer, and all of whom are really fucking cool. I might be in a geographically uninteresting location, but we have arguably the best group of volunteers in the whole country.
• Because there are no mountains, it's a region I probably wouldn't have visited otherwise. So it'll be nice to get to know it as my home. And while it's pretty flat, it's got some other very interesting characteristics. It's in the middle of one of the largest pristine grasslands in the world, and it's got a shit-ton of gazelles as a result. Apparently sometimes you'll look over and thousands of gazelles will be running by. Coolness. Also, there's some sort of lava tubes somewhere nearby? Maybe?
  
• I'm living in an apartment! With a bathroom and running water and central heating and a refrigerator!!! I admit, I feel like a little bit of a sissy for not living in a ger for the next two years, but at least I got that experience this summer. And it'll be nice not to have to worry about freezing my ass off all the time.
• Choibalsan is a winter fly site. Which means that from November to March, Peace Corps will pay for us to fly into UB for any required events. It would be kinda nice to be a fly site year round, but this means that I don't have to deal with getting all my shit on an airplane on the way to site next week, and I still don't have to sit through the twelve to sixteen hour bus ride in the winter. However, if I do want to go into UB on my own, twelve to sixteen hours isn't the end of the world, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than flying myself.
• Being the fourth biggest city in Mongolia means that Choibalsan has access to all sorts of nice comforts and amenities. It's also on a railroad spur that the Soviets built straight into Russia (apparently they laid the tracks down to exploit a local uranium deposit). As a result of these two things, delicious items like peanut butter are not tough to come by. Also, apparently there are lots of good restaurants, including a huge concentration of Chinese places, which is rare for Mongolia, a country that almost universally hates the Chinese.

Surely there's lot of other pros, about which I'll update you in the next two years. Here are the cons:

• NO FUCKING MOUNTAINS. UGH.
• Because I have so many sitemates, and also because I won't be living in a ger with a khashaa family, Mongolian cultural immersion is going to take a lot more effort. It would be very easy to fall into a comfortable life of working with Mongolians and spending all my free time with Americans, but I'd prefer to avoid that if at all possible. I have to remember that I came here to discover something different, not to relax with the known.
• I'm really far from all my Bayandelger friends. There's only one other east of Ulaanbaatar (my friend Sarah), and she's still six to ten hours away.

When I put it like that, the pros clearly outweigh the cons. That's nice. I'm sure I'll be swearing by Choibalsan before long. It was just a big shock. At least I can visit all my other friends at their beautiful sites.

In other news, said goodbye to my host family this morning. That was quite sad. Both of my parents cried. I'm going to miss that family a lot. But one more bright side is that they're on the way to Choibalsan, even though I'll rarely get a chance to stop in and say hi on that trip. But y'know, it's better than nothing. I can wave at least.

Also, today my fellow M21s elected me to represent them as a VAC. Embarrassingly enough, I don't remember what exactly my new acronym stands for, but basically I'll be a liaison between my cohort and the Peace Corps. I get to travel to Ulaanbaatar one in the fall and once in the spring to carry out this task. I'm looking forward to the opportunities being a VAC will afford me, and to getting to give something back to my friends.

Anyway, mixed feelings or not, it's really nice to have a new home. Now I just gotta make the most of this last week with all my buds. We officially swear in as volunteers on Friday, and I'll probably head to my new site a day or two later. We go to UB this Tuesday, and they give us our cell phones, so stay tuned if you feel like giving me a call sometime!

Oh, the picture at the top is me in my new deel, drinking milk tea of course. The one below is my mom, some cousins, and I in front of the parliament building in UB. These are the pics I meant to put up with the last post but the internet was too slow.

They know where I'm going!

Unfortunately, however, they won't tell me. Not yet anyway. Yesterday we had a session and I asked Lisa, a head honcho in Peace Corps Mongolia, whether or not they'd figured out our site placements yet. She said that they'd just finished hammering them out that very day. A friend said, "so you're looking at us right now, knowing where each of us is headed?" She was.

It's crazy that we actually have a new home now, even if they won't tell us just yet. However, the wait is quite short now. This Sunday afternoon, August 15, a mere three days away, we'll find out. I'm so pumped, even though that means that less than three days from now, we'll have left our town and our families. That reality has yet to set in.

The last week has been spent finishing up projects, preparing for our language test, and doing various things around here for the last time. On Saturday, the day after I returned from Nalaikh, my mom took me to Ulaanbaatar for the first time. THAT was crazy. Let me tell you, after living in a tiny town of barely a thousand for two months, a place with no running water and no paved roads, a place which barely has internet, it's quite a culture shock to head to a city of over a million people, a city with high rise buildings and designer clothing stores and real American Heinz ketchup. Oh, and escalators too! I think it was my mom's first time on an escalator, as she kept almost tripping and smashing her face every time we got on and off one, and then she'd laugh hysterically. It was great. Probably no place in my life has ever been built up to the degree that Ulaanbaatar has. It seems like a pretty interesting place, and I look forward to spending more time there in the future. The reason we went was to get me a Mongol deel. A deel is the traditional dress of Mongolia, and as you can see, it's pretty freaking cool. It's basically an excuse to wear a big, comfy, badass bathrobe out in public.

A deel is something pretty much every Peace Corps volunteer winds up getting in this country, but I needed one ASAP for our community appreciation event. To show the town our thanks, we organized a concert and a dance on Sunday night. The girls out here performed two traditional Mongolian dances which were really beautiful (on a side note, the traditional dance of Mongolia is probably my favorite form of dancing I've ever witnessed... it has all the nuance and precision of southeast Asian dancing coupled with the energy and fervor of central Asian and Russian styles; you could probably find some on YouTube). Additionally, my friend Andrew and I performed a song called "Eejiin Chanasan Tsai," which translates to "Mother's Boiled Tea." It's a very slow-moving, epic song with a soaring melody all about how there's nothing as beautiful as a mother's milk tea. It's currently one of the most popular songs in Mongolia, which just goes to show you how different this culture is from ours. Could you imagine if Kanye released a song about his mother's milky tea? Yeah, that's what I thought. Anyway, we had our friend Sarah play "the mom" and feed us tea as we performed. It was a huge hit. We're going to perform it again at the swearing in ceremony. Also, all of us Americans sang a song called "Ayani Shuwuu," which means "Traveling Bird." This is a love song which is one of Mongolia's perennial classics. It's quite beautiful, and people really love it when we sing it. Finally, they requested that we perform an English song as well, so I played "Two of Us" by the Beatles. I even translated one verse (incredibly poorly I'm sure) into Mongolian.

Afterwards, the dance came. We had to have it in the atrium outside the auditorium because of recent repainting, but it went okay just the same. It was really nice to give a little back to this community that has taken us in and treated us so well. A dance and a concert aren't enough, but they're something.

So anyway, the next few days will see us taking our language and training tests (that's tomorrow actually), having one last big party with our families (for which Brian and Adi get to return!), and then heading out Sunday morning. We'll spend a couple days in Zuunmod, meet our new supervisors, and then head to Ulaanbaatar for several days to get officially acquainted with the nation's only real metropolis. A week from tomorrow, we swear in. I know I've said this a million times, but I just can't believe it's over. Tempus fugit.

In other news, the internet has sort of returned to our town, but not enough to allow me to post any pics today, so you'll all just have to wait.