Get ready, cuz here I come!

I never met a country that makes me feel the way Mongolia do,
YOU'RE ALL RIGHT!
Whenever I'm asked who makes my dreams real, I say Mongolia do,
YOU'RE OUT OF SIGHT!
So fee, fi, fo fum,
Look out Mongolia, cuz here I come.

Alright so the song doesn't work perfectly, but whenever I'm getting ready for anything, I can't help but think of that Temptations tune. And that's pretty much all I've been doing in my spare moments the past few weeks. You may or may not have noticed the page I put up on this here blog about the things I need to get between now and departure, and I've been spending a lot of my time trying to figure out just how I'm gonna get them, and which ones I can do without. I received my sweet hiking backpack from Eagle Creek yesterday. As mentioned on that page, lots of places give us PCVs a discount, so I got that $230 bag for only $115! Awesome.

I've also been reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. It's really interesting and is only furthering my opinion that GK was fucking awesome and has been mistreated by the history books ever since. Highly recommended.

In other non-Mongolia news, I'm now in my last week of work in Central PA. I'm training my sister to replace me, so it's nice to be a little family for a while out here in Carlisle. This weekend I'm making one last trip to Baltimore and DC to say some goodbyes, and then I'll head up to Maine to work at Handy Boat! Very excited about that, even though I just got back from six days up there on Sunday. Aside from the run (for which I finally raised my $1000; thanks to everyone who donated!!!), I've also planned some camping and even a day of skydiving in the next month. May as well leave the US with a (hopefully non-literal) bang, amirite?

Mongolia on My Mind

Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia. Such is the litany which now comprises the majority of my thoughts. As you can see in the picture above, I couldn't even go to the Museum of Natural History in DC without pointing out Ulaanbaatar on every map I came across. I guess it'd probably be a little strange if I weren't thinking nonstop about the totally foreign land where I'll be spending the next two years of my life, but I'm a little surprised by just how infatuated I've become. I guess it makes more sense when coupled with the mundaneness of life in Central PA.

Needless to say, I've been reading everything about the Land of the Blue Sky that I can get my hands on. I tore through what documents the PC sent me. I've even watched a couple excellent Mongolian films (The Story of the Weeping Camel, a documentary about a nomadic family living in the Gobi Desert, and Mongol, the first part of an epic trilogy telling the story of Genghis Khan's life; both were nominated for Academy Awards and can be found on Netflix). It's been really fun, and I'm pumped that I'll soon be living in such an awesome place. Here's ten of my favorite facts I've recently learned, in no particular order:

• Mongolia has one of the highest average elevations (about 5100 ft) of any country!
• In Mongolia, if you accidentally step on someone or kick their feet, you must shake his hand immediately!
• John Wayne once starred as Genghis Khan in Howard Hughes' 1956 film, The Conqueror. It is considered one of the worst movies ever made, and because it was shot downwind from a nuclear test site in Nevada, nearly half of the cast and crew (including John Wayne and Agnes Moorehead) developed cancer!
• Peljidiin Genden, Mongolia's ninth Prime Minister, disagreed with Stalin over how to deal with the Buddhist monks in his nation (Stalin wanted to purge them; Genden didn't), and he even charged the Soviet leader with "Red Imperialism." In response, Stalin kicked Genden's walking stick! Right out from under him! What an asshole! So Genden slapped Stalin across the face, breaking his pipe and yelling "You bloody Georgian, you have become a virtual Russian czar!" Can you guess how Stalin reacted to that? If you guessed that Crazy Old Joe had Genden killed, you're correct!
• The common English term "hurray" originated as the Mongol battle cry. Doesn't seem to mean the same thing to us, does it? Personally, if I saw a whole bunch of people running at me with swords yelling "hurray!!!" I probably would think they were just being silly. But then they'd kill me. Just like every other chump in their path!
• Genghis Khan wasn't a total dick after all! Don't get me wrong, he wasn't a saint exactly, but he was no bloodthirsty mindless sociopath either. History textbooks fail again!
• For every one Mongolian, there are THIRTEEN HORSES! WTF!?!
• One delicacy of Mongolia's oh-so-unappetizing cuisine is known as boodog, which is really just a euphemism for blowtorched marmot. That's right. You heard me. Blowtorched. Marmot. I don't think anyone needs to hear more about this particular oddity, but it's just too bizarre not to go on. Anyway I'm the one who's potentially going to have to eat this stuff. Quoting from Lonely Planet's guide to Mongolia:

  This summer delight first involves pulling the innards out of the neck of a marmot. The carcass is then stuffed full of scalding rocks and the neck cinched up with wire. The bloated animal is then thrown upon a fire (or blowtorched) to burn the fur off the outside while the meat is cooked from within. The finished product vaguely resembles a balloon with paws.

  As a bonus, apparently handling the dead animals is the number one cause of Bubonic Plague in Mongolia. Hurray!
• Khövsgöl Nuur, while not the largest lake in Mongolia, is the second oldest lake in the world and contains sixty-five percent of the nation's fresh water, and two percent of the world's!
• It is estimated that about one in every twelve men living in the former Mongolian empire (one-fifth of the world's land area) is descended from Genghis Khan, for a total of about sixteen million great-great-great-great-etc. grandsons! And that's just the men! The moral of the story? GK was a ho. Fo sho.

In a recent comment, the lovely Anna Santo requested more details about what exactly I'll be doing in Mongolia. I don't know how much anyone else cares, but I'd do anything for Anna, so here goes.

I don't know that many specifics, but my job description is English teacher trainer. For the first ten weeks, however, I'll be in intensive pre-service training with all the other PCVs in my cohort. I'm not positive where it will be, but I think I read somewhere that it'll be in the town of Darkhan, Mongolia's third largest city, which is in the north, not far from the Russian border. While there, I'll be living with a host family, which ought to expedite learning of the language and culture. After PST ends, we'll all be sent to our permanent sites, the places where we'll live for the next two years. These will have been determined a few weeks prior. I have no idea where I'll be sent, but it will most likely be a city of moderate size, which for Mongolia means fifteen to forty thousand people. There are three kinds of sites at which I could be placed:

1. Foreign Language Institutes (FLI)—These are basically colleges. Should I get sent to an FLI, I'd be leading classes of fifteen to twenty prospective teachers aged seventeen to twenty-two.
2. Provincial Education Departments—There is an Education Department in every aimag which oversees the administration of education for the whole province. If I were placed at one of these, I'd be aiding the officials in improving the quality of English instruction in that aimag. Apparently this job includes some traveling into the countryside, which makes it sound like the best possibility to me!
3. Secondary school complexes—In a secondary school complex, which is a fancy term for a high school, I'd be working with current English teachers to help them improve their own skills. I'd also be doing some private tutoring on the side. Judging from the description alone, I'm least excited about this one.

As in my initial country placement, I will have some say on where in Mongolia I get to go, but it's not their first concern. Based on what I've read so far, I'd like to be placed somewhere in the central to western part of the country. That way I could be in the mountains, which I so love, and yet not too far from Ulaanbaatar. But I guess we'll just have to wait and see!

Two Months!!!

That pic would probably be more appropriate if I weren't holding the fish skeletons, but it was the closest thing I could find to a photo of me looking excited and terrified... which are the two emotions I'm feeling right now since, two months from today, I'LL BE ON MY WAY TO MONGOLIA!!! Well, more or less... I'll be on my way to stateside staging. I technically won't leave for Mongolia until two months from tomorrow.

Anyway, this isn't much of a real post; I just wanted to mention that. And also this: ever since I began considering the Peace Corps in earnest, which was right around the beginning of my frosh year at Oberlin, I've tried to get a grasp on just how long twenty-seven months is. My main strategy has been to consider what I was doing twenty-seven months prior, and what had happened in the meantime. Back at the beginning of my college career, that interval seemed absolutely, unbelievably, nigh-on-insurmountably enormous. In the two and a quarter years that passed between July 2003 and September 2005, I'd gotten my first job, learned to drive a car, traveled to France and Spain for a two-week exchange program, gotten my first girlfriend, applied to college, graduated from high school, said good-bye to old friends, and made new ones at Oberlin, where I was now a student. I couldn't imagine spending that much time in a place about which I knew nothing. If such a huge amount had changed about me in that time, all while basically living at home, would I even be able to survive the same interval in a foreign country, living a life without many of the comforts and conveniences, not to mention people, I take for granted back home?

Those questions are still valid, but at least now the amount of time seems less daunting. In the twenty-seven months between January 2007 and now, I spent a semester living in Egypt and studying at the American University in Cairo, made some new friends there, saw a lot of awesome new places in the Middle East, lived in Boston for a summer, finished out my time at Oberlin, had a six-month relationship begin and end... and then there was graduation. Since then, besides the road trip, not all that much has happened in my life (as the previous post will tell you). Plus, there's that whole phenomenon where, as you age, the same amount of time (one year, two years, twenty-seven months...) comprises a lesser portion of your life as a whole. As a child, a year seems like a whole lifetime. Nowadays, it feels like it was just yesterday I was leaving for Cairo.

Point is, the mix of excitement and nervous terror has changed quite a bit in the last five years. I still feel both knowing that I'll be leaving in two months, but (thankfully), I feel a lot more of the former.