"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.