"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!