Holy guacamole! It's been nearly a month since I posted! Apologies for having been so remiss. I wasn't all that busy in any usual sense of the word, but I suppose I was trying to enjoy my time with Kaede as much as possible. In case you're still worried, my pink eye cleared up no problem. I wound up in UB for just a few days and then got flown back to Kaede. School and work get all but canceled this time of year. There's a ton of holidays, it's really cold outside, and everything just kinda falls apart. A week after I returned, the city's foreign language methodologist hosted a two-day seminar on a variety of subjects. Kaede, Zoloo, and I were given half of one of the days to inform the teachers about creative writing and its benefits in the foreign language classroom. Because of my conjunctivitis and the resulting trip to UB, we didn't have quite as much time to plan as we might have liked, but overall it went really well. Everyone seemed to feel it was a useful and important topic, though we're a bit skeptical that many of them will wind up implementing it in the classroom. Oh well, at the very least we're hoping to get some of them to motivate their students to participate in the International Writing Olympics, a competition started a few years ago by a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia wherein students from PC countries around the globe have one hour to respond to one of three creative writing prompts. Essays are judged on ideas, not grammar and spelling. Mongolians love competitions and prizes, so hopefully this will be a good way to get them interested in creative writing. I should note that this whole thing was Kaede's idea. Thank god I have such a motivated girlfriend.
Or should I say, fiancée! Certainly the biggest news of the last month is that Kaede and I are now engaged! It's pretty crazy, I know. A year ago, I didn't even know I was coming to Mongolia, and if you'd told me I'd be engaged by now, I probably would've hit you. Shows what I know. But yeah, Kaede and I have been talking about it for a while. I definitely feel like I would be very happy for the rest of my life with her, and she seems to feel the same way about me. So it had been something we sort of expected to happen at some point from pretty early on. Then, back in October, our good friend and fellow PCV Tim, who sensed our potential, alerted us to the PC policy that says that volunteers who marry each other during service can be moved to the same site. Being away from each other is so difficult, not to mention distracting, that we knew we'd be happier and more effective as volunteers if we were together. But, as sure as we were, we figured we ought to give it a bit more time before we put the wheels in motion. Fortunately, we knew Kaede was going to have this month-long break in January, and we figured that would be the closest thing to a test run we would get. Needless to say, it went really well, so when I was in UB, I picked up a ring.
Kaede of course guessed I would do just that, and as soon as I got back, she was all over me, helping me "unpack." I hadn't expected her to be so aggressive about it, and somehow clutching my backpack and refusing to let her see anything inside it kind of gave me away. Just my luck that I couldn't remember which pocket I'd put the ring in, so that the little golden box holding it flew right out as I was fumbling around trying to find it. I snatched it and hid it behind my back, locked a very excited Kaede in the bathroom, and hid it away until the proper time. The next week it seemed every other minute she was asking me when "Box Day" would come. The following Saturday marked six months since we'd gotten together, so she pretty quickly divined that that would be the day. And it was. The surprise was kind of ruined, but what can ya do? At least this makes a better story.
So we're going to get married this summer! Hence the title of this post: if I took Kaede's last name, that'd make me John Johnson. Amusing as that is, I'm pretty sure I won't. We talked to Ellen, the country director, about it, and she's pretty much on board. It sounds like it's more likely that Kaede will move to Choibalsan rather than the other way around. Fortunately we're fairly ambivalent as to who goes where. Tsetserleg is super beautiful, but Choibalsan seems to have better community-volunteer relations, and my school also works with me a lot better than Kaede's does. We'll see. Apparently quite soon too. We were worried we wouldn't know who was going where until as late as the summer, but Ellen says we'll probably know by the end of the month!
I spent the last two weeks in Ulaanbaatar and Arkhangai, Kaede's site. We had a week-long break for Tsagaan Sar, the biggest holiday of the year. Kaede and I headed to UB with Baagii to get his ears taken care of. The picture above is him sleeping under my hat on the long bus ride in. As you may or may not be aware, the poor little guy had pretty bad frostbite and ear mites which culminated in the tips of his ears falling off. Originally Kaede was going to take Jagaa back to her site, but when Baagii's ears got bad, we realized he needed to see a vet, so she wound up with him instead. Anyway, the vet looked at his ears and told us they needed to be trimmed down to the living flesh, but that they couldn't operate until he'd been dewormed, or the anesthesia could be deadly. So after a few days of hanging out in UB with our friend Sarah, which included lots of good food and a trip to the national opera (which is where we are in the pic below), we headed to Arkhangai for what we'd hoped was just a few days so that Kaede could meet with her counterparts and start planning the new semester. Unfortunately, they were all too busy preparing for Tsagaan Sar to see her. We wanted to go back to Bayandelger to spend the holiday with our host families, but the buses were all shut down, so we got stranded in Arkhangai. Tsagaan Sar is the celebration of the lunar new year. Families visit one another and eat and drink and give small presents. We wound up only visiting one family, but after hearing about the experiences of others, I'm not too sad about it. At each house, you're expected to eat at least three buuz and drink three shots of vodka. Many of my friends visited dozens of houses over the three days. They were drunk, overstuffed, and exhausted. Anyway, we still have one more year to do it "right."
So instead of all that, we took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather (one day it was in the 40s!!!), went hiking, and played a lot of Monopoly with the aforementioned Tim, as well as Mark and Kara, Kaede's sitemates. It was quite nice actually. She lives in a really beautiful place, and it was nice to relax there for a while.
On Sunday we headed back to UB for Baagii's surgery. It went off the next day without a hitch. It turned out his ears were healing so well that they decided chopping them off was unnecessary. They did however take his balls and the tip of his tail, which had also gotten frostbitten as well as slightly broken. He was a bit off for the rest of the day, though it was mostly the anesthetic, which apparently was also a hallucinogen. He kept stumbling over himself and looking around at things that weren't there. It was a little bit cute, a little bit sad, and a lot of funny.
Now both Kaede and I are back at our respective sites, which is a real bummer. I miss her a lot, though I probably shouldn't complain. We were some lucky to get to spend a month and a half together during the school year. Hopefully I'll stay busy and get a lot of work done, and before long it'll be late March/early April, the next time we get to see each other. And then we'll only have another month or two apart before it's summer and we're together for good!
I hope you're all well, and that your Groundhog Day was unforgettable. I was not a little amused by the fact that the most important holiday of the year over here is at the same time as the most ridiculous one back in the states. Here's a pic of Kaede, Tim, Mark, Kara, and their Mongolian friend Ochka all decked out for the holiday.
