Sarah & Carolyn bring Puppy Season to Lenintown!

Clearly this is a three-part entry, so I'll write it as such. In spite of the catchy title, they actually have little to do with one another.

Sarah & Carolyn


You may remember these two from the summer. They lived in Bayandelger with Kaede and me, and they were two of our best buds. Well, they're also quite close with Bob and some of my other sitemates, so they decided to use the beginning of their spring breaks to come see the glory that is Choibalsan! It was really nice to have them visit for a few days. It felt like I was seeing old friends for the first time in a long while, and so I was repeatedly shocked to remember that I'd known these people less than ten months, that it had been barely three since I'd seen Carolyn and less than two since I'd seen Sarah. Weird. Fortunately, I was on my break for the greater part of their time here as well, so we spent most of our days laying around Bob's apartment, eating food, and going on long walks around the city and surrounding areas, as you can see in the picture above. Sarah's all the way on the left, and Carolyn is next to her. It was sad to say goodbye. Kaede and I might see Carolyn next week in UB, but the next time I see Sarah, I might well be a married man!

Puppy Season


As you may be aware, dogs go into heat twice a year, which means that, in countries where strays aren't packed off to the pound, there are two times a year when the city is suddenly full of adorable, starving, unwanted puppies. This is one of them. It didn't affect me as much the last time it happened, which was right around when we got here in the fall. That was probably due to how busy and overwhelmed I was as well as the fact that I still wasn't much of a dog person. But now that I've grown to love Jagaa and am a little more used to this place, it's nigh on unbearable. Every puppy I see is so adorable and sad and I just want to take them all in and bathe them and feed them and NURTURE THEM!!! Alas, that is totally unfeasible, so I have to settle for playing with them and encouraging Jagaa not to be terrified of them, a hefty endeavor indeed. Oh well, if I can just hold out a month or so, they'll all be dead or grown up, and I'll be able to go back to walking this town guiltlessly.


In other (former) puppy related news, Jagaa had quite a traumatizing week. If you've seen my new Facebook picture, you might already have the gist of it, but here's the story in full. When Sarah and Carolyn were here, the two of them, Bob, and I went for a sunset stroll down to the river, a place I often take Jagaa. We were walking on the river, which has been frozen solid for months, when Bob expressed concern over the apparent thinness of the ice ahead. I stubbornly insisted it was fine and trekked onward, only to hear it start to give under my feet and immediately retreat. The four of us ran up onto the bank and were collecting ourselves when we suddenly realized we'd lost the dog. "Where's Jagaa?" I asked. "Where is Jagaa?" Sarah emphasized. Just then, a herder who'd been sitting with his friend on the opposite bank leaped to his feet, bounded down onto the river, and ran out to the middle of the ice. He dropped to his knees, reached into a hole we had not noticed, and when he pulled his hand back, he had Jagaa by her leg. She was screaming and dripping with dirty ice water. The herder dropped her and of course she booked it. We shook off our absolutely flabbergasted shock, I ran after Jagaa so I could shove her in my coat and get her warm, and the other three profusely thanked the herder for his heroic deed and gave him their cigarettes as compensation. He returned to his perch and laughed his ass off about it with his friend. We headed back to my place to give Jagaa a bath and warm her up. She was pretty quiet the rest of the day, but I'm happy to announce that she seems to have made a full psychological recovery, and the cold has not affected her physically in any noticeable way. Here's a picture we snapped of her and me next to the hole she fell in just after the incident. I figured I'd juxtapose it with the picture of me next to the hole I fell in nearly ten months ago when I was drunk during orientation. Just a chip off the old block, right? Kaede's response when I told her this story was, "well this bodes well for our offspring." Actually it was uncontrollable laughter followed by that comment. Haha, she's probably right.


Lenintown


On the long road that heads west out of town to UB, I always notice a field right on the edge of the city limits but long past anything that really resembles a city. I notice it because there are three prominent standing structures surrounded on all sides by rubble. Two of them are statues, one of which is a large upright Lenin, the other a man on his knees lifting a gun into the air. The third structure is a large hollowed-out building that looks like it could have been a reconstruction of the Parthenon. I've always wanted to walk out to this area and explore it and take some semblance of interesting, thought-provoking pictures. Well yesterday, Bob, Susanne, and I did just that. Unfortunately we underestimated the distance a bit and got there just as the sun was setting, which made for prettier pictures but allowed less time to explore. I had heard that this area had been the Soviet center of Choibalsan before communism fell and the Russians got the hell out of Dodge twenty years back, but I was skeptical because, other than those three structures, there was pretty much nothing else remaining in that area at all. But as we approached Lenintown, as I've affectionately dubbed it, the ground became positively covered in the debris of fallen buildings. By the time we actually made it to the statues, it was clear that they were on either side of what had once been a large city square, and everywhere we looked were the crumbling foundations of what once must have been very impressive buildings. The population of Choibalsan before the Russians left was about sixty thousand. Now it's forty thousand. That's how many Russians got out of here, and this is where a great many of them surely lived. I was bummed that we didn't have enough time to rummage around more, but even in the few moments we spent out there, it was one of the most mind-blowing experiences I've had in this country. It felt like I was exploring the ruins of an ancient Roman city, and yet only twenty years ago this place was bustling with Russians at the end, both geographically and chronologically, of their empire. I can't wait to get out there again a bit earlier in the day and learn more.



Epilogue

Mongolia continues its slow march (no pun intended!) toward warmth. It's almost t-shirt weather! Which really means it's almost to the point where I'm so fed up that I refuse to wear a coat outside anymore. But really, it's supposed to be in the 50s this week! Even better news is that on Tuesday, after the aimag olympics, I fly to UB for the VAC meeting, where Kaede will meet me! I'm using a few of my vacation days, so after the meeting on Friday, Kaede and I will head out to Tsetserleg and spend a week together. We're gonna make BLTs!

That's all. Stay classy, Planet Earth.