Mmmmmmmboy

Here's a few little videos pertaining to Mongolia which may interest you. The first two are from Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, a show from the Travel Channel. The second video paints a very, shall we say, earnest portrayal of the kind of stuff Mongolians eat, whereas the first one is a little more appetizing.

Mongolian Dumplings

Top 5 moments in Mongolia (not for the weak-stomached)

And this last one is a little sadder. It's about the ongoing famine in Mongolia which is getting more devastating by the day. I hope it rains soon! Props to Sari Gardner for finding it (and once again to Jason Patrick Douglas for the first two vids).

A Bitter Spring for Mongolia's Nomads (this one's a wee bit unappe- tizing as well...)

OMG it's really happening!

So us soon-to-be trainees all received quite the email from headquarters a few days ago. In it we were given our first glimpse at the details of the next few months of our lives, and let me tell you, it's a bit intimidating. After getting over the initial shock a few months ago, I've felt very little anxiety about this whole Peace Corps dilio. But now that departure is less than three weeks away and I'm starting to get a better idea of the reality of my impending life in Mongolia, I'm pretty much crapping my pants.

So here's a few things I've found out.

• We'll arrive in Ulaanbaatar late at night on Saturday, June 5, (though it'll be early morning back in America!), and then we'll hop on a bus to Zuunmod, a small city of about fifteen thousand people. Zuunmod is about fifteen miles south of UB as the crow flies but nearly thirty miles by car. The road is so much longer because it has to wind around Bogd Khan Uul, the three thousand foot mountain that sits between the two cities (click the map above for a larger image; UB, Bogd Khan Uul, and Zuunmod are just to the lower left of center).
• In Zuunmod, we'll be given the first fourteen days of our walk-around allowance as well as a -40° sleeping bag. We'll be there for at least the next five days for orientation, living in dorms.
• After that, we'll be sent off to our host families, where we'll be for all of Pre-Service Training, which will take up the next ten weeks. I'll be in a community with between eight and twelve other trainees, but we'll each be living with a different family. I still don't know where I'll be for this portion of service, but I doubt it will be Zuunmod or Ulaanbaatar.
• Training for Mongolian PC service follows the Community Based Model. Rather than sitting in classrooms and studying in the more traditional way, we'll be doing much of our learning experientially, through engaging with the community in which we live. Apparently this is a relatively new thing for the Peace Corps, and many nations still use the older style. However, it sounds like a more efficient method to me, so I'm excited about that.
• Apparently while being trained, we'll also be responsible for conducting a community service activity in our area. Just to keep the stress level maxed out.
• Assuming I survive training and am chosen to become a Volunteer, I will be sworn in back in Zuunmod on Friday, August 20.
• While in Zuunmod, it will be fairly easy to stay connected via the telephones at the post office and the city's two internet cafes. However, the email says that communication will be much more difficult once we're living with our host families. We are told to "be prepared for this limited communication and prepare your family [back home] for the fact that you probably will be able to call or email them only rarely after you head out to your host community."

So yeah, pretty intense. But already a lot of the anxiety has dissipated and I'm getting excited again.

My time in Maine has been nice so far, although I wish I were getting more hours at work. I've been spending too much money, but at least I've been doing a lot of the things I'm gonna miss a lot: going to my favorite restaurants, eating lots of seafood, seeing my buds, going bowling. Jonny Hyman, one of Peter's best friends from college and a very good friend of mine as well, was in town all last week, and then this weekend Eric Gibbs, one of my best buds from Oberlin, came to town. He and I went hiking in northern Maine (see pic below) with Erin Child, another Obie, and generally had a great time. Saying all these goodbyes is getting rough, but I guess that's just the way it goes.

I've also been studying a little Mongolian. I'm focusing on the alphabet, but I've got some words down too. Here's how you say goodbye: bayartai!

Crying in the Aisle

Wowie wow wow. A month from now I'll have been in Mongolia for three days already. Yesterday I called the Peace Corps travel agency and booked my flight to staging in San Francisco. I have to leave at the fucking crack of dawn from Portland on June 3, but my travel agent was so charming that I barely noticed. He had a very endearing Indian accent and he told me that I should not worry but the Peace Corps would not be mailing me a paper ticket because they have no money, and neither would the airlines because they have no money either. And then he said he liked my state because it's abbreviation sounds like "me." Finally, he asked, "would you prefer a window seat so you can wave goodbye to mom and dad since you won't see them for three years, or would you rather sit in the aisle and cry?"

Staging sounds like it's gonna be a lot of fun. I'll get into San Fran at 11:20 or so, and then we have some preliminary training until 7 at night. After that I'm pretty sure we're given some money to go out and get trashed on our last night in the country. But the shuttle takes us to the airport at 6 AM the next morning to leave for Mongolia (layover in South Korea!), so I doubt there'll be much sleeping.

In other news, I'm back in Maine. On my birthday I drove to Boston to go see a Red Sox game and celebrate with my friends. It was a lot of fun. Then I came the rest of the way so I could start work at Handy Boat yesterday. I was supposed to work today and tomorrow too, but there are only a dozen boats in the water, so they told me I didn't need to come in. Which totally sucks because, after I finish buying all the crap I need for the PC, I'm gonna have no money in the bank for the next two years. Oh well. At least I have some sweet dancing to look forward to (props to fellow M21 Jason Patrick Douglas for finding the video).

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.

Where are you going? Where have you been?

So how bout a little summary of what my recent life has been like as well as a rundown of what's in store for me between now and my departure for Mongolia? Mmm, that sounds good. I'll have that.

Where to start? Well the picture above is of my family (plus Peter) and me just after my graduation from Oberlin. Following that bizarre ritual, I spent the summer living it up in a sweet apartment right on the Eastern Promenade in Portland, Maine. I was working at my favorite job, driving the launch boat for Handy Boat Services in Falmouth, only a few miles down the road. Besides working, drinking too much, and eating Buffalo wings (which, if you know me at all, you'll know that wings are perhaps my greatest passion), I did little of substance all summer long. I was living with my good pal, the aforementioned Peter Lord (once again, if you know me at all, you know Peter), and it was with him that I did the one real thing of note: we formed an all-male Indigo Girls cover band. We called ourselves the Indigo Guys. Somehow we went on to win the annual Yarmouth Clam Festival Battle of the Cover Bands, as well as five hundred bucks. Not too shabby for a couple guys making total asses of themselves. If you didn't make it to the performance, you can watch the videos on YouTube. Just search for "Indigo Guys." Actually I'll just embed the best one here. I mean, we're gonna go viral soon anyway.


At the end of the summer, Peter went back to Boston for his last year of college at Northeastern, and I moved in with my wonderful Aunt Claire and my equally wonderful Uncle Ron for a month to finish out the season at Handy Boat. It was a somewhat boring beginning to the fall, though I did get some good hiking in. Anyway, I could deal with a little ennui, since as soon as my job finished in early October, my sister Becky and I went on an epic road trip all around the country which lasted until Christmas. Although I've traveled quite a bit for a guy my age, I'd been very few places in America prior to that, so it was nice to make it out to the West Coast at last, and to see lots of national parks, as well as meet up with a ton of my more far-flung friends before leaving for the Peace Corps. Here is a map of the route we took.


Although the road trip basically ended when Becky and I made it to my mom's place in Pennsylvania for the holidays, I continued to live out of my car for the next month, traveling back up to Maine and meandering down via Boston and NYC, y'know, until the money ran out. Once that happened, I did what so many hip young college grads are doing nowadays and moved in with mom. Fortunately she got me a job right away working with her at Safe Harbour, a homeless shelter only a couple blocks away. So I've been in Carlisle, PA, for more than two months now, and while I wish I knew more people around here, it hasn't been so bad. I've appreciated the opportunity to chill out a little, especially after the frenzy of that road trip. And now that the Peace Corps has become a tangible, imminent reality, I'm enjoying it all the more. And while my job is really boring (I'm a file clerk... *shudder*), having some money has been nice. I've managed to make it to NYC a couple times, as well as down to DC and Baltimore, and even back to Ohio to see my old school. Wicked fun.

So what's next? Well I'll be in Carlisle until early May. I hope to squeeze a couple more trips in before I head out, one to Charlottesville, VA, to see some pals and check out Shenandoah National Park, one to Kentucky to check out Mammoth Cave and see that state for once (never really been before), and one more down to DC and Baltimore to see some buds before I head back up to Maine, which is where I'll be until I leave for the PC. I'm gonna help them start up the season at Handy Boat, but the biggest reason I'm returning is to soak in my home state as much as possible before I leave it for more than two years. I really love Maine, and being away even for a few months is obnoxiously tough for me, so twenty-seven should be... interesting.

Besides working and doing my favorite Mainey things, the only other event I've planned for May is the charity 9K which is described in the sidebar. I've been fortunate to get a lot of time to work out while living in PA, and I figured I could use that for good, so I've decided to attempt this 5.4 mile run. The farthest I've ever run before is about 3.5 miles, so I've got some training to do, but I think I ought to be able to pull it off. I'm trying to raise $2500 for the cause, so any donations would be greatly appreciated. For more information on the event and how to donate, check out the blurb on the right.

Anyway, that's my pre-Peace Corps life. More later!

San ban oh!

Apparently that's Mongolian for "hello" or "welcome" or "how are you?" or something like that. I'm sure I'll be able to tell you more definitively after a few months. If you're reading this blog, you probably already know who I am and why I'm writing it, but just in case you don't, my name is John, I'm from Maine, I'm a recent graduate of Oberlin College (B.A. in Comp Lit and CRWR), and I've just accepted an invitation from the Peace Corps to serve in Mongolia for twenty-seven long, cold months, from June 2010 until August 2012.

So why Peace Corps? I don't entirely know the answer to that. Of course, I hope to be able to use what skills I have to help others, and I'm eager to learn about other people, to see the ways in which we're similar as well as those in which we're different. I'd be lying if I said that much of my motivation isn't somewhat selfish: I love to travel, I love to experience that which is totally different from what I know, I crave culture shock. I seek what these things show me about myself, to see which aspects of my character are strengthened and which are abandoned after wrestling with who I am and what my place is in the world.

I've known I wanted to do the Peace Corps almost as long as I've known what the program is. Paul Theroux deserves a great part of the credit for that. Theroux is, in my (somewhat unpopular) opinion, one of America's absolute greatest living writers. He hails from Medford, Massachusetts, and was a volunteer with one of one the first ever Peace Corps delegations, serving in Malawi back in the 60s. Amusingly enough he did not complete his Peace Corps service in the normal manner. He was discharged, or "separated," as the PC euphemistically calls it, for supposed involvement in an attempted coup. As I recall, a professor friend of his fled Malawi (then called Nyasaland) when he could no longer take that government's increasing violations of liberty. Theroux agreed to drive his friend's car to Uganda, the professor's new home. This greatly irritated the government of Nyasaland, which viewed the professor as an enemy of the state, and they subsequently declared Theroux persona non grata. Hopefully my experience will go a little more smoothly than did that of my idol.

It's been a long wait. I applied at the end of January 2009. Normally it doesn't take this long, but there was some substantial bureaucratic SNAFU which slowed everything down. No need to get into that. I'd wanted to go to sub-Saharan Africa (just like Paul), but that's a pretty coveted region, and PC doesn't send as many people there as they used to. In terms of places outside of Africa that interest me, Mongolia is, believe it or not, at the top of the list. I have a tendency to develop fascinations with somewhat random regions of the world (they often share the attribute of frigid isolation). Newfoundland, Iceland, Svalbard, Mongolia. Additionally, a large part of my attraction to Mongolia can be attributed to the way in which, eight hundred years ago, this culture managed to conquer an area so enormous that it remains the largest contiguous empire in all of history, yet then somehow proceeded to all but vanish from the world stage. Craziness.

Things I'm less excited about include but are not limited to:

• the weather: temperatures regularly drop below freezing seven months out of the year
• the remoteness: I could be placed as much as a thirty-hour bus ride away from Ulan Bator (the capital and largest city... by a long shot), and even if I'm not so far away from that one real urban area, Mongolia is still one of the most isolated nations in the world
• the housing: I'm likely to live in a ger (more commonly known as a yurt), which is basically a souped-up tent, usually having mediocre heat and no running water... forget about internet!
• the language: I've heard it's incredibly difficult to learn, to say nothing of pronouncing it... needless to say, English speakers tend to be few and far between outside of the capital (and even inside of it), so I'm gonna be struggling for a while
• the ocean: I love it, aaaaand even the part of Mongolia that's closest is still four hundred miles away, and that's only to the Yellow Sea!!! WHATAMIGONNADOOOOO

Of course, I'm excited about dealing with each and every one of these challenges, and if I hadn't considered them before I applied, well, I suppose I wouldn't be a very good Peace Corps volunteer, now would I?

As you can see, already I'm not doing so well with the whole brevity thing. I'll try to keep these posts concise and readable (something which, if you recall the days of Pete and John in Cairo, can be a bit difficult for me), but even if internet isn't tough to come by, I'm sure I'll have lots to write about. Please don't be afraid to comment on them! Or to contact me in some other way. I tend to get very homesick, so any form of correspondence with all you lovely people is going to be much appreciated. I'll post info on how to send me snail mail closer to my departure.

So yeah, I hope you all enjoy the blog! Through it you'll be able to monitor my gradual transformation into this guy:

P.S. If you want more info about Theroux and his experience in the Corps, check out "The Killing of Hastings Banda." It's an article he wrote about the whole ordeal in 1971, eight years after his service. Not only is it interesting for its discussion of the deportation debacle, but it's also an excellent portrayal of the struggles a volunteer encounters while serving, albeit in a very different region from where I'm headed.