The British are coming!

Saturday night I went out to dinner with my counterparts. One of them, Moogii, had just gotten a one million tugrik bonus (about $750, five times my monthly wage) for being with the school for five years, so she treated us all to quite the feast at a local Chinese restaurant. Aside: pretty much all the nice restaurants in this town are Chinese, and many of them are really freaking good, though quite different from what you'd find stateside. Saturday was a cold, bitter day, but nevertheless I was totally unprepared for what we saw when we left the place...

SNOW!

On September 25! Definitely the earliest I've ever witnessed it in my life. They were big, wet, heavy flakes, and they didn't even make it through the night, but we certainly hadn't seen the last of the stuff. On Monday morning, I woke up and looked out my window to this:


That day was bitterly cold. Literally one week prior it had been in the seventies. I figured we were in for the long haul at this point, that it was already time to start asking people if they were wintering beautifully, only for every subsequent day to be remarkably warm and comfortable. I guess the lesson here is: Mongolian weather is insane.

In other news, a couple days ago, several English people came into town. They're part of an exchange program that sent my counterpart Munguu and half a dozen or so other Choibalsanites to the UK this summer. These folks will be here for a couple weeks, learning all about life in Dornod, ostensibly. I get to meet them tomorrow at our library English club. It's always exciting to talk to other foreigners in this place. I'm certainly not the only one pumped for this experience. Zoloo has been talking about it a lot. A few days ago we were discussing it and somewhere in the conversation she said "the British are coming." I couldn't control my laughter, and everyone looked at me like I was crazy, so then I had to explain all about the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere and Longfellow's poem and how it sounded like Choibalsan was being invaded. A good excuse for an American history lesson, I suppose.

Tuesday night was the opening "ceremony" of Choibalsan's brand new fountain. They threw this bad boy up in a couple weeks, and it's quite the spectacle. Color-coordinated lights and all sorts of crazy cool jets. They were all lighting up and shooting out, vaguely in rhythm with Mongolian and Russian songs booming out of some terrible quality speakers, a standby of any large Mongolian gathering. Townsfolk were gathered all around, but no one looked all that impressed. Bob and I stood around for a little while, marveling as much at the technology of the fountain as at the countless other more useful ways the money might have been spent. If the fountain is like any other in this country, it'll probably be in disrepair by this time next year, which means this may be one of the only times we see it running, being as we are on the verge of freezing temperatures. Oh well... it was still mighty purty.

Just about this time last year, I was waiting patiently to hear where the Peace Corps would be sending me, finishing a long summer of working at Handy Boat, and gearing up for my ten-week roadtrip around the country. I simultaneously can't believe that was only a year ago nor that a year has already passed. I feel like I've lived at least that long since I came to Mongolia, when in reality it hasn't even been a third of that time. Absolute craziness. Here's a picture of me from the beginning of that unspeakably awesome trip, about to engage in a round of fisticuffs with a Québecois lighthouse keeper who rubbed me the wrong way. Clearly a lot has changed, mostly with regards to hair.

"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!

All in a day's work for... FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE!!!

First, a light-hearted, poop-related story. So if this sort of thing grosses you out, maybe you should skip ahead a paragraph. Yesterday was movie prep day at my apartment, so a few teachers came over to watch Big Fish, which went over really well. Now my toilet hasn't been working for a few days, but this is the first time I've had guests since it broke. It's nothing too serious; the handle has just come detached from the actual flushing mechanism, so you have to reach into the tank and pull up the plunger to release the water. I forgot to warn them about this, and several of them used the bathroom over the course of the evening. After they left, I went in to have a pee... AND THERE WAS A HUGE TURD SITTING THERE! A BIG OLE PILE OF IT! IT LOOKED LIKE A FREAKING COW HAD BEEN THERE! As I shut the lid and pulled up the plunger to force the thing to flush,I gagged and groaned in shock and disgust that they would be so embarrassed as to leave their poo there rather than ask me what to do about the situation. When the toilet had finished flushing, I lifted the lid to go ahead with my own business... AND IT WAS STILL THERE! You see I have one of those nasty European style dealies that is more like a platter with a puddle than an actual toilet. Amidst more moans and groans, I began to repeat the process, when suddenly something dawned on me. Something terrifying. Something debilitating. Something unfortunate. Most of all, something humiliating. I recalled that I'd taken quite a large dump just before they'd all arrived, and that the smell had lingered in a rather unusual manner, even by the standards of this unfortunate style of toilet. I recalled that, what with the need to reach into the tank to flush, it was necessary to put the lid down, and that I could not remember having pulled it back up to see if I'd been successful. It occurred to me that, while most of the time the water pressure is more than enough to take down even the mightiest of turds, on occasion this country has caused me to have some extremely massive bowel movements which require flush after flush after flush, and as I did just that, it was becoming apparent that this was just such a bowel movement. And so I went from being positively disturbed by the indiscretion of my counterparts, to being more embarrassed than I've ever been in my life. Four incredibly sweet and proper Mongolian ladies had to see my nasty old poop, and to add insult to injury, they couldn't even operate the toilet to flush it down. Worst of all, these are the people to whom I must turn when I have problems at my apartment, so now when, in a few days, after some of the embarrassment has subsided, I tell them I need to get my toilet fixed, they're gonna be like, "Yeah, we know." Sigh.

Besides that, life has been generally not so embarrassing. This weekend I basically just hung out with my sitemates (see picture above). I've been getting more and more settled into my new life here, and I'm enjoying teaching some classes. Two days ago I offered my first English course for the other teachers at the school, and that was fun. I played "Hello, Goodbye" again. That song is just too perfect. Yesterday, I signed up for Access, a program at the local library that offers English courses to the poorest students in the area for free. I did it mostly to keep me from being bored and missing Kaede, if only one night out of the week, but also largely because I'll be glad to have a class that is truly my own, that I get to plan and teach on my terms. Team-teaching is great, but I also want to develop my solo skills.

The biggest event of the week came on Monday, when I found out Aagii had been fired for not having a teaching certificate. I was shocked and saddened, especially when I heard that normally that's not a big deal; many teachers begin their careers without a certificate and then get one later. It only matters this year because some inspectors from UB are coming, basically to size the school up and make sure everything is in compliance with national requirements. I saw Aagii later that day, and (understandably) he looked incredibly upset. The unemployment rate is enormous in Dornod, and finding another job would not be easy. Plus, he really loves to teach, and now this excellent opportunity to begin living his dream had been torn out from under his feet.

And then, the next day, he was back at school! There's been a minor break-out of foot and mouth disease in Dornod, which has made travel a little more difficult. The police have set up checkpoints coming in and out of the aimag where they spray the soles of your shoes to keep you from trekking the disease in (don't worry... it's really only dangerous to animals). Doesn't sound like much of an inconvenience to me, but apparently it was enough for the inspectors to cancel their visit. The third year in a row they've done so. I guess that's how stuff works around here. Whatever, I'm just glad Aagii got his job back!

So life goes on. No big plans in the near future. As usual, love you all, miss you all. Hope your autumn is coming on nicely. Here's a pic of a sunset/moonrise I watched over the steppe this weekend.

The Posh Corps

Aagii, one of my counterparts, the one whom I helped get the job as a matter of fact, came over to my place tonight to watch Toy Story (I forgot how awesome that movie is). A couple of us teachers were preparing a list of vocab words to go with it when we show it in our new English Language Film Club this weekend. Last week we watched Grease, which was much more sexual than I'd remembered, although it was a hit nevertheless. But film isn't the point of this story. The point is, Aagii got here early, and he brought along a photo album. Honestly, after eating mutton and drinking vodka, showing people family photos is your average Mongolian's favorite pastime. A lot of Aagii's photos were of his college friends. As I mentioned in my last post, he graduated quite recently. I asked him where they were living now. "Most of them are in UB," he said. "So why did you decide to come back to Choibalsan?" I said. This is the story he told me:

"Well this friend," he said, pointing at one of the men in the photos, "one night we were very drunk, and he..." Aagii didn't know the word, so he made a fist and abruptly shoved it toward his knee, where I noticed a sizable scar for the first time. "With a knife," he said, smiling. "He stabbed you?!?" I was incredulous. I'd heard that Mongolian friends will rough-house when drinking, but I'd thought it was limited to (relatively) harmless wrestling. "What is word? 'Stab'?" "Yes." "Ah yes, he stab me." Shocked, I asked if they were still friends. "Yes of course," Aagii replied, as if I'd been crazy to ask. Anyway, he concluded by saying that, since he did not have health insurance that was good in UB, he was forced to return to Choibalsan to have his wound treated. Fortunately he doesn't seem too unhappy about it. I said to him, "Aagii, if we ever get drunk together, you aren't allowed to stab me in the leg." He laughed, and I added, "although I do have insurance." "Ah yes, I have insurance too!" "Does that mean I can stab you if we're drunk?" He chuckled and told me I could, but I doubt I'll take him up on it.

The last week here has been okay. The highlight was definitely this weekend, when I went with most of the teachers from my school to the countryside for a retreat. We talked and ate and drank and played cards. Saturday afternoon was beautiful and hot, so we went down to the river and swam around. Well I swam. As I may have mentioned before, very few Mongolians know how to swim, and most fear water that rises above their waist. On the other side of the river, however, there was a mountain. Not a big one, but the first one I'd seen since coming to Choibalsan. Obviously I wanted to swim across and hike it. I was not alone in this desire. Aagii was also interested, and he even suggested that we strip our clothes off on the far bank and climb the thing naked! I would've done it, but a few of my female counterparts got up the nerve to join us. We waded across the river, which is very shallow, and in spite of the terrible mosquitoes and rocky ground, hiked barefoot all the way to the top. It was majestic and primal and awesome. The picture above is from the summit.

School is going okay. I realize it's only been a week, but I've been getting a little frustrated by how little work I have and how expendable I feel. But in the last few days I've taught a few classes and my schedule is beginning to fill out, so I'm doing better in that regard. And it's hard to get too annoyed with so many wonderful people to work with, as well as such attentive and motivated students (especially compared to some of the brats I had during training this summer!). One interesting cultural difference I found in my workplace: today I went to the primary school for the first time to observe the fourth and fifth grade English classes. I was sitting in the fourth grade English classroom when I noticed something conspicuous sitting in the bookshelf. I went to have a closer look and was shocked to find... a Mongolian nudie magazine! Many pictures had been cut out, but I'm pretty sure they were all of people who were dressed, probably to teach clothing vocab. There were naked women everywhere, including one softcore picture of two couples copulating on the same mattress under an overpass. Could you imagine the parental backlash if something like that popped up in an American classroom, fourth grade or otherwise??? The magazine's greatest transgression, however, was a picture of some random woman who was labeled as Pierce Brosnan. How dare they!

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been struggling recently with the realization that I'm living a pretty damned easy life here in the Peace Corps. I've got lots of sitemates to keep me company, I've got a nice job with motivated students and teachers who speak excellent English, I've got running hot water and a refrigerator and access to peanut butter and brown sugar and Bailey's Irish Cream and all sorts of fruits. And now I have internet too! My life is so cushy, some people deem this type of service as "the Posh Corps," and I think that's pretty fair. Especially when I remember that some of the people I trained with are living hours from the nearest native-English speaker in gers in tiny towns with no running water and difficult jobs and the knowledge that in a few months they'll be chopping wood every day to keep from freezing to death and waking up every morning to frozen toothpaste! What enormously different experiences we'll have. I just finished washing my clothes in the bathtub, an activity I relish because it is the one remnant I have of how difficult some chores were this summer. But even that is a hell of a lot easier now that I have a big tub to do it in rather than a little bucket, with hot water at the twist of a wrist and a sink for rinsing. Oh well, as I said last time, I'm not taking it too much to heart. It's just kind of... funny.

You'll notice I've made a few changes to the blog. Mostly the picture above (it's finally one I took), some of the colors, and a new tab, geared toward people who are interested in visiting me out here. Which if you like awesome, totally unique places, should include you.

So there's one major detail that I've been omitting in this blog for the last couple months, at first because it wasn't quite so major and I was uncertain about which way things would go, and more recently because I just felt it was private I suppose. But now it's become such an enormous force in my life, probably the most enormous in fact, that this blog just seems like a big lie without including it. And that detail is... I have a girlfriend! If you remember from that long post a while back, I mentioned a girl named Kaede with whom I was playing a lot of cribbage and who was with me when we were nearly dismembered by that goddamned dog. Well, somewhere between card games and animal attacks, we got to really liking each other. It was kind of an unfortunate time for that to happen since we only had a month left at our training site. Kaede is also a teacher trainer, so we knew that there was zero chance we'd be placed together, and in a country this enormous and poorly connected, very little probability that we'd be anywhere reasonably close. As a result of those and other variables, we originally planned to play things by ear once we went to our new sites. But as that date drew closer, we fell more and more for each other, and the whole idea began to seem absolutely ridiculous. I really did not come to Mongolia to be in a long distance relationship, but in the end it just felt right.

It's been rough since we got to site. Kaede is ten hours west of Ulaanbaatar, which makes her about twenty-four hours away from me (which believe it or not, is not even half as far as she could be). Additionally, we're forbidden from leaving our sites except on work-related business for the first three months of service, making any chance of seeing her all but impossible. We talk every day, but the minutes for our phones are kind of pricey. We both got internet at our places so we could Skype, though it only works some of the time.

Anyway, point is, in spite of all that, she's totally worth it. Kaede is smart and funny and gorgeous and talented and interesting and adventurous and good at cribbage and I haven't felt this way about someone in a really long time, if ever. Maybe it's the altitude or all the fermented mare's milk, but I'm pretty sure it's her. Alright I've probably said way more than I need to about this, but the point is, I really like her, and I miss her like crazy, and for some ridiculous reason, she seems to feel the same way about me. It's nice. Really nice. If you've got any long distance pointers, holler at me, cause I'm pretty inexperienced with this sort of thing.

And because I know everyone's gonna beg me, here's a picture of Kaede, the only way I've seen her for the last few weeks... over a webcam. Oh, and by the way, her name is pronounced KAH-eh-deh.

Ойлгохгүй, мэдэхгүй, хамаагүй

So I've been here a week, which is remarkable considering how relatively little I've done. After the frenzy of the end of PST and then Final Center Days, it has been nice to relax a little before the start of the new school year. After I arrived, I spent the first few days setting up my apartment and exploring the city. It's totally unlike any place I've ever been. Choibalsan basically consists of apartment building after identical apartment building, occasionally broken up by something vaguely resembling a town square (the picture above is one of the biggest exceptions... an artificial lake right near my apartment building). Every few blocks or so there's a restaurant and a supermarket and an internet cafe, etc etc etc, so that it actually has the feel of some sort of a dusty, less crowded Manhattan on the steppe. It's growing on me quite nicely, although every time I read about the mountainous parts of this country, it makes me sad.

My apartment is small but quite nice. I think I hallucinated the fleas, which is a very good sign, for my physical if not for my mental health. I've got a pretty nice set-up at this point. The school has provided me with everything from a refrigerator to a rice cooker. Sometimes I lounge on my comfy couch while listening to the music coming out of my Bose speakers (brought from home) and gazing out the window at the beautiful sunset and wonder if I'm totally missing the Peace Corps experience. Then I forget about it over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a hot shower, though usually not at the same time. Usually.

I did do a few interesting things before school started. First off, on Friday, I met the VSO volunteers in Choibalsan. It should come as no surprise that Peace Corps is far from the only organization to send volunteers to Mongolia. VSO, which stands for Voluntary Service Overseas, is a British-run organization that recruits from all over the world to send volunteers to many of the same countries PCVs go to. The main differences from Peace Corps are that VSO volunteers tend to be more experienced in their field, they don't do a homestay or learn much of the language (in fact they usually have a full-time interpreter to take care of those sorts of difficulties), and the length of their stay is variable, rather than having the required two years like us. Anyway, Choibalsan currently has two of them, Velan, an older gentleman from India, and Easterlina, a woman in her twenties from Kenya. They both seem really cool, and it's nice to have the extra English-speaking company around, although our site is probably the least in need of it.

A couple days later, Velan and I went with my counterpart Zoloo out to the countryside. Velan, who knows Zoloo because he also works at my school, had told her that he wanted to ride a horse. The people we were originally going to see were unavailable for some reason, so we started heading toward a place where our driver knew some people. On the way, we saw a man riding a horse and herding sheep. Zoloo told us that sheep horse are very calm and so this one would be good to ride. We pulled over and asked this man that none of us knew from a hole in the wall if we could ride his horse. He was extremely obliging, and even gave Velan and me some pointers. Afterwards, we went to the driver's friends' place, and they fed us and gave us tea and treated us like family. Mongolia is a wonderfully hospitable country. It was also amazing to see people living so close to the land, so close to the way Mongolians have been living for thousands of years. They were totally off the grid. They had a little electricity from a solar panel, just enough to run a weak lightbulb and a small black and white television. And still they seemed exuberantly happy with life.

School started yesterday. The first day of classes in this country could not be more different from the way it happens stateside. To start off with, there was a big ceremony with speeches and songs, including one of each by me. I mustered up enough Mongolian to say something meager about why I was there, and then I treated them all to a stuffy-nosed rendition of "Wonderful World" by Sam Cooke. Y'know, the one that goes, "Don't know much about history, don't know much biology." Vaguely relevant, just how I like it. After the ceremony, students got a class about Chinggis Khaan and the history of Mongolia, followed by a live broadcast from the president of Mongolia. Then, there were a few "normal" classes, but no real work was done. People all got to go home early. It literally is treated as a holiday around here, to the point where people go around saying "Happy Holiday!" all day long. It's kinda nice. I probably would've liked it more if I hadn't had to perform.

Today, I went into school expecting to teach some more classes, but apparently Thursday is the day the school gives the English department (the picture below includes all of us plus a few stragglers... oh, and Velan's in there too) off to regroup and plan things for the rest of the week. I'm sure it'll be nice to have in the future, but today we just worked out every painstaking detail we possibly could of the rest of the year. We were all understandably tired by the end of the day, but there was a meeting all the teachers had to go to. Our director was pretty angry because several teachers had gotten quite drunk during the celebrations yesterday, and while that's fairly common around here, it would seem our school takes a hard line on it. The director said that she wanted to fire those people right then and there, but she put it to the floor to see what the teachers thought of it. No one really voiced an opinion, big surprise, so she decided to call on one of us individually. Guess who it was! ME!!! I was pretty taken aback, so I just responded that I didn't understand, a stock retort in an awkward situation around here. But clearly I did, and she called me out on that, so I said that I didn't know. She demanded I not give such an answer, so I said I didn't care, which made all the teachers as well as her burst into hysterics (the three of them sound somewhat parallel in Mongolian: oilgokhgui, medekhgui, khamaagui... they also form the title of this post). I felt too uncomfortable to find it that funny, but I was relieved that I'd derailed the situation. In the end she decided just to dock their pay for three months, which was kind of nice, I suppose.

Oh, one more thing. While I haven't felt like I've made much of a difference in my classes yet, I did manage to be at the right place at the right time and give my altruistic motivation a good jump start. One day last week while exploring town, a Mongolian man about my age came up to me and asked me if he could speak English with me. I said of course, and we launched into conversation. He told me he'd recently graduated from university and was having a lot of trouble finding a job, but that he really wanted to teach English. I told him that that was a shame because his English was excellent (it truly is, some of the best I've heard in this country), but that my school was hiring and he ought to come apply. He did, and he blew the competition out of the water. And the school hired him! So really all I was in this story was a liaison, but it felt really great to help a nice guy get a job. Y'know, all warm and fuzzy. Hopefully it won't be the last time I get that feeling around here.

"You are like a child."

Welp, here I am, sitting in an internet cafe in my new city. Choibalsan seems pleasant enough so far. My apartment is on the fourth story, and I have a pretty good view south. This is literally the flattest, emptiest place I've ever been in my life. It's kinda beautiful in a way. The ride yesterday (see the post office bus which brought us above) was exceptionally long, and my ass was aching by the time we finally got in at 11 PM, fourteen hours after we left Ulaanbaatar. I sat facing backwards, which afforded me the opportunity to watch the mountains get smaller and slowly recede in the distance. It was almost as sad as it was gorgeous. Nevertheless, I think there is a certain charm in this landscape, and at least I'm only a kilometer or so from the Kherlen Gol, a very pleasant river, and the same one I visited back during training. It's Mongolia's second longest.

In spite of the length, I didn't mind the ride so much. Probably as a result of my iPod, the views, the amount of stuff I had to think about, and Munguu, my fellow teacher who accompanied me. We had all sorts of good conversations, about everything from god to alcoholism to special education to American music. Apparently I'm far more inquisitive than your average Mongolian, as at one point she said to me, "You are like a child. You ask so many questions!"

Also, my Mongolian mom has been texting me like crazy since we got our new phones, and she wanted to know when I'd be rolling through our old training site. I told her, expecting she just wanted to be aware. But when we were driving through, she called me. Unable to understand what she was saying, I handed the phone off to Munguu, who had the driver stop the bus. Realizing what was happening, I apologized to the thirty plus other passengers and told them that my mother was "too good." I don't know if they knew what I meant. A few minutes later, my sister, some other relatives, and my mom come rolling up. She runs out, a thermos of hot milk tea in one hand, a bag of fresh-made cookies in the other, all the while apologizing that she didn't have time to make me a real meal. It was amazingly sweet, and it was great to see her. About a minute later we were back on the road.

In other incredible kindness related news, once Munguu and I got to my new apartment, five of the other English teachers with whom I'll be working were waiting there (below you can see Zola, one of them, presenting me with airag to welcome me), having cleaned it and set it all up for me, as well as made me buuz (steamed dumplings) for dinner. It was very sweet, and they all seem quite friendly. After that I pretty much went to bed, which was nice except I think I might have fleas. This morning I got up and started unpacking and setting up. My apartment is small, but I like it. I have a stove and an oven and a shower, and allegedly I'm getting a TV, a fridge, and a washing machine sometime today.

Well anyway, just wanted to update and let everyone who cares know I'm safe. I go into work tomorrow to get acquainted, and classes start on Wednesday. I can't believe this is all really happening.


Oh, and here's a video of Andrew and I (with some help from Sarah) playing our milk tea song at swearing in. Enjoy!

Ice Cream Dump Trucks

Well, tomorrow morning bright and early I leave for my new home. I've spent the last week in Ulaanbaatar, swearing in as an official volunteer (see above picture), saying goodbye to friends, and getting to know the city. I'm surprised by how much it's grown on me. It's definitely dirty and run-down, and pickpocketing is rampant to say the least (a friend of mine nearly got his money stolen right in front of me!), but it has a certain charm that's hard to define. It's also been very nice to eat cheeseburgers and pizza and Mexican food and all sorts of other things I haven't had in a while. A couple days ago, I ate probably the closest thing Mongolia has to a Buffalo wing... these breadstick type things stuffed with Buffalo chicken served with a side of bleu cheese dressing. It wasn't the same, but I'll be damned if it didn't taste good. One of the really unique things about this city is that, every now and then, you'll hear what sounds exactly like an ice cream truck melody. Your inner monologue will immediately stop whatever it was rambling on about and scream "ICE CREAM!" You'll follow the noise like a moth to a flame, only to find... A GARBAGE TRUCK. That's right, to alert people to put out their trash, the garbage trucks play very pleasant little diddies of the exact same style as American ice cream trucks. It's cruelly hilarious, or hilariously cruel. Fortunately, I'm not much of an ice cream person, so it doesn't irk me as much as some.

It's been very, very sad to say goodbye to all the friends I made this summer (see pic below for the last gathering of my fellow trainees, plus one of our language teachers), but I can't wait to get settled in my new apartment. I'll write something when I get there. With my new home, I also have a new address and a new phone number, but Peace Corps prefers us not to post those on our blogs. Most of you who read this have probably received an email with those items included. If you haven't and you want them, send me a request, and if you're cool enough, I'll forward it along.


Oh, and here's Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers," cause it's just appropriate.

That is soooooo cool.

This is legit a video of one of the Mongolians that trained me to teach English here this summer. As many of us found out recently, he used to be Mongolia's first Elvis impersonator! Anyway, you should check this out. It's kinda long, but it's fucking great, and it'll give you some insight into Nargie, one of the badassest trainers in the history of the Peace Corps. I'm gonna miss the crap out of that guy.

Oh, and the story behind the title of this post: I was so glad to see in the interview portion of the video that Nargie uses his trademark term, "sooooo cool." He literally says this all the time, and it's fucking awesome.

"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.

They know where I'm going!

Unfortunately, however, they won't tell me. Not yet anyway. Yesterday we had a session and I asked Lisa, a head honcho in Peace Corps Mongolia, whether or not they'd figured out our site placements yet. She said that they'd just finished hammering them out that very day. A friend said, "so you're looking at us right now, knowing where each of us is headed?" She was.

It's crazy that we actually have a new home now, even if they won't tell us just yet. However, the wait is quite short now. This Sunday afternoon, August 15, a mere three days away, we'll find out. I'm so pumped, even though that means that less than three days from now, we'll have left our town and our families. That reality has yet to set in.

The last week has been spent finishing up projects, preparing for our language test, and doing various things around here for the last time. On Saturday, the day after I returned from Nalaikh, my mom took me to Ulaanbaatar for the first time. THAT was crazy. Let me tell you, after living in a tiny town of barely a thousand for two months, a place with no running water and no paved roads, a place which barely has internet, it's quite a culture shock to head to a city of over a million people, a city with high rise buildings and designer clothing stores and real American Heinz ketchup. Oh, and escalators too! I think it was my mom's first time on an escalator, as she kept almost tripping and smashing her face every time we got on and off one, and then she'd laugh hysterically. It was great. Probably no place in my life has ever been built up to the degree that Ulaanbaatar has. It seems like a pretty interesting place, and I look forward to spending more time there in the future. The reason we went was to get me a Mongol deel. A deel is the traditional dress of Mongolia, and as you can see, it's pretty freaking cool. It's basically an excuse to wear a big, comfy, badass bathrobe out in public.

A deel is something pretty much every Peace Corps volunteer winds up getting in this country, but I needed one ASAP for our community appreciation event. To show the town our thanks, we organized a concert and a dance on Sunday night. The girls out here performed two traditional Mongolian dances which were really beautiful (on a side note, the traditional dance of Mongolia is probably my favorite form of dancing I've ever witnessed... it has all the nuance and precision of southeast Asian dancing coupled with the energy and fervor of central Asian and Russian styles; you could probably find some on YouTube). Additionally, my friend Andrew and I performed a song called "Eejiin Chanasan Tsai," which translates to "Mother's Boiled Tea." It's a very slow-moving, epic song with a soaring melody all about how there's nothing as beautiful as a mother's milk tea. It's currently one of the most popular songs in Mongolia, which just goes to show you how different this culture is from ours. Could you imagine if Kanye released a song about his mother's milky tea? Yeah, that's what I thought. Anyway, we had our friend Sarah play "the mom" and feed us tea as we performed. It was a huge hit. We're going to perform it again at the swearing in ceremony. Also, all of us Americans sang a song called "Ayani Shuwuu," which means "Traveling Bird." This is a love song which is one of Mongolia's perennial classics. It's quite beautiful, and people really love it when we sing it. Finally, they requested that we perform an English song as well, so I played "Two of Us" by the Beatles. I even translated one verse (incredibly poorly I'm sure) into Mongolian.

Afterwards, the dance came. We had to have it in the atrium outside the auditorium because of recent repainting, but it went okay just the same. It was really nice to give a little back to this community that has taken us in and treated us so well. A dance and a concert aren't enough, but they're something.

So anyway, the next few days will see us taking our language and training tests (that's tomorrow actually), having one last big party with our families (for which Brian and Adi get to return!), and then heading out Sunday morning. We'll spend a couple days in Zuunmod, meet our new supervisors, and then head to Ulaanbaatar for several days to get officially acquainted with the nation's only real metropolis. A week from tomorrow, we swear in. I know I've said this a million times, but I just can't believe it's over. Tempus fugit.

In other news, the internet has sort of returned to our town, but not enough to allow me to post any pics today, so you'll all just have to wait.