Fall/Winter 2009/2010

So it has been a while since I have posted anything. Most of what has been going on is similar to what happened last year at this time so I will bore you with those details, you can look at posts from last fall and winter.

So how am I? Well I am good, I have been keeping busy and enjoying my time here. While many things are similar to last year there are many things that seem different or maybe it is just that because I have been here for over a year already, I am just more used to everything. I think I shall just write by topic: work, site mates, personal hobbies/etc, travels.

Work

When the school year started I had thought up several project ideas that I could possibly do at my school, out of those I managed to organize one of them. That one short project was a short business planning seminar conducted by a local Mongolian business development center for a group of my teachers. The idea was that if the teachers knew how to write a good plan, then they would be able to help their students with their senior project, which is to write a basic business plan. Now that the fall semester has finished and my school seniors have graduated I asked the business teacher how they were, it sounds like they are better than last years plans, which is good. So I call that a success. Other than that at my school I have been teaching some students English and helping in whatever ways that I can.

During our summer training in 2008 we had a translator who now works for ADRA as a program manager. With her help I met the local ADRA staff and together we conducted a survey of the ADRA clients. ADRAs work is primarily focused on micro business development. The survey topic was related to the general business environment in Zavkhan and specifically on supply management issues. While doing the survey I got the chance to travel to 6 different soums here in Zavkhan to help conduct the survey. The trip lasted about a week and I got to see a lot of the province. After we finished traveling around to the soums collecting the surveys I entered them into a program and gave ADRA the raw data and some ideas and advice that I drew from the data.

With my site mates I helped create a homemade recover disk for the computers that were given to many of the schools in Mongolia by an NGO. Here in Mongolia, like in most places I would assume, computer viruses are a major pain. Our idea was that we could create a disk with all of the software one would need to completely reformat a computer and have it auto load everything. With the magic of the program Norton Ghost, this was made possible. So far the feedback from those people that we have given it to is very positive, the school were each given a lab of 20 or so computers and each computer only takes about 30 minutes to reformat.

Other than those three main projects that I worked on I have been teaching English so several motivated students and for a while I was teaching some cooking classes to my students and to a group of people in the community.

Site mates

So each summer new volunteers are trained and then sworn in and sent out to live and work in the countryside. Here in Zavkhan, we were graced with 3 new volunteers, one in a soum (Tim) and two here in town (Aaron and Nate). They are good fellows, all English teachers. The only down side is that the schools they were placed at are on the opposite sides of town from each other, so it is a bit of a walk to get to the center of town and where I live. We see each other usually once a week or so, mainly on the weekends. We also have a new Finish family that moved in and a Finish teacher that teaches the families two children. They are very nice people, though we see them infrequently.

Hobbies and whatnot

To my surprise this years school New Years Party was much nicer than it was last year. This past fall a new hotel and restaurant was opened on the other side of town, and it is very nice. While the party itself was the same old, same old. The atmosphere seemed different, it may have been because I avoided the vodka that people were always trying to get me to drink, or something else. I dont know, though it was much more entertaining than last years.

Well as Peace Corps is only two years, and my two years are starting to come to an end, I have started to think about the future. Whatever shall I do? Well I do know that I need to go to grad school, so I have been starting to research schools and programs and figuring out what I need to do to be prepared for that. I have started to study for the GRE and I am reviewing Calculus and plan to teach myself more math for grad school. This is what has been taking up a lot of time recently, it is a long project though hopefully it will set me up to get into a good program. My plan is to try and get into a good Applied Economics Masters program, though only time will tell what will happen.

Otherwise I have been continuing doing yoga, some light meditation, cooking, reading and talking to my wonderful girlfriend every evening. Somethings dont change to much over time.

Travels

This year I got lucky and we had to get flu shots, which meant a free flight to UB and a chance to be with my girlfriend for a week and a half. I will say it was very nice. In UB we had a Thanksgiving party which was amazing, the food was SO GOOD. Chicken, turkey, stuffing, real salad, pies...the list goes on. It was so good. The food, the company, all of it was so refreshing. Mongolia has a new US ambassador who came and met us (and he brought the turkey, I think). It was a very nice break from the normal Mongolian lifestyle we have. After that Alona and I went back to her site and hung out there until I had to come back to my site. It was a wonderful time, though soon another wonderful time will begin.

On Jan 30th, 2010 Alona and I are taking a vacation to Thailand for a month. So after we get back I will post our story from that, all I know is that there will be fruit, fruit and more fresh delicious fruit for me to devour. I cannot wait.

Oh how summer vacation is the delight of students and teachers. I left my site on June 3rd to travel around Mongolia with Alona. When I left many of my teachers looked surprised at the length of my trip out of Uliastai, about two months, though now that it is over, it was not that long, though I did miss my site a little bit. The trip to UB was the same as the last time I went in, though it took 30 hours to get there verses 26, a slight but very noticeable difference. Alona met me in UB and we were there for a day. She came down so that we could pick up books from Books for Asia for her school. We did that the following day and then went back to Erdenet for a short spell.

We hung out and did not do much really. We went on a short hike up to the top of a mountain just outside of town from which we could see the entire city, I decided to walk without a shirt and got sun burned also… I did not realize how big the Erdenet ger district, it is HUGE. During this week I also finished studying for the wonderful Foreign Service Officers Test. We went back down to UB on that Thursday night so that I could meet the Ambassador for a talk on the Foreign Service and then take the test on that Saturday. The Ambassador and one entry level Foreign Service officer talked about what the Foreign Service is, about the test in a very general way, and the life of a Foreign Service officer. It looks very interesting to me. The next day I took the test, and four weeks later I got my results. The results were not what I hoped for; though when I received the detailed test breakdown I found out I almost passed. I scored 149, while the minimum to pass was 154 out of a number I am not sure of. Only the top 10% of test takers pass the written test. Next year I can take it again and hopefully should pass.

After I took the test we just hung out in UB. We stayed at our Mongolian friend Tuul’s apartment. There were numerous other PCV’s that stayed there, so it was kind of cramped but it was really nice to see people again. Each PCV is required to have a physical and a teeth cleaning done each year, I managed to get mine done the Monday after my test, I received a clean bill of health. Otherwise we just hung out in UB for about 4 more days before we started our traveling to our friend's sites.

One less than wonderful event happened when we were walking to a local restaurant to listen to a popular local band play. It was maybe a 30 minute walk from Tuul’s apartment, not too bad really. While we were walking by another bar/restaurant this Mongolian came up to us and said hi and shook my hand and then asked me for one dollar. I said no and we kept walking. He kept follow us and continued to ask us for one dollar. We said no again and he started to get angry. We started to walk faster and then he just started to swear at us and attempted to hit me, though he only managed a drunken slap. At this point we start running and he continues to follow us. Alona’s shoe fell off and she fell behind me a little bit, which I did not immediately notice. I looked back and she was taking her shoes off about 20 feet behind me. The drunk guy was not paying any attention to her I guess because he just ran by her and she tripped him. He gets up and is even angrier at us and drunkenly hits Alona’s head. We start running again and he still is following us. He is drunk so we can easily out run him, though he is screaming out in Mongolian something…I do not know what but the next thing I know this other Mongolian that is just walking along tries to trip me, though fails at his attempt. By this time we are far enough ahead of him that we just run to the restaurant we were going to and call our Peace Corps Safety and Security Officer. She came over and helped us out. We met another volunteer there and stayed and watched the band and then took a taxi home.

That is not that uncommon of an event though it seems. I have heard of other volunteers running into situations like this, and there is not much we can do to stop them. You have the options of run or stand and fight, yet either way you seem to lose. If you run you damage your pride though if you stand in fight you run the chance that the Mongolian could get help from other Mongolians and get beat up, robbed, or even killed. The police in UB are not that useful. One other volunteer was assaulted a week after we were and he went to the police and tried to file charges. He was in a store and had witnesses and the assailant had come to the police station with them, the police said that nothing could be done for some reason. I think I heard that they said they had no pen or something absurd like that. I have come to not like UB, and that is one major reason why.

After our incident we hung out in UB for a few more days more or less not doing anything. We went to see the national history museum of Mongolia, though otherwise we hung out at Tuul's apartment. From UB we went down to visit my former training mate, Amber, who is the business volunteer in Arvakheer, Overhangai Aimag. The city is about 25 thousand people, many of the roads are paved (I am used to only having one paved road), and there is a fairly nice variety of stuff in the market. It is a very nice, quiet small town. We took the bus down there; it was a short 8 hour trip. Amber met us at the bus stop and showed us around the town a little. She lives in a nice apartment. Last winter she lived in a ger, though moved into an apartment for personal reasons. She even has a cat to play with, it is so cute. We spent 3 nights there just hanging out; we also played a board game called Settlers of Cathan. We helped Amber with an American culture club meeting, though otherwise we just walked around and went on one hike.

The one short hike we went on was to a Mongolian-Russian friendship monument that is on a hill just outside of town. I started to notice a trend on our travels, whenever we travel the weather was not at its best. Of the three days we were there, two were overcast and kind of rainy, and the third was nice but very windy. We went on our hike on the nice, but windy day. The hike was not to far, maybe a 30 minute walk from Amber’s apartment. When we got to the top of the hill and to the monument, the wind was howling. We made a small picnic out of some snacks and hung out on the leeward side of the monument. While we were sitting on the hill we noticed a small herd was walking towards us, we did not think anything of it, but then this small group of children descended upon us. They were watching the herd, I think. We talked to them for a while and then went back to Amber’s apartment.

We took the bus back to UB and spent three more days at Tuul’s apartment, this time waiting on one of Alona’s old training mates, Jamie, so that we could go back to her site with her. Her site is in Sainshand, which is in the Gobi. We took the train down; it was a slow train, about 12 hours, though comfortable. Again the weather did not cooperate with us very well, it was very windy and sandy for most of the time we were there. For the most part we hung out in Jamie’s ger or a café just chatting and eating. We spent three days there, on the last day it was finally nice enough for us to go outside and for a very very short walk up to the ‘look out point’ which is a small monument that faces south and has a tank on top of it. We took some photos from there, though it was still kind of windy. It was nice to go to the Gobi I will say, though it is very flat. One the plus side we did not get hit by any bad dust/sand storms while we where there.

After the Gobi we went back to UB for our final stay at Tuul’s for the summer. Tuul left to study Environmental Science/Protection at Antioch in New Hampshire in mid August. We stayed at her place for a couple of nights. One the last night we gave her a thank you gift of red wine and bananas for letting us stay at her place for almost two weeks for free, she really liked them.

We took the bus up to Erdenet from UB, it is kind of irritating that all of the central and eastern aimags have nice new Korean buses and the western aimags have the old style Russian buses… Such is life. The bus ride from UB to Erdenet was only 6 hours, though we got stuck in the way back of the bus. We bought the last two tickets for the bus…we had luck with tickets I will say. We always got a ticket, even if it was the last ticket. We got to Erdenet and just hung out for a few days. Alona stayed in Erdenet, while I took a short trip to visit my host family and buy a Mongolian bow and arrow set.

I only stayed in Erdenet for maybe two days before I tracked down a mikr and went to Darkhan to meet Chris, the volunteer there, who was helping me buy my bow. It was my first time back in Darkhan since training and it brought back fond memories of training. I stayed at Chris’s apartment for one night and then we went to his old training site. Two of the volunteers in Darkhan came and hung out at Chris’s place also tht night. Chris’s host family knows the family that makes the bows in his soum. There are only a couple of workshops that make handmade bows anymore and one was in his training site.

We caught a mikr up to my old training site and got off half way and walked to his soum. His soum was really pretty and his host family was extremely nice. We got the bow and just hung out with his host family. The entire family was there or was coming in because it was their soum’s Naadam the following day. His host family runs a hushuur stand during Naadam, so they were super busy preparing to make, I think they said, about 1000 hushuur. That is a LOT of hushuur to make by hand. They had a really nice Naadam; I stayed for about half of the day of Naadam. It was very small, but it had that small town fair feel to it. I really enjoyed it. I also ran into some random tourists that were passing through the area. I left early afternoon to go and visit my host family.

So to get to my host family I had to walk to the road and wave down a ride north. I thought I was going to have to wait for a while for something…nope. Right when I got to the road a mikr that was going north was there. I lucked out big time. It did not take long at all to get up to my old training site. I think it took longer to walk from where the mikr dropped me off to my family’s house, which is on the edge of town, than to get to my site from Chris’s. Now I have not really talked to my host family at all since I left training, I sent them a message saying that I was coming to visit soon…but I never gave the exact date. So when I got there they were not there… It was kind of awkward. My family owns the main store in the area so I just went there and the person that was running the store did not remember me…so I just kind of hung out for 2 or 3 hours waiting for my little host brother to get back. He was getting his test results for the college entrance exam, this fall he is going to start studying to become an English teacher at the school my girl friend works at. Once he got back he gave me a beer and some snacks and we hung out at the store until the rest of the family got back. We looked through some pictures and I used the internet, I was amazed they got it installed at their store. I feel asleep in the store…only to be woken up at midnight when the rest of the family got back from horse racing at a soum Naadam… They were happy to see me. I stayed there for 2 nights. We hung out and talked some, I explained what I was doing and everything. My host brother and I together got my bow strung and we shot that in the yard a little bit and after that randomly we went to the river. I did not know why at first…but they wanted to clean the car… Got to love random surprises, I just played with the kids until they were done…I am starting to get the hang of playing with children. I left the next day to go back to Erdenet. My host mother helped me find a car to Darkhan and had the driver help me find a car to Erdenet. I was nice; I did not have to hang out to long in Darkhan. I was missing the girlfriend a good bit.

So I got back to Erdenet and we hung out there for a little over 2 weeks I think. Naadam occurred right after I got back. On the first day Dao, Alona and I went and hung out in the Naadam area. It was a fairly nice day. We watched some archery and wrestling, ate some hushuur and just hung out. In Erdenet there is this fares wheel that is kind of random, it was working though the line was really long…so needless to say we did not go on it. The next two days of Naadam were rainy and cloudy, so we decided just to hang out at the apartment. Otherwise for the next two week we just hung out and enjoyed resting in Erdenet (with its clubs, restaurants, stores, etc). A couple other volunteers came passing through Erdenet while we were there also which was nice.

One of the last places we went to was Orkhon soum, which is where Alona trained. It is maybe an hour and a half outside of Erdenet. It was in a really pretty place. Her host family was really nice. Also it happened to be the day before their Naadam so a lot of other volunteers were in. Alona’s Mongolian is not that great, which is not surprising given that she has 25 English speaking counterparts to work with…why would she ever need to speak the language. So I played (adequate) translator for her. We spent two nights in Orkhon, on the second day her host father took us to the ‘river’…which turned out to be the karaoke bar… that was amusing…sort of. Things like that happen all the time. The day that we left we spent the morning with the other volunteers that were visiting their host families. A couple of them were just back from Cambodia, so we got some of their stories and what not. It was nice to visit with people I have not seen in months, even though we had to leave quickly. Her host family seemed confused when we told them that we were leaving and not staying for Naadam, we had our reasons…mainly because we were going to Hovskol right after we got back to Erdenet. So we caught a car to a small town called Hutuul to meet Alona's younger host brother and to find a car to Erdenet, though there were no cars or mikrs to Erdenet. We ended up going to Darkhan and then finding a mikr back to Erdenet from there. It was a pain but hey that is life.

So the high point of our traveling was going to Hovskol Lake. It was awesome. I took a lot of pictures up there. Alona’s dean had gotten two three day tickets at a ger camp free from some alumni and gave them to us, which is why we went up there in the first place. So we took the bus from Erdenet to Moren, which is the capital of Hovskol Aimag. It took 18 hours or so, it was the first time Alona was on the Russian style bus and she did not like it…for me it was the same old self inflicted misery. The bus was slow but it did not really break down at all on the way, which was nice. We got to Moren and met Patrick my old training mate and the health volunteer in Moren. We stayed at his place for a night while we were figuring out what we were going to do. Right after we got to Moren we found out that the tickets were not going to be honored at all. We had no place to stay on the lake… we were very irrigated at that…yet her Dean helped us out again. She gave us money to stay at a ger camp of our choosing. The following day we took a mikr up to Hatgal, the soum on the lake.

The day before we went up to Hatgal the volunteer that lives there got back from traveling with his family around Mongolia. We stayed at his place for one night and he helped us find a ger camp and find a ride to a ger camp. It was almost like he did all the planning for us, which was amazing. We stayed at the ger camp called Natures Door which was 25km from Hatgal. It was beautiful. It is probably one of the nicest ger camps on the lake. We had our own ger and they made three meals a day, three GOOD meals a day. We went hiking, I took a kayak out, and we went biking and just hung out. They had a shower house, with hot water… and it was all right on the lake. It was so nice. It was the high point of the summer I will say. We stayed there for three nights and then went back to Hatgal and found a ride (right away) back to Moren. We lucked out (again) because there was a mikr leaving to Erdenet right when we got in. It was not at all comfortable…though we got back to Erdenet all right.

We got back to Erdenet sore and tired, though safe. We spent five days in Erdenet waiting for the next ride to my site. I got all of the shopping done that I wanted and Alona got the break that she wanted. We hung out with the other volunteers a few times and then we were off again. It was really random how we found our ride. A mikr driver just called me in the morning and said that he was leaving at 12…this was at 9. So we had about 2 hours to get ready and to get to the mikr. I had a bad feeling about the mikr right from the start but ignored it. So we found the mikr and were the last ones in it and then we were off, Ok cool no problem. We were barely outside of town when the mikr veered off the road into a clearing. It turned out that most of the passengers were from one family who were heading back from a wedding. We spent two hours at least in this field while this family was saying their good bye and drinking probably 20 bottles of vodka. We were not impressed for now they were all drunk…which was not that bad except that they were singing nonstop for several hours. There were two mikrs that were going to Zavkan, the other was only people from that family, and in mine were 5 people (including Alona and I) that were not in the family. I will say this ride is probably the worst experience I have had in Mongolia. Since the mikr was mainly one family they just had the driver stop whenever they wanted for as long as they wanted (or so it seemed to me). The mikr broke several times. It seemed that they had problems with their suspension. We stopped randomly for 2 hours in the middle of nowhere so they could wrap the bow under the axle with rubber, and then we stopped for almost 4 hours for them to get something welded. We stopped a few other times on the way for an hour or two each.

We had left Erdenet at noon and got to Tosensengle at 11pm the next day. Tosensengle is 6 hours from Uliastai so I thought we would keep going…nope. We stopped in front of the normal guanz for a little while so the other people could eat. The area was crawling with drunks and police…it was so messed up I was seriously worried and kind of scared. I have heard bad stories about that place. We ended up staying the night in a motel of sorts above that same guanz. The driver asked if we had any valuable items in our bags, se we took them with us to our room. We slept there and then continued on the next morning to Uliastai. It took closer to 10 hours to get to Uliastai. We stopped for food once randomly which took a while and it had been raining all night so the road was bad to washed out. We had to drive on the side of the mountain for a while to get passed a washed out part…Alona thought it was going to flip while we were driving on the side of the mountain. We didn’t and we got to Uliastai safely…if very tired and worn. It took about 52 hours to get back…not fun at all.

And I was back to site…it feels so nice to be ‘home’ again. Alona stayed in Uliastai for two weeks. For the most part we just lounged about the house. We went for a couple of short hikes, and visited some friends houses but otherwise we just hung out and watched some movies and had some dance lessons…yes I am learning to dance a little…I know how shocking. She ended up leaving by bus to go to the Peace Corps training that I was skipping. It feels so weird now to be alone, we spent all summer together and now we will not see each other until December. I am sad about that.

That was my adventurous summer vacation. Now it is over and work starts again. Wish me luck 

Well as you all know, I hope, I am have been living in Mongolia for about a year now. This has been the longest I have been away from home. I will say I have missed some big event while I have been here, my nieces birth and brothers wedding being the main ones. Yet I will say I do not think I will ever be the same for coming here. This is my one year recap and reflection for those who have not read the rest of my random ramblings on this here blog.

We came to Mongolia on June 2nd 2008. It was a long flight, yet it does not seem so bad now in retrospect, given I have to take a 30+ hour bus ride to get to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, on rough dirt roads. Our first three months were more or less spent in training, be that in Darkhan or our host communities in Selenge Aimag, which is in the northern part of the country. Peace Corps has some really good training, and some not so good training. The Peace Corps language programs is probably one of the best in the world. Being in a local community with a family along with four hours of class per day is a great way to acquire the language, though sometimes it is to much. On the same level learning about the culture is much easier, as you are in it. You are not just reading about it, or being told about it, you are in the culture. That along with specific classes on Mongolian culture we learned enough so as not make overly stupid cultural mistakes. That is what Peace Corps does best in training, teaching you how to survive in your host country. The rest was not overly impressive, though they do the best they can so no matter. During training we had little free time really, which is the opposite of real Peace Corps Service. Yet in the end, as a group we found plenty of time to hike in the surrounding mountains and spend time by the river. It was a very nice summer.

Peace Corps is two years of service plus three months of training, so it is really 27 months. While my first three months were spent in the northern most part of the country, my two years is being spent in one of the more western aimags of Zavkan. During training we were in groups of 12, my site in Uliastai was of 5, 3 M18 and 2 M19 volunteers (M means Mongolia and the number is the class, so 19 means 19th class or group of volunteers). I was told when I entered PC that I would be working with small businesses primarily, not so much really. I was placed at a vocational school to help with their basic business class, which is a good idea I think. In reality I have had more than a few problems trying to do anything, though in the end that is what PC is about, trying something new in a new country and to try and make it work. I have been keeping myself busy of course, though with more personal things than work things, which is fine I guess. Normally the first year of a volunteer is much slower than the second year as your language is so bad and you do not know many people. SO what personal things have I been doing, well I have been working on my Yoga, some meditation, and I have been studying for the Foreign Service Officers Test which I will take very soon. My work has been mainly teaching English, some computer classes, and I had a business club at my school. So not to bad.

So Mongolia. What is it like? I can almost hear that being the most common question when I get home, that or what did you do there… Well Mongolia is really nice, once you get used to it. Like any country it is a lot different than home. My house is really nice, I am on the central heat line so I do not have to start fires in the winter, though I get my water from the river (which is frozen in the winter… you get it from a whole in the ice) and use a squat outhouse. Food is the biggest difference outside of language. Here I have a lot less variety of food, less fruit and veggies and more grains and meat, which is fine. We have apples all year so that is nice. The language here is HARD, any language is hard though Mongolian is in a completely different language group than English so there was almost no direct similarity between the two. Since I got to site my language has improved, I am pleased with it so far, though it is still not very good.

Mongolia is a big country. It has many different types of areas, from the Gobi dessert, to the Steppe in the east and the mountains in the west. I am in the west, which is probably one of the most beautiful areas of Mongolia. I have heard many people say that Zavkan is one of the most beautiful places specifically, and also one of the coldest parts. Uliastai is either the coldest or second coldest city in Mongolia on average, which means the winter is cold. Yet I looked online at the weather back home and it was colder back home than here, I laughed at that. So Uliastai is located on two rivers which flow through town and there are mountains all around the city. It is really nice, it has a lot of good hiking really close. Along the river there is grass and some scattered trees, with more trees up in the mountains. On the whole it is really nice.

The culture is an odd blend of traditional and communist cultures. Here the holiday seasons starts with New Years, which has many similarities to Christmas (some similar music and the decorations). I will say I liked that the least, be it the decorations reminding me of Christmas, which does not exist here, or that it is a major drinking holiday. For each holiday the school has a party, which involves vodka, beer, dancing, silly games that are overtly sexual, bad music and food. Though in the end I survived. On New Years Eve though people tend to stay home and have a small family party, nothing to elaborate. Normally the evening is spent watching TV, and some of the stuff on Mongolian TV is pretty funny.

The biggest holiday is Tsaagan Sar or White Moon/Month. That was in February this year, it changes ever year as it is based on the lunar calendar. It is a three day holiday where you visit many peoples homes. Figuring out when to visit can be difficult but do able. At the homes you just hang out and eat small dumplings and drink. At every house a gift is given to all of the visitors, usually a small amount of cash or some candy or something on that line. I really enjoyed Tsaagan Sar.

There are many professional holidays in Mongolia, it is a hold over from Communism. There is Teachers Day, Soldiers Day (Men's day), Women's day, Doctors Day, etc. These follow a typical patter. Arrive at the place on time or not, does not matter. Once you get there you have some milk tea and some soup, then comes a vodka toast beer. Typically some games, dances, and singing occurred during the evening randomly. The main meals arrives eventually, and more vodka is passed around. Not much changes from party to party.

Early during the school year I attended a Hair Cutting Ceremony. This is similar to a Christian Baptism. When a child is born they do not get a hair cut until they are 3 to 5 years old. It is meant to symbolize washing away bad luck or something on that line. That party was mainly eating, drinking vodka, and listening to people sing. A nice small party.

For the most part I have really enjoyed my time in Peace Corps and in Mongolia. It is not what I thought it would be. In the end if everything would be just like you thought it would be, what would the fun be. What is different than I thought it would be? Well work was mentioned already. I thought it would try and force myself to be more social though I still I am kind of reclusive, I have a small circle of friends, though with my language being the way it is I do not visit as much as I was thinking I would. Transportation is different than I though, 30 hours on a small Russian bus…who would have thought. I think the biggest thing that was a surprise is that I have found my self in a relationship with another volunteer. She is in Erdenet, so we do not get to see each other, at the time of posting I will be getting ready for summer vacation which will be spent with her traveling about Mongolia. Her name is Alona and she teaches English, we met during training, she was in a different training group and we just starting talking and it grew from there. Works for me, I cannot complain. Things are not what I thought they would be, yet in the end that is why it is so much fun.

Most Americans have not lived over seas, and I will say it can be very stressful. The things I miss the most are the hobbies I cannot do and the family events I miss. The only hobby I can do here is yoga, and no I cannot touch my toes yet… I cannot practice Aikido, cannot mountain bike or ski. It is very hard to find new music or other media like that. It is hard to keep up on the news, hard to keep in touch with family and friends. Even if it were not a physically trying place to live in at times, it is hard emotionally to be away from home for two years. Most other development workers I have met go home at least once a year for a month or two for that reason. Peace Corps is not like that, we are here continuously, we can take vacation but it is on our dime not the agencies. It is hard to willingly give up being the best man in your brothers wedding or being at your nieces birth, or any of the other celebrations that we miss. Yet in the end how often do you have the opportunity for an adventure like this, to live in a country for two years, to learn the language and culture, and to be 'paid' for it. It is an amazing experience and there is never a good time for something like this, you will always miss something.

Being here and helping with some development project and seeing how others work has changed my opinion of development work on a level. Peace Corps is not a development agency it is a People to People program, we are here to learn about the people and for them to learn about us, while we do work here, it is of debatable value sometimes. Honestly the only way for development agencies to do work is to have people live abroad and work with people, like Peace Corps and missionaries agencies do. Many projects just give money to people and there is no follow up or even preplanning for it. Some projects do not even have much of an impact, though seem on the surface as interesting ideas. This is a hard idea to explain. One thing I am sure of is that just giving people things will not make a difference their lives. There are many school that I have seen that have received things from many agencies, books or computers or free training. Yet nothing has changed there. They do not use them effectively, they just put them in a room and have it for show. How could this be done better, the key is looking at their actual needs from their point of view. They may not need computers or advanced English books, they may not need anything. Development takes time, it take generations, education is key, and training the education staff is probably the most important thing that can be done. Training them in the best teaching methods, helping the country produce good education materials in the native language, and helping create a school system that encourages learning and not just the status quo is what is needed, not computers. Yet, that takes more time and more work. Which is why it is not really done. It is easier to give people computers and say that you are making a difference instead of helping them redesign their exam system. This is just education, business and every other sector has similar things that could be said about them, though I do not know about them as well. Just something I have noticed being here.

Below is a link to an article that is a critical analysis of one former country directors thoughts on PC. I found it very interesting. There are some things I do agree with and other s that I do not. I think it is worth reading, it is a different perspective of the agency I work for that deserves attention.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4295

So anyone who has ever tried to learn a language knows it is hard. Living in and learning another culture while learning a language is even harder. For the European languages and cultures everything is fairly similar, the cultures have many similarities, there are many words that are derived from Latin in each language, and the grammar structures are similar to an extent. That is not to say that they are the same, they are not. German is a lot different from French or English or Russian, yet they are in the same Indo-European language group. Now Mongolian has almost no similarity to European culture or language, as it is a Asian culture and the language belongs to the Altaic language group, which included Japanese, Korean, Turkish and, oddly enough, Finish. Being a different language group and a very, very different culture, translating expressions directly word for word can create some entertaining sentences and questions. So I will give you some examples, most of these are everyday expressions, greetings and things on that line. I will write the Mongolian Cyrillic first, the literal translation and then the English equivalent.

Сайн байна үү? = Good is? = Hello. How are you?

Сайн . Сайн байна үү? = Good. Good is? = Fine. How are you?

Сайн . = Good = Fine.

Сайхан амарсан үү? = Good rested? = How was your evening?

Сайхан . Сайхан амарсан үү? = Good. Good Rested? = Good. How was your evening?

Сайхан амарсан. = Good rested = It was good.

Сонин Сайхан юу байна вэ = New good what is? = What is new?

Юмгуй тайван = Nothing peaceful = Not much.

юу байна = What is = what's up?

Юмгуй = Nothing = Nothing.

Баяртай = with happiness = Goodbye.

Сайхан амараарай = Good rest please = Good night.

Сайн яваарай = Goo go please = Have a safe trip.

Сайн суугаарай = Good sit please. = Stay well. (Not sure really on how it would be put in English)

Зүгээр = its ok = You are welcome

Юу гэнээ = what said = What did you say

Чи өөдгуй амьтан байна =You rise not animal are. = You are an asshole.

Those are just a few examples of why translation is hard. Most of these are everyday greetings or expressions, but the last one which is just for fun, but to actually be able to translate properly you cannot just translate the words, you need to translate the meaning of the words across the culture. Which makes learning the culture so important when you are trying to learn the language, you need to understand how context affects a sentence and it meaning. Either that or you need to have a really good language book or teacher that translates the expressions and words across the cultures very well.

Just a random comment on learning a language…and anther reason why it is really, really hard…

Tsaagan Sar is Mongolians largest a holiday, it would be their equivalent of Americas Thanksgiving or Christians Christmas. During Tsaagan Sar, or White Month/Moon, people visit friends and families homes. Now I was gone for the 2 weeks before Tsaagan Sar so I did not get many invitations to visit peoples homes, though I have few Mongolian friends so that may be part of it.

Tsaagan Sar started on the 25th of February and ended on the 28th. Now the 24th was Tsaagan Sar Eve, it has a name that I cant remember. On the 24th I went over to my Hashaa families home for dinner, it was buuz, potato salad, candy and rice. I made some lemon bars and brought them over, they may have liked it I don’t know, they said it was good. I am sure they have never tasted anything like that. Hung out there for maybe 3 hours, ate and watched TV. Chatted a bit and then came home.

On Tsaagan Sar there are many traditions, I don’t know what they are and don’t understand them. So I didn’t do any of them. On the 25th I went over to my hashaa families again, this time in the morning. My hashaa mothers sister and her family came over to visit. The way visiting works is that you first greet everyone, it is an interesting greeting. You put your arms on the other persons arms and give them a sniff kiss on both cheeks. You start with the oldest and go down to the youngest. Ok fair enough. After that the males exchange snuff bottles, and you smell them. It is another greeting of sorts. So after that it is time to eat. Now we had boiled beef and salads and then bainsh, which are mini buuz, or dumplins. After we started to eat the vodka was brought out. Now each time you visit the host is obliged to offer you 3 shots of vodka, I just did the sip and give back, don’t want to drink. After that people don’t hang out that much, so the gifts are given, every guest gets a gift. Normally it is a haadock and something small like 1k or candy or something. I just got money. During the 3 days of Tsaagan Sar I only visit 4 or 5 homes and it was more or less the same. Some of the food was different, sometimes it was just me visiting or an entire family side, it had lots of variation.

On the 3rd day all of the teachers came to school and greeted each other. Now 50 people is a lot of people to greet and keep track of so it was kind of chaotic at the beginning. After the greeting the two youngest female Mongolian teachers served tea, then candy, then the vodka to everyone. The school had boiled mutton, two of the youngest males teachers carved that and gave it out, as I am the youngest by far but I am foreign so I got out of it. After the meat was given out, the Tsaagan Sar food was given out and that was the end of that. It was very short.

Over all it was a nice holiday, it is very family focused so being foreigner was kind of odd, but it was not as bad as I heard from some other volunteers.

The Trip to Erdenet:

Ok so transportation in Mongolia is not that fun when it is over long distances and involves something other than the train or airplane… So I left for UB on the Feb 4th on the postal bus. Like everything in Mongolia it did not leave on time, it was supposed to leave at noon but I left at 1:45pm. Though I am told that is fairly early still. So we left the post office and start going…just to stop on the other side of town to pick up a couple of other people. Ok I guess that is common. So then we were off.

So the postal buses are the best form of land transportation I am told. I know why now. So this bus was a 29 person bus, it was fairly old but kept in better shape than most vehicles. The seats had some cushion but where not very comfortable, the worst part of the bus is that the backs of the seats are not very high and that they are fairly close together, so a person that is taller than the average Mongolian, like me, have a cramped time.

So we were off, the oddest part of the bus is that like all forms of transports people get on and get off randomly, we picked up probably like 8 people and dropped off 10 on the way to UB at different points, really odd. They just pay the driver and get on… Also while there is a heater, some people do not want it to get that warm, because they are hauling frozen meat and other goods that should remain frozen. We had at least two sheep carcasses on the bus that started to thaw enroute. Joyful.

The best part of the bus is that while there is day light you get to see the country side. Zavkan is beautiful. The mountains are amazing. Though at this time of year it gets dark early so I was not able to compare it to much else but the steppe closer to UB.

We stopped twice for food. Once in Tocensengle, which is the second largest town in Zavkan. Had some Tsoiven and then the other time is in a random soum that I cant remember the name of. It is cheap food at least. After we left Tosensengle the young couple that was sitting behind me started to talk to me for a little bit. I guess the girl is working on her masters of some sort of engineering, she is working at the APU company in UB, which is the main drink producer. Talked with them for a bit and then went to sleep, or tried to anyways. One of my site mates recommended to eat a bunch of Benadryl, though I didn’t as I am not a fan of taking medicine, though I now understand why… .

So trying to sleep worked a little, got maybe 4 or 5 hours of sleep total, not very comfortable. After we got to Tsetserleg I couldn’t sleep the rest of the trip. Also at tsetserleg I got a seat mate, a guy just moved over and fell asleep. Now here in Mongolia there is no idea of personal space so yup he fell asleep on me more or less, he slept for maybe 5 or 6 hours. O well, it wasn’t that bad. So as it got light out I found myself in the Steppe, or plains. It is very very dull. The mountains are pretty and I am sure the Steppe is also in the summer but right now it is kind of dull. The rest of the bus ride was dull and uneventful. We got to UB at 3Pm, so it only took about 26 hours to get in, which is insanely fast I am told. It is usually more like 30+ hours. Works for me.

I did not stay in UB for very long. I went to the office to get some mail and other miscellaneous stuff that I needed and then went to the train station. Got to the train station and bought my ticket and then waited there for a few hours for the train to leave. The train is by far the nicest way to travel. It is warm, they have half sleeper cars, you can sleep…ya a lot nicer. The train took 12 hours to get from UB to Erdenet, so while it is nice it is slow. Slept most of the way at least. Got into Erdenet and grabbed a taxi to go to Dao's house to get the key to my friends house. I stayed at Alona apartment, though she was at a school activity until that evening, so I got to relax, take a hot shower, get some movies and nap until she arrived.

Erdenet

Erdenet is the second largest city in Mongolia. It has about 80-100k people that live there. The city itself was built by the Soviets to exploit the large copper deposit that was developed there. The mine at Erdenet is the 4th largest copper mine in the world. It is a massive open pit mine. There are two distinct areas in Erdenet, the city center and the ger district. The city center consists of 6 districts of soviet era block apartments, there are maybe 20k people that live in those max. This is that area that has all of the shopping and nice restaurants. The rest of the people live in the Ger district. There is only one major ger district, and it is huge. It reminded me of the slums you would see outside of Mumbai or San Paulo for some reason. But on the whole it is a very clean, nice city. I think I like it the best out of the three main cities in Mongolia.

So I spent 12 days in Erdenet. What did I do? Well I stayed at Alona's apartment. One the whole Alona and I just hung out for the 12 days. Did a little bit of shopping, ate out a few times, hung out at a few cafes, and walked around the city a bit. We went out to the club Gravi twice, once just because, the other time it was for Bradley's birthday. While we didn’t do that much, it was a real nice break from the countryside and not really doing anything in the countryside. What else did we do? Humm…well hung out and chat a lot…. O ya and we watched Dexter seasons 3 and some Sex and the City. Yup. Lazy vacation.

Well the other thing that happened while I was there was Valentines Day. Now this was the first year I could not dislike Valentines' day. Why you may ask, well because I have found myself in a relationship with another volunteer. Yes It is with Alona, who would have guessed that right? But ya. Valentines day was nice. During the day it was the same old, hang out, watch Dexter, chat. But the evening was were it was at. We went out to eat at Cecily, this was our third choice. Our first choice was a nice restaurant on the fifth floor of a bank, but when we went to order we found out that they had no food for some reason….strange. So we went to a Chinese place, that was also closed. So we ended up at Cecily. We had a meal of sorts, cant really describe it, it was Mongolian. After that we went to a café called Jungle, it was a very green café. It was kind of interesting, it had a bunch of animals in cages, like turtles and rabbits. Was nice. After that we went to Gravi for Bradley's birthday bash. That was just another night at the club.

On the whole that is about all we did. Lazy and relaxing. Really nice vacation.

Trip back to Uliastai.

So I took the night train back from Erdenet to UB on the night of the 18th, so I got into UB at 7am on the 19th. Grabbed a taxi to the office and hung out there for 2 hours until the Dragon center opened. The dragon center is where the long distance buses leave from, and where you buy the tickets for them . I decided to walk there instead of taking a taxi, took about an hour to walk. It was a lot farther than I thought it would be. Got my bus ticket and then walked back to the city center. I did my shopping at that amazing store called Mercury, it has everything almost…

That is about all I did. I hung out at the office and watched the BBC, then I met up with some friends and had dinner with them, went to Tse for a beer and then crashed at Sam's apartment.

My bus left on the 20th at noon, so I had the morning to waste watching tv. Grabbed a taxi to the dragon center this time, to much work to carry my luggage. Got there a little early, but of course the bus didn’t leave until about 1pm, which is normal. The seat that I had was 21, it was ok seat. It was facing with my back to driver and inline with the isle, so I could stretch my legs out, a little. The isle was FULL of luggage. The bus was really full. The bus ride was uneventful, it took 30 hours to get back to site, people sitting around me played some cards games and I just zoned out and tried to sleep. While the bus is the best way to travel long distance probably unless you own your own car, that is to say it the least uncomfortable… it is not fun at all. But o well. Next up is Tsagaan Sar...

So I the wonderful world of post-soviet Mongolia there are these wonderful professional holidays. While I am business volunteer and thought I would be able to avoid them, I am at a school. So I got teachers day stuff.

Well teachers day is the first Sunday in February. Our school did three different things. The first was on the Jan 29th, which was a volleyball competition and relay race. I participated in the relay race and then watched a little of the volleyball. It was Bens birthday so I went and hung out at his place. My team won the relay race but we lost the volleyball I think…

The next wonderful thing was the party… More or less the same thing as for New Years. It was held at Crystal, though it started at 3 and not at 6 for whatever reason. So it was a short night at least. I showed up one time, like always. Why I still do that I don’t know, no one else was there on time. People trickled in and most were there at about 4ish. Fair enough. Now I decided to not sit by my translator and instead to sit by the part time English teacher and the other part time teachers that I have never talked to. Now since I am quiet and cant talk in Mongolian, I really didn’t talk much I just…you guessed it, drank and zoned out. Early in the party we all did the walk around and wish everyone a happy teachers day… yup just like new years. Then it was time for speeches, signing, vodka toasts, some dancing, some games etc. Same old same old. Badmagi the part time English teacher tried to teach me the other Mongolian dance that I don’t know, didn’t work so well. But she tried. Let see there were two games that were played. One was that each table had to have 6 people come up and try to make words out of 6 random letters, my team lost we only had 3 words. The other was something about pretending that a monkey was your child and you had to say something to it and give it a kiss. Now the people that didn’t do it the first time were forced to come up and do it. This was a partner game so those that were forced to come up had to give a kiss on their partner where they kissed the monkey. At least I was in the first group I guess…

Ya on the whole that was about it… horrible circle dancing, food, alcohol, etc. Same old same old.

The third and final activity for teachers day was an afternoon out at Tsasni Batz. This is an area that people go to go sledding and hangout. So we left the house a little after 12 and went to get my hashaa fathers Russian jeep to go out there in. Now these jeep are not the best quality but are easy to fix. Now when they tried to start it. it wouldn’t, the battery is not holding a charge it seems so they switch out a battery to start it with and we headed out. So we got there and maybe half of the teachers were there. When I look around I saw that it was an area that I have wanted to go hiking in for a while, so I set off to scale the peak. I also noticed that I am getting out of shape… o well. So walking up the mountain and looking around, the beauty of Mongolia is very odd, it is a very harsh beauty. Not like a rain forest or the ocean. So walking up the rocks and looking around, it was beautiful but sadly I did not bring my camera. It took maybe 45 to 60 minutes to get to the peak that I choose, though it was not as far as I would needed to have hiked to get where I wanted to. That will be summer hike I think. By the time I was on top my feet were getting a bit cold. It was not a difficult walk, though some parts were a bit slick… So on top I decided to take a different way down. I went straight down, about half sliding on my boots and the other half walking. That was fun, sliding down the hard snow… though on the walking parts I ended up getting snow in my boots, so my feet were cold the rest of the afternoon… joyful. So when I got back down the rest of the teachers were doing some sumo wrestling in the snow, I did not take part in that, though I got some food. After the sumo there was a foot race up the hill about halfway. I got forced into doing that, though I won it by a large margin. I really am getting out of shape. Though running up a hill and through snow is HARD work. So finish that and we all just milled around for bit. Then comes the gifts for the winners… beer. I got a two liter of borgio that I don’t want… o well. And then the vodka got passed around, did not drink any of it, just did the lip touch. Drank enough the day before… After that we all went home. For teachers activities this was probably the best one because while it was still horribly structured it was outside and was less drinking based.

I have come to have much more respect for those immigrants that come to the US and actually are able to become part of the culture. I guess in the US it may not be as hard in some ways, as you can do whatever you want within bounds. What are some requirement, well be on time, but otherwise people don’t care what you do… But honestly, if they speech half ways decent English, that is impressive. Many places don’t have that great of English programs, like Mongolia. It is a shame that many people don’t cut them some slack, it is really hard to try to become part of culture that has a lot of things you don’t care for in it, and then having it forced on you. For many of the people coming into the US, the current immigrants are not from Europe, they come from the nonwhite world where the culture is so different, in so many more fundamental ways than if you are Polish or Irish… Cut them some slack. We all came from someplace else...

There are few things about Mongolian culture that I truly like. One of them is their hospitality, the other is their patience. Though they are too patient on some levels. So what is visiting in Mongolia like? Well on some levels it is really odd, but very hospitable. For visiting in Mongolia you just show up, you don’t have to call or notify them ahead of time. Though in normally do, just because I feel it is odd to just show up on someone. Traditionally on the first time you visit you should bring a gift of some sort, I don’t, but I guess that is traditionally proper. Being a foreigner you can get away with stuff easier. So when you arrive at a house you are given tea, either milk tea or just basic tea, and some candy. That is the minimum they will give you. If they have it they will give you bread and jam, or if they are cooking a full meal. Now they don’t ask you if you want any of this. They give it to you and just tell you to drink or eat, very direct and commanding. In grammar terms it would be called the imperative form of the verb.

The odd parts of visiting sometimes is that when you show up, if they are dong something they will give you tea and candy, and then go about doing whatever they were doing and set you in front of the TV or something. I have always found that really odd. If other people happen to be over and they are drinking , well you are drinking now also. Drinking in odd here, being drunk is socially unacceptable, but people drink a lot. You cannot refuse alcohol, it is highly rude if you do. What you do is accept it and then either touch it to your lips or do a ceremonial toast with it if you don’t want to drink. Now being male you get more pressure to drink, but they don’t force it down your throat or anything. One other kind of odd thing is that they will never ask you to leave, they will keep giving you stuff and trying to keep you there. That is considered polite. Asking someone to leave is highly rude. But you just leave when you want to.

Ok. So my birthday has never been very important to me really. It is on a really bad day being between Christmas and New Years. O well. But here in Mongolia…well it means even less. But I did do something for it…I went to my works Shin Jil party. YA or not. So my birthday starting off like every other day. You know the whole waking up and working stuff. Fall term is ending so we were doing verbal tests for the English classes. Easy I will say. So after class all the women needed to go and primp themselves up so that they look all pretty. My main CP Jundaamaa I guess spent 3 hours getting ready. While they did that, I went home and made myself a lemon cake from a cake mix that mother sent me and some lemon frosting from scratch. Turned out nice. After that puttered a bit and had some cake and a little brandy…so good. And then I had to get ready to go. So I wore my suit and black shirt and tie… I was the mad man in black that night…o ya. As I was finishing up getting ready my hashaa duu came over with his dad and gave me a little birthday gift. Cute kid, I give him a bunch of treats here and there as I have them. He gave me a card and a small Christmas wreath that was decorated with a couple of small saxophones… nice gesture.

So the Shin Jil party… It went from 6-12 and was help at Crystal Club, probably the nicest place in town. Maybe. So I get there at 6, and of course they are not ready yet, or the women are not ready as the men had to wait outside until almost 6:30 to go in. It is Mongolia, that happens. So we all sit down and more or less hang out for most of the nights. The night started off with a nice cup of milk tea followed by a soup of some sort. During the soup they had some sort of Shin Jil ceremony or something. Father Winter came in and gave some gifts out and then some of the teachers sang a song. After that we all went around and shook everyone else's hands and wished them a happy New Year. Joyful I will say. If I understood everything it would be a lot better, but o well. After that was the first dance. Jundaa dragged me out for a wonderful waltz, which I am really bad at. Though that was the only time I had to do it for the entire night.

After that it was more hanging out and then a game. There were two games played that night. One was where several people have to act like an animal but no one can say what it is and then the best one gets a prize. The animals were: penguin, rabbit, mouse, cat and something else. I thought it was dumb. The other game was a two stage game. Stage one was you and a partner had to break a balloon without using your hands and the second stage was you had to dance on a piece of paper that kept getting smaller. The last one on won. That was less stupid, got a couple of fun photos off of it…hehehe.

Ok so the main dinner was a fried egg with a cutlet and some salad. Wasn’t to bad. Throughout the night people were making speeches and getting gifts. Though even though I had my translator next to me, she wasn’t translating very well, so I had no clue what was going on…no matter. There was free booze on the table…HA. So ya, when I am really bored and there is free booze I sometimes tend to drink to much…sometimes. So I had 4 or 5 shots of Chingis and a beer…slightly tipsy. Enough to willingly dance badly… I even had one of the teachers husbands hold up a bottle of Chingis, point to it and then his head, asking are you drunk. Tiim I said, then he crossed his arms in the sign of you are cut off. Here have juice. I thought it was funny. Well technically getting drunk is socially unacceptable... This was at 9:30, we starting drinking at 6:50ish. So I had 2 hours to sober up before I had to walk home. YA otherwise the rest of the evening was mainly dancing and eating. Had the Champaign toast and really bad cake at like 10:15ish maybe. Ya that is a Shin Jil party.

Ya I am not a big fan of big parties anyways and the whole drinking little to much made the evening not the best, sobering up doesn’t feel so great. O well. Like I understand what is going on anyways. What a happy birthday. There is one other teacher that has the same birthday as me, I cant remember her name though…. I think Oenchimeg maybe

So on New Years Eve. What is it like? Well at least for me it was low key. My hashaa mother invited me over to hang out with them for New Years. I wandered over there, after playing more C&C3, at o maybe 9:15ish. About an hour latter Tsegii and his parents came over, Tsegii is my hashaa brother. So we hang out, I am quiet like normal, though on the whole it was a fairly quiet evening. Watched a bunch of TV. They had a year in recap type of thing on the national broadcast channel. The Olympics were the big one and then some cultural performances and other misc stuff. For the cultural performances they had some Russian Ballet, Opera, and an odd mix of other western, Chinese and Mongolian culturally influenced performances. I found it kind of odd, though Mongolia is a small country next to two giants, so the cultural influences do tend to be strong in some cases. Examples, New Years is a Russian import, they even brought in the fireworks for it. I heard them going off throughout the night. They were selling roman candles by the truck load in the market. Tseggii had one that he shot off at like 11:30, miss fired also, was amusing. So while we were watching TV we had some o so delicious buuz, and potato salad and fruit and milk tea and juice… And Tsegiis parents brought the vodka. Just a sipping night… I cant remember who but it was either Narengel or Tseggi's mother brought some Korean Whiskey (Ginseng Wine) with them back. They gave me a taste of that, it was ok. I had thought about brining my bottle of brandy over …but I didn’t. What New Years Celebration would be complete without some cake and low quality Champaign. They cracked the bottle open at 10:30, did the toast and then sipped that. That was most of the evening. At 12 they cut the cake. Now these cakes were sold by the truck load also for like 5k each. They were brought in from UB in boxes and to say the least they weren't that great of cakes. They weren't that bad, but they were kind of dry. We all had a piece of cake. And by then I was tired so I crashed… yup

And yes this will change your world, maybe. But there is Mongolian Idol here. They put that on for a while. And there was even an Elvis impersonator sitting as a judge…ya. That’s Mongolia for ya.

This should start during my time in UB. So, Christmas does not exist in Mongolia. New years or Shin Jil does though. I guess the Russia influence caused a pseudo Christmas celebration to be transformed into New Years. It is really odd. Alright, while I was in UB I saw many Christmas trees, Christmas lights, bad pop renditions of Christmas carols, and even Santa and his sexy, sexy elves. Though they are all in Mongolian Shil Jil terms. Santa is Father Winter, the elves are his Snow Girls. I am not sure what the tree is called. But most of the outward decoration of Christmas are here. Just not the celebration. Very odd, but very interesting. At least it reminds me of home a little bit. And of course, my house has no decoration. Though I did buy a small ger Christmas ornament to give to mother when I get home in 20 months or so… hey it is something.

Ok so Christmas in Uliastai. Well since it doesn’t exist, out side of all of the New Years decorations, which look like Christmas decorations, there is no Christmas here. But what did I do? Well Christmas Eve was a normal day. Got up, went to class, taught English, poorly, then we had an English competition that didn’t turn out that great, it went fine, but we didn’t have much turn out. I didn’t plan it though, that is why turnout was bad. I came home, played some C&C:3, and then the power went out. That happens from time to time, not sure why. While the power was out this time though, I went over to the neighbors house and gave Tsegii, my neighbors kid, a present. I got a package from home the Monday before Christmas and I took some of the candy and stuff and put it in a bag and gave it to him. I said what it was and a little about Christmas, but I don’t think he understood it. Although, his mother did and she repeated what I said in a way that made sense to him. Which was cool. Hung out there for a bit and then went home and cooked.

Since I am a lazy cook, though I like to cook, I made most of what I wanted before hand. I made some lemon bars, apple bread, and rice the day before Christmas eve, so I just had to make some horse stir-fry. The meal was very good. Apple bread and hot Chocolate appetizer, horse stir fry and rice with tea and then lemon bars and a glass of brandy for dessert. O how I miss good booze and wine.... Good meal altogether. After that I texted with some friends and then did some Christmas prayers and crashed. (Christmas is a religious holiday you know)

Ok on Christmas. Normal day. Almost. Got up and ate. While I was eating the family called from home, they were just finishing dinner. Got to love the 13ish hour time difference. Chatted with them for only about 15 minutes, we do email a good bit. After that went to class. Same old classes. After class I puttered for a bit and then… We had Graduation for the third year students. Random right? Graduation wasn’t that long, only had like 65ish max students graduating this year. The ceremony it self was nice, short had a possession of all the students at the begging. They were all dressed up. They guys were in suits mainly, and the girls were mainly in dresses of some sort though a some were in suits. The dresses were a random collection. Some reminded me of the stereotypical prom dress, many had dell suit/dresses on, and a few had western-ish normal dresses. After that they had some speeches, which I didn’t understand, and then the families and other students gave gifts to all the students, had a time for photos, some random dance moments, a couple of students sang, and they honored and gave gifts to each of the best students. It was a nice short ceremony. Though non of my photos turned our really well that I took. O well. After that the students put on a reception for the teachers. Some fruit, candy, hiam and of course…some vodka. Hung out there for o 20 minutes and then came home. Played some more C&C:3, finished the GDI campaign. Today Narangel returned from Korea, she was there for a week for work or something, I went and gave her some of my extra lemon bars and apple cake. I talked with her for a while and came home and puttered some more. Wonderful Christmas I know.

FYI: Christmas in Mongolian is pronounced: zuil sarin bayar (зул сарын баяр)

As a PCV group what did we do? Well on the Saturday after Christmas we all meet up at Bens ger for a late lunch. Before that though, my school had its New Years party for the students. I got to watch maybe 20 minutes of it. It was supposed to start at 12, but this is Mongolia so it started at 12:50. It had all the trappings of Christmas almost. Odd as hell. So I left there and went and got my stove top casserole and fork/bowl/cup set. Ben doesn’t have enough to be able to entertain people, well no one does really… So I got over there at 1:30 and was the last one there of 5 people. Fair enough. We had BBQ something, fresh rolls, and my stove top. There was also 3 bottles of vodka, 1 bottle of coke, 2 1.5Liter bottles of wine and when Thomas came he brought another bottle of real wine. Lots of booze. The food was good, the cheap wine was drinkable. Thomas is from Germany, he works for GTZ and his project is at the local power plant. He brought an actual bottle of real wine, a nice Italian Cabernet…soooo tasty. Real wine, how I miss it. So we hung out until about six shooting the shit. Ben and Patrick both had their school New Years party that evening. So we got kicked out then and we wandered back home.

And now Christmas is done, kind of. In the West the holiday season is ending, here though, it is just starting. Shin Jil (new years) is a really big holiday so I have that for another week to deal with and then in mid-late February it is Tsagan Sar… and the holidays keep on going...

The first trip back to UB since being at site, how nice it was. So what is IST or In Service Training about? It is about getting more technical training about our specific sectors or needs at site. IST was from Dec 9-12 and was held at a 3 star hotel about 20km outside of UB. I was flown in on the 8th, there are only two flights a week to and from Zavkan. I arrived late afternoon, as I am a fly site, I was one of the last people in. *Note the divide between the fly sites and drive sites is how long it would take to drive. A drive site is 10 or less hours on a bus or mikr, anything over that you fly. I am about 40 hours on a bus or mikr away form UB. So I got in late afternoon. The oddest part flying in, is that I went from dust roads with no real traffic to stop and go metro traffic…odd feeling. It was Donny's birthday, so I dropped my stuff off at the office and met up with them and went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant. It was tasty, I had a salmon salad, mmm fish and green things. Two things I don’t get. Hung out with them and then went back with Sam to his apartment, he was kind an let me sleep on his futon.

So we had to be at the wonderful PC office at 7:30 to go out to Nukt, which was the hotel. We left at 7:50 with everyone but 2. My counterpart and Ridges did not show up on time. O well. The hotel was literally just outside of town, it followed the same floor plan as the Darkan hotel also, kind of odd. The 3.5 days of training were all the same really. Got up and had breakfast at 8, had class till 1, ate lunch, went to the language tutors, class from 2:30-7, had dinner. And then either went to the optional class and hung out after or just went and hung out all night. For the most part since it was just the 3 sectors there, the party was fairly mellow, which is what I like. I brought with 2 bottles of Soviet Champaign, mmm tasty. We watched Batman Dark Knight one night. Otherwise it was just hang out, have some drinks, chat and have fun. I think the training was more for the counterparts than it was for us. This IST was 1/3 of what last years group had because of budget cuts, so our training was ok, but very general. More specifics would have been helpful and more on grant writing. O well

So we went back to town Friday night. And we found some TEFLers. They slowly trickled in until Monday night. I stayed in UB until the 18th. What did I do? Spend money, well more like over a months, maybe even two months salary… On the whole, we didn’t do that much. I went shopping and bought all the stuff I wanted, found a 700ml bottle of French Brandy for 27500T, so expensive… I also got some English books from the Asia Foundation and some business resources from the Mongolian Chamber of Commerce. That was all that happened during the days really.

The nights, and the food. That was were it was at. Most evening we all hung out, either in one big group or 2 or 3 small groups. Since all the TEFLers come in at different times, each night the new ones in would want to go out and drink, which was fine. It was really nice to see everyone again, some more than other though :-) . I think I ended up at Ikh Mongol 5 out of the 7 nights I was in, good beer and live music . One night they convinced me to go out to the club with them, clubs… not my favorite. The food was so good in town, expensive, but so good. BBQ chicken pizza, kebabs, Japanese, spicy tofu…mmm so good. Yup that is most of IST. Lets hang out, drink, eat good food, and enjoy what little time we had together.

I stayed at a hostel after IST, it was ok. Nothing special. Their was this guy from South Africa that was really cool though, he ended up being almost an adopted PCV. He is planning on trying to do the Mongol Rally race in 2010.

Yup. So on 18th, I came back to site. I remember reading in email that eventually our sites will become home to us. I am not sure if that is true or not, but the feeling that it is a 'home' has set in. UB is nice, but it is so polluted and expensive. Uliastai is nice, small, cheap. I think on a level it has become a 'home'. So I got back, tracked down my key, and re-set up my house. O the joys of being gone for two weeks. And now it is time for the Holidays here in Mongolia to start.

So while I do not look at the comments people place, if any, on my blog that often, I do. If you ask a question I will reply, so ask away. Just don’t expect a response to be soon.

The comment is:

just a few questions...what led you to do volunteering? your first impression when u heard "Mongolia"? it sounds like you're sacrificing some of your things which u've listed here. would be glad to know what is your expectation after PCV? regards,someone who likes to read your posts

Ok. So what led me to volunteering? Honestly I don’t know. I have always been volunteering, either for school, a little, or for Boy Scouts, a lot. I grew up volunteering in the scouts and I like it. Nothing really led me to it, well maybe my parents because they got me into scouts when I was young. But I enjoy volunteering, I like to help people. If I would be in the states still, I would still be volunteering I think.

For my first impression on Mongolia, I though “cool”. Not much more or less. I was surprised because I was hoping for the Caucuses or western central asia, but I was excited, I had a job after college unlike most of my classmates. Of course I really didn’t know that much about Mongolia at the time, so it is hard to really form a proper, informed first impression.

For sacrificing, the real question is, when is a good time to do something like this? There is no perfect time, you will always miss something, and no matter what you have to sacrifice a lot for it. So yes I am sacrificing most of what was on that list, or at least postponing some of it. In the end though, is it worth it. Yes! If it wouldn’t have been PC it would have been teaching English in Japan or Korea for a couple of years. The only difference for that, is it is a little more flexible, so I would have been able to attend my brother wedding and meet my niece. But I would still be gone for a few years, and I may do that after PC, you never know. But what do I expect to get out of it. That is a hard question. I personally think that being 21 makes this a good time to do something like this.

You get out of it what you put in; you get out of it what you want. As a development organization, we can only do what the people want us to do. Some places just want a face on the wall, so the volunteer doesn’t have much to do, other have very active agencies and are really busy. I am in the middle; I have stuff to do, but not that much. Honestly most are closer to a face on the wall. Why, for a variety of reasons, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you make your own work and set a lot of your own priorities yourself. So what do you get out of it? What do you want to get out it? What do I want to get out of it? Personally I can into this with the ideal version of work, that I would be in an agency with stuff to do, to say that I was kind of disappointed is understatement. So the answer has changed since I joined. What I want to get out of it is personal development, to make myself better. I personally am an overly shy, introverted person. Becoming more social, outgoing, is one goal. I also have been kind of insecure and depressed for most of my life, so to learn more about myself, to find a more solid foundation for my personality and personal beliefs. That is the type of stuff I hope to get out of it personally. I hope to make a positive contribution at my school, I will try and do my best, but who knows. Professionally, well living in a hardship country, living abroad, learning another language and culture, learning more hands-on how ‘development’ happens, etc. All of that will help in my future career, whatever that is. This is a hard to answer question. After I am done, what will I do, who knows. I will ride the winds of fate and wait until then.

Hope that answers some of your questions. Ask more if you would like!

Well the holiday season is upon us. The holidays is about being with those that are most important to you, your family and close friends. So how are the holidays, well for this Thanksgiving, celebrated by those of us that are in the Peace Corps. Well it depends, you two different choices. For those that are will and able to get to Ulanbaatar there is a large party on the Saturday following Thanksgiving that is put on by the Ambassador and the Embassy, for those of us not able/will to get to UB we have our own party at site.

For those of us in Zavkan 2 people, Ben and Patrick, went to UB for Thanksgiving, and the other four of hung out and made our own dinner. So what did we do? We made a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, with no traditional Thanksgiving food in it. So we met at Natalie and Justin’s at 10:30 and went out and bought our food. For four of us it only added up to 18000T for the entire dinner, not to bad. We got back to Natalie’s and started cook at noon, when the power came back on. So what did we cook? We made a 1.5kg horse pot roast with some onion, carrots and potatoes; we made 16 buttermilk biscuits; 1kg of mashed potatoes; cream gravy; one can of corn; 2 apple crisps and 2 chocolate cakes. It came out to being a LOT of food. Though, we ate most of. We only had maybe 1/4kg of pot roast left, 1/5 can of corn, 1 apple crisp and 1 chocolate cake. Not bad for 4 people. For all four of us it was by far the most food we had eaten since we got here in Mongolia, we were all stuffed full. Natalie had a massive stomach ache the rest of the day. So we ate around 4ish.

Well after that we hung out. Did some music and TV show trading and then played games until 10ish. We played Outburst for maybe an hour, I will say I am not good at trivia games that were made before I was born. And otherwise we played 3 games of hearts. Janet taught us how to play, as Natalie and I didn’t know how. Good game, didn’t do that bad. Not to bad of a Thanksgiving since we are all half way around the world from our family and friends back home. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Greetings Friends and Family;

I hope that this letter arrives to you in the best of health, spirit and enjoyment of life. Life in my family has changed significantly this year. My grandfather died in April. My sister was married in May. I graduated from college in May. I have a new niece, Ayla, that I won’t meet until I return to America that was born in June. I have a new sister-in-law as of October, though I was not able to be at the wedding. And of course, I am in Mongolia as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I am sure you have all heard, or at least have noticed that I am not around anymore. Yes I am actually in Mongolia. It is hard to believe, but it is true. I am in the western region of Mongolia, in the provincial capital of Uliastai in the Zavkan Aimag. It is really beautiful here in Zavkan. We are in an ancient mountain range, so while the mountains are not tall, they are very beautiful. The city itself is one of the smaller, and poorer Aimag capitals, though it nice overall. There are a total of 6 Peace Corps Volunteers in Zavkan, 5 here in Uliastai and one TEFL Volunteer in a small soum about 30km from here. A soum is like a county. We have a nice little group here; we hang out on the weekends. It has been an enjoyable time.

So what have I been doing? Well, in all honestly, not that much so far. The work of a Peace Corps Volunteer is very slow during the first 4-6 months. Learning about the community, meeting people and making friends, and of course improving your language ability all take time. The most difficult part and the one that hinders my work personally is the language barrier. I am placed at a Vocational Training Center, which is more or less their version of an alternate high school. I am here to try to improve their business program, mainly their business project/plan writing class, though my translator, who is their English teacher does not know business terms very well. This has made it very difficult to understanding how I fit into the program, and has created some set backs in my main project. I have done other small side projects here and there. I have helped the English teacher design posters for each vocation with the English word for each of the main vocational tools, I have done a small cooking class for the 3rd year cooking students, and I am currently teaching English with my English teacher. I am teaching English now because the business plan class only lasts for half of the semester.

For those that know me well, you know I am not that out going of a person. I am shy, and introverted. That coupled with the language barrier makes making friends very difficult; though I do have them of course. So what do I do when I am not working? How do I spend my time? Well since I have a computer, and I brought my yoga mat and block, it is similar to how I spend my time back home. I read, watch TV shows and movies that other people’s friends and family send to them, do yoga, meditate, and of course play some video games.

I will say that this is very frustrating work at times. The difference in cultures, the language barrier, and just each of our own personal idiosyncrasies all can make it better or worse. But I fell that I will make a difference, however small, for some of my students. That is why we join PC, to try and help. While each person’s contributions may be small, over time and with many people, it will add up to a major change; for both the host countries and the volunteers.

So for those that were wondering, yes I am still alive. I haven’t fallen off the planet, I sort have fell through it. I am having a good time in Mongolia, and hope that you all are doing well back home. Have a joyful holiday season, and I hope to hear from you. You are all welcome to email me at Mike.Loehlein@gmail.com. Happy Holidays! J

Sincerely Yours from Mongolia;

Michael Loehlein

M19 Peace Corps Mongolia; Uliastay, Zavkan

PS: Shameless Plug

With it being the holiday’s season, memories of all the wonderful food come to mind. The delicious cookies mother makes, the salads, meats, and all of the rest that all of my dear relatives make. We can stay in touch, via email and Skype; but the food is what cant easily be acquired here. So….if anyone would wish to send a care package filled with delectable American pre-packaged and processed foods, please do so. What is hard to find here in hoodoo Mongolia: brown sugar, powdered sugar, western candy, Cream of Mushroom soup, other canned soup, stuffing mix, salsa, ranch dressing mix, Velveeta and parmesan cheese, oatmeal, canned meats (ex: spam, Hormel’s cooked ham in a can), Rice o’ Ronnie mixes, cake mixes, Whorstershire sauce, Red Wine Vinegar, etc. Those types of food items are hard to find replacements here. I know that these times are difficult with the economy the way it is, but every little helps. And hey 4-5 people or more could pitch in and send one package together. If anyone does wish to send something, let me know when you send it, so I know to pick it up at the post office. I don’t check my mail that often. Please email at Mike.Loehlein@gmail.com when you send something. My address here in Mongolia is:

Thank You and enjoy your holiday season.

So I was thinking the other day, what has it cost me to join the Peace Corps. I was actually thinking about my brothers wedding which I have been unable to attend. So here is what I have come up with:

*Note: The is the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is the cost of the NEXT best alternative, which would be to have been to stay in the United State (Maybe)

My first niece’s birth, to be first and second birthdays and all the other things that happen in the first year

My brothers wedding and being the best man in his wedding

Most likely my brother’s first (?) child

Work and the associated income, though with the economy now that may or may not be that much

Aikido practice, two years which would be about 2-3 ranks

Friends weddings and other celebrations, many many

Hanging out with friends and other social activities, possibly even getting a girl friend…no that wouldn’t have happened

Good Food, major cost

Mountain biking and skiing

Ready access to the internet along with news and the ability to pirate stuff

…

The list goes on I am sure, but that is what come to mind, which means that that is what is important, if it isn’t important it really isnt a cost. That is a very steep cost actually. Didn’t really think about it before I left. More of a thought exercise than anything else…

If you can think of anything leave it as a comment…

Ok so it has been a while since I updated. What I have been doing? Well honestly I can say not a whole lot. My class has recently finished, it only went half of the semester, why I am not 100% sure. But it has come to an end. This is also true of the cooking class that I was doing for the third year cooking students. So basically I am out of work now… Next semester starts at the end of January…

Ok so what did I do? My projects so far have been to help our language teacher make posters of the professional tools. I wrote the lesson plan/outline for the business class, in class I just sat there and studied Mongolian as my language is not to the ability that I can do anything, for 5 weeks, or 10 times, I taught some different American-ish foods to the cooking class, and I wrote a book for them of recipes that they cam make with stuff from around here. I have also studied Mongolia, though I don’t have a tutor. So I really haven’t done much. I do teach some English though, still.

One major issue is of course the language, I am told by people that I have good Mongolian, but I barely can hold a conversation…odd. Also my school does a lot of thing well from what I can see, at least well in the form of a bureaucratic post-communist way. People spend a lot of time filling out forms. The community it self doesn’t have much to it, and I don’t really know what I can do, other than teach English to people yet. So the side projects are slim.

In general, Mongolian has a lot of foreign aid agencies doing stuff. Those agencies are much more focused than we are, and while there is a lot left that can be dome, the type of stuff that we do in PC is much hard to find. Also finding the Mongolian counter parts is difficult.

The first six months of a PC volunteers life is the most bored I have heard, well it is here. Finding your own works if very difficult.

So Peace Corps came recently, they stop by to make sure everything is ok and to help clear up issues and whatnot. When they were talking to my counterparts and my neighbor (who is the vice director at my school) the only running theme was that I am much of a quiet, reserved person. Ok I know that, I have always been shy. They also brought the last of our Newsweeks, they are discontinuing our subscription due to the increase in internet access around Mongolia. Ok fine. The first one that I was reading had a special section on education and the changing face of it, one of the sub topics/ideas in one of the articles is how technology has changed the shape of education, and it mentioned the social aspect of it. That got me to thinking how has technology shaped my life and social ability?

I am a very quiet person like I said. My hobbies and interests have always been more reclusive than most. I like to read, do things on the computer, do individual sports, etc. This is part of our individualistic society, doing things on our own. Here in Mongolia, the one thing I could not live without is my laptop…it has my music, movies/tv shows, journal/blog, ebooks, etc. I do work on it, etc etc etc. My hashaa mother made the comment that she would like me to spend more time hanging out with her and my hashaa family than ‘entertaining’ myself with my laptop. I keep saying to myself I would, but I haven’t…oops

Why is my computer, which can be a viewed as a proxy for tech in general, so important to me as compared to my other possessions? My generation were the first to grow up with the internet and the modern Windows style computer, Gen-X grew up with the game consoles and the older computers. But they were much more limited in their ability. I grew up on the computer, and in front of the tv and with books. I was never a big fan of sports, I like to exercise, but sports not so much. So I spent more time on the computer, alone. I would have to say that on a level I grew up alone, in a sea of people. I am the youngest child of the family, so while I am the spoiled one, the family was also busier when I was growing up compared to my two siblings. Less direct attention from the parents, etc. My brother was taken under my fathers wing and he is defiantly his child; my and my sister are our own creations though. Neither of my siblings are into technology as much as I am, or at least spend as much time on it. My brother does very little on the computer, but he is very social. I do a lot on the computer but am not very social. I have heard other say, and jokes and stories that the smart people, computer people know a lot but are bad with people. Well it is true on a level.

Technology, while bringing us together in a way, creates a barrier. We have less and less direct interaction with people, interaction without a medium, phone/email/IM. This limits our ability to build those needed social skills. On a level I think growing up on the computer, and trying to excel at school, while helping in some ways, has had a negative effect on my social ability on a level, along with other personal issues. The role of technology in society is a topic that is actually really interesting to look at. In the same edition there was an article on the different perspectives on robotics in America and Japan. Japan is much more focused on the android type of robot, America the practical type. As technology becomes even more fused into our lives, will it take place of face to face interaction? Will it take place of human interaction? What will the effect be on our society and social abilities? Socially technology has had a negative effect on my life, while in other aspects it has helped. Keep in mind that there are always unanticipated outcomes from these changes in society. Makes me wonder about the world that my niece is going to grow up in, with more and more technology saturating our lives; my brother-in-law plays a lot of video games and he is also kind of socially awkward.

Working at a school I have noticed that while all students have a cell phone, they don’t have access to most of the other technology that we have. I always see students and kids hanging out on the bridge and outside. Just hanging out. Even in the states, this is becoming less common; while we hang out we play video games or listen to music, watch movies, etc. This is what I mean by a medium, while we are together we aren’t interacting, we are doing something else. Even here, when I hang out with Ben we watch something or do something and not really talk to much, we always have music on when we are at Natalie’s, etc. Now I can’t say if they have better social skills, I am just noticing the difference in their activities. I will say this though, it isn’t the technology that creates the lack of social development, it is the isolation and lack of building of true relationships that do it. The danger is in technology replacing relationships.

Throughout training they talk about the Mongolian traditions and ceremonies, and now that I am site, and in a school with 50ish workers/teachers I get to experience them all, over time of course.

So the hair cutting ceremony was first. A hair cutting ceremony is the equivalent of a Christian Baptism in a way. It occurs sometime between a child’s 3rd and 6th birthday depending the family and other factors I don’t know about. The ceremony is as it sounds, cutting the child’s hair, it is the child’s first hair cut. They shave the entire head by the child, boys and girls. The ceremony itself is fairly short, everyone present cuts a little bit of the child’s hair and puts it in the hoodock… and there is not to much more to it than that. You have a couple of toasts and a speech, I think. What is the main part is the meal before and the singing after the ceremony.

Ok so from the beginning, we all met at the school at 6ish, several of the teachers were surprised I was coming I think. No matter. We left the school and drove over there, it would have a been a bit of a walk otherwise…1/2 hour probably. We get there, of course our host lives on the top floor, and the stairs are uneven. The joys of Russian built apartments what can I say. There were about 30 of us that came to it. One odd part for these ceremonies is that Mongolia is a culture that respects age and position, I am the youngest teacher, but I am a foreigner. This odd combination ends up with me at the head of the ‘table’ or room/ger whatever, a place of honor. What ever, no matter. Jundaamaa was also put up there so I could at least a little bit of a clue on what was going on.

The meal itself was fruit, candy, salads, mutton, some sort of local juice and of course…. Vodka and Airag. The food was really good. The booze was the same old same old. I believe that the glasses were passed around 15 times, good thing you only sip the booze…though 1/3 shots still add up over two hours. The joys of booze, especially when you have poorly built stairs to walk down…good excuse to stop drinking though…maybe.

So we ate for about an hour, then there was the ceremony. The gifts were given during the ceremony. The main gift was about 200k MNT, or about 200 USD from the school and teachers. Their were some other minor gifts/toys for the child and family but mainly it was cash. Honestly I think cash would be the best gift, Mongolians don’t really have that much spare money and putting on one of those ceremonies must cost a lot.

So after the ceremony was time for A. more Booze, and B. singing. Singing is the pastime for Mongolia, most Mongolians know MANY songs. This is kind of awkward as I cant remember most peoples names much less memorize a song, English or Mongolian… Kind of problematic. I need get on that I think. So people spent about an hour singing different songs, I was starting to zone out quite regularly at that point and as I don’t really know what is going on anyways I really didn’t care. It was hard enough to talk to my translator much less to anyone else in that room with the singing. Alright so about half way through the singing there was an announcement that the new teachers were going to treat us to a night at a restaurant. Free booze and food, o the joys… So the singing ended around 9ish I believe and we went over to the restaurant. I thought it was going to be the next day, but I was wrong.

One of the more entertaining points of the night I think is that my Hashaa father has a 69, it is a Russian made jeep. The starter wasn’t working, but don’t worry, Russia thought of the solution… a crank starter. They had to crank start it both going from the teachers apt to the restaurant and then back to the house. I chuckled to myself. Also the new teachers were planning for 50 teachers, only about 28 showed up. They had 80 beers and 8 bottles of vodka on the table. Here is a fun stat, if we as a group went through all of the vodka that evening, we would have drank 15/16 bottles over 7 hours… or about 8 liters.

Alright so we hung out at the restaurant for about 3-4 hours. Bars close at midnight technically, well not really. Find that amusing. Now honestly at this point I was not in the mood for more drinking and bad music. Not at all. But this is Mongolia, I could tell some other people were not that into it either… O well. So the night went on, more vodka, beer this time, some more candy and fruit. Though there was mandarin oranges there…so good. Got dragged out to the dance floor, attempted to learn the Mongolian waltz, which is really just a Tsarist Russian waltz… But ok they call it the Mongolian waltz. I guess I didn’t do that bad. Entertaining point maybe, all of the teachers, regardless of age rocked it out on the dance floor, thought that was funny on a level. Not many 45-50 year olds rock it out to trance…

Now honestly when I say I was not in the mood, I mean that booze, bad music and not being in the mood = not a happy Michael. Bad music more than anything set me off, and that is all there is at these clubs, bad techno/trance music. And that kindled the anger… I will say I need to work on that part of my personality, need to be less angry and depressed/melancholy. Not sure how well being a melancholy drunk goes over here. No matter. I have two more years of this joyful entertainment, no doubt will learn to love it. Just hopefully I don’t turn into an alcoholic, many other Peace Corps Volunteers seem to turn into them. Though it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, it was a nice ceremony and I don’t mind the clubs that much, just need to be in the mood, wasn’t. I wonder how that went over with the other teachers…no matter. Though I did get some entertaining look when went ‘casual’ un-tucked and buttoned my shirt...I had a shirt on…

So I love to cook. It is a hobby and it is relaxing to. Anyone that knows me knows this. So, what I am eating here in Uliastay. There is a slightly limited selection of stuff that I can buy, well not truly as limiting as I will make it out to be, I just don’t have the money to buy all of the stuff I would like. What does my cupboard hold right now? Well we have: potatoes, rice, millet, buckwheat, a turnip, onion, garlic, carrots, dried seaweed, tofu, noodles, lentils, flour, sugar, salt, dried milk, salami, beef, eggs, candy and spices. So what can I make with all of this stuff? Well the first question, is what can I cook with. We got a cookbook from Peace Corps; it has instruction on how to bake without an oven. There are two methods that I have used so far, I think there were four in it. One is via the stove top the other is via steaming. The stove top method is just that. Place your food, mainly breads, in a pan and put it on the stove too cook, normally on low heat. I place the pan in my frying pan and cover it to make it more of an oven, it works. The other is to take my electric wok, put some water in the bottom and place my bread or whatever in a pan and place it on the steamer tray to cook. It comes out really moist. Both have worked very well.

On the whole I can make most anything I want, but wanting to make something and making it are different things. Been eating soup, make a bunch and freeze some in bags for latter to eat, rice and veggies, friend potatoes and stuff, goulash and spaghetti, bread and jam, homemade tortillas, some fruit and candy. Kind of monotonous on a level, but my spice selection is fairly good. Am I eating as healthy as I want, probably not, I eat more candy than I should, and a bit more oil than I am used to. But it isn’t that bad really. Come winter we shall see what the selection is.

I have been at site for a few weeks and have a better grasp of what I will actually be doing for the next two years, well a little bit. The school I am at has 12 different profession that it teaches skills for, welding and plumbing, auto repair, tv repair, food preparation, hair dressing, carpentry, masonry, tailoring, and several others. It has around 50ish teachers, both teachers and administrators, and 600ish students. The school itself is like a high school back in the US, most of the students are around 16-18 years old. Most of the teachers, general schooling and vocational teachers, are females. Most are probably in the late 30’s, 40’s and maybe early 50’s. There are only 6 or 7 males teachers, the youngest teacher just started this year, he is 27. I am by far the youngest ‘teacher’ at the school; which on a level does make it hard to ‘integrate’ into the social life of the school, as the all have families.

The school itself is nice, it has all of the needed equipment for teaching the trade skills, though methods for some of the trades are different than in the US, as it is much less industrial and mechanized here. My school had the teachers resource room wired for the internet, which works very well for me, now I can stay in touch with the world, maybe. There are two English speakers at the school, one is the English teacher, who also works as my translator and pseudo tutor, and there is a new cultural worker that also speaks English that just started this semester. With my limited language ability, this makes the social level slightly difficult.

For what I will actually be doing, I am working the Economics/Business teacher teach skills and business planning. I start the 22nd of September. The issue though is that she doesn’t speak English. So how I am actually going to be doing my work, I am not sure yet. I will find out soon, I may teacher her the skills, and then she would teach the class, or something else on that line. I have been slowly writing my lesson plan, which in reality is a full script on the topics I would teach about. My fall back plan is to have that translated and then just read it, sort of. Like I said I am not sure how it will all work.

The one thing that has finally sunk in, even though it was told to me by several people, is the necessity to find your own work. Many places want a volunteer, because it looks good, we are just pictures on the wall on a level. I have heard other people just say, ‘if you show up every day, smile and be friendly, you are doing your job’. On a level this does seem true. As I don’t truly have many business skills, and am not that knowledge about business, if my entire job is to do is to work with the Econ teacher, I am sure I will run out of stuff to do in about 4 months. After that, I am here, but have to find my own work. Which would be fine, but for the language barrier, and that I am a very shy person. I have no doubt that it will all work out, so I am not worried, I just need to be prepared to be bored a lot I think.

On the whole I like it here, I just need stuff to do. I just need to give it time though. Mongolia does not have the sense of time that is in the US, or the work ethic, so patience is need on my part. I suppose I could always just teach some cooking classes or something…

Uliastay City, Zavkhan Aimag is a very nice twon. The town has about 20,000 people living in it, while the Aimag itself has only about 79,000 people. It is a small area. Uliastay has a small town feel, which is nice. There isn’t too much to do here per say, though I am sure I will find stuff to do, other than drinking I hope. Uliastay is surrounded by mountains, they aren’t the Rockies, but they are nice. I think they will give me plenty of stuff to do on nice days…o the joys of hiking.

One random site in town though. There is a ridge line that peaks in town, on top are nine Buddhist Stupas…and a radio/telecom tower. It has a very odd evilish sci-fi feel to it. The joys of soviet planning.

The market has almost everything I need in it. I am surprised by the selection of products that I can find. I just wonder about the food supply in the winter and the variety of stuff that I will be able to find. No worries. I am expecting that I will become a defacto vegetarian while I am here, for the most part. Meat is expensive, though the dried tofu is not…so I will learn to make rehydrated tofu taste good…though it doesn’t really taste that bad. Though I am told that camel meat is the cheapest meat.

My house, my home. I am very, very pleased with the house that I was given. I am in a duplex with the vice-director for the school. The house is directly behind the school, so I have a 5 minute walk to get to work. That will be nice when it is -40. I have two rooms, a kitchen and everything else room. The kitchen has a freezer (well fridge that only freezes things), a two burner hot plate, a wood stove, a dry sink, a decent size cupboard, and a washing machine. The washing machine was given at my request, now I hope my cloths will last longer. The bedroom has a bed (which is not that comfortable), a couch (which is comfortable), a coffee table, table, bookshelf and closet. The one down side to this house is that I have to walk to the river to get water…but that isn’t to far, come winter though…

The school. I start work on the Sept 1ist. Not sure what I will be doing, I’ll post that latter. The school has 500 students, around 40 or 50 teachers, mainly female, and many a buildings. In Mongolia those who do the trades tend to be females, unlike in the states. It is an interesting cultural note.

UB. I will say this about my stop over in Ulanbaatar, I hate being in administrative limbo. We got down to Ulanbaatar on Sunday night, most people left on Monday and several on Tuesday. I am one of the eight that got to stay until Thursday. UB is a nice city; I didn’t really do any of the ‘touristy’ stuff, though you don’t really do that when you live in a place I guess. It was a good time, but I just wanted to get to site and be down living out of my suitcase.

So on Sunday we left Darkhan late, we were supposed to leave at 10ish, we left at 11:30. Peace Corps dropped the ball on getting us down to UB, they got one bus and one mikr, which could not fit all of our luggage, so they brought it down latter. Ok that’s fine, what bothered me more is that the bus that we took drove SLOW. It took us about 5.5 hours to get down to UB, it should have only taken 3-4 hours. That messed up the rest of the plans for the day, which were mainly retrieve our stuff, primarily cash and our phones, from the office and get a tour of town. We got our stuff, but not the tour. O well. After we ate, several of us took a small tour of our own around Sukhbaatar Square and the State Department Store.

Monday thru Wednesday was pretty consistent. See people off, hang out at the office for a while, eat good food, do some shopping, and just hangout. It was enjoyable to eat good food, use a real toilet, etc. There are only two real highlights that stick out for me. On Tuesday night we went down to Ik Mongol, which is the popular expat bar/club in town, it is a big place, and has a good, fairly cheap beer. We hungout there, it was to say goodbye to the outgoing PCVL. At Ik Mongol there is this house band called Altan Urag. They play a type of modern Mongolian folk music. They are AWSOME. There are 6 members to the bad, 3 play the traditional horse head fiddles, but they have aliens on the top instead of horse heads. There is one clarinet style instrument, some sort of string/piano type thing, and an AMAZING drummer. The drummer is amazing in both talent and she is gorgeous. I attempted to find their CD around town, but the place I stopped at was out. Our other highlight was going to see Hellboy 2 in the Tingis Theather. The theater felt like being back in the states, it was really nice. The movie was ok, standard sci-fi/fantasy. It was a nice break from the past three months, it was also in English.

Thrusday was interesting, kind of awkward but ok. Ben’s counterpart met us at the dorms at noon and took to the airport. We had two taxi’s, one for each. The taxi cost me 15,000. I guess prices have been going up recently. O well, that is what Peace Corps budgeted to us for travel so…ya. We got to the airport about an hour and a half early, so we just hung out until check in time. Once we finally got checked in I, I got the sad news that I was 11kg over for my luggage allotment. It is 3400MNT per kg over, so there went 37,000 more MNT. O well, only have to do it once, I think. The flight itself was pretty short, just 2.5 hours. We flew in a SAAB 340, duel prop plane. I got stuck with a baby crying right behind me. Good fun. Otherwise outside of the some turbulence at landing, it was an uneventful flight. Once we arrived we were met by our counterparts and swept away to our respectable homes…

Final Center Days

Final center days began when we parted with our families. It was a heart felt going away at 6:30 in the morning. My mother made me a silver tsamts, or dress shirt, with black and silver trim as a gift on Monday. The family also gave me 5k and a box of 6 glasses. Very nice gifts I will say. I gave them a bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet, a box of Polish chocolate and 20 photos of the family and me. The gifts seemed to be well received. We left the school at 7 am to go to Darkhn, though we had one little stop at the Sukhbaatar sign to get some more photos and for a bottle of vodka to be passed around. That took about a half an hour, and then we moved on. The drive to Darkhan was uneventful as always, though it seemed as if there were more livestock on the road than last time.

Upon arrival to Darkhan the standard welcome was there, get a room, drop your stuff off and chat with people. The one issues this time, is that many of the rooms were not ready, so everyone put there stuff into one room. This room ended up being the room that Donny and I singed out. That was an entertaining day and evening I will say. Everything was cleared out by 7 that night so it wasn’t really a problem.

The sessions at Final Center Days were the same type of stuff, medical, safety and security, how to pickpocket, how to avoid being pick-pocketed, and we met our supervisors. I posted what my placement will be already, so I will let that be. My supervisors doesn’t speak English, so our sessions together was slightly awkward, but what here isn’t… With my limited Mongolian, and several loan Russian words, I got that he is 42, a teacher, married, has 2 daughters and a son, he was born in Zavhan and has lived in Uliastai City for 20 years. His name is long, though his nick name is Luya. He is a nice guy, the communication barrier is just a little much, like always.

Other than the sessions Final Center Days seemed to be a little more low key than Orientation or Mid Center Days. There was no real BIG room parties or suck, or at least not that I was aware of. People seem to have their groups and just hang out. Which was nice.

Swearing-in Ceremony

The swearing in ceremony was very nice. We had it at the Darkhan Theater. The theater itself had a very nice interior, reminiscent of Socialist Realism, and wonderful seats. All of the volunteers wore the Dels or Tsamts that their families gave them, some people were given amazing stuff. We got there about an hour before the ceremony started, which we spent taking photos mainly. The ceremony itself felt like graduation to an extent. It started with several speeches, the Country Director, Ambassador, an official from the Ministry of Education, one representative for the supervisors and three representatives for the volunteers spoke. The speeches were very nice, the typical substance I will say, though the Ambassadors was very nice. The ambassador here, LOVES the Peace Corps, he thinks it is the best program in Mongolia from America. Once the speeches were done it was time for the oath and then getting our diplomas. The oath made it feel like I was enlisting, but whatever. The certificate was given to us by the Ambassador individually, nice touch. Though the certificates didn’t have a stamp on them, so by Mongolian standards they were not very official… After that we had performance by M19 PCV’s, it was mainly songs, dances, and playing traditional musical instruments. They wer e great performances, we have some amazingly talented individuals in our group. We also did a group song, which didn’t fall flat, but most didn’t know it very well, but o well.

After the ceremony we had the reception, which was of a cocktail party style, but with no alcohol. The food was delicious, though kind of random, most I was not sure what it was, but it was all good. At the reception we gave our LCF’s our gifts to them, we gave them a bunch of photo’s taken through the summer. They loved them. After for the most part it was hangout and chat time. I chatted with the director of USAID in Mongolia for a while, they have two programs here that they are closing down soon, an anti-corruption and democracy projects. It was a very interesting conversation.

After we left the reception it was time for the goodbyes to begin. About 10 people left director for their site from Darkhan. It was just the begin of slowly saying goodbyes to the crew, as I am one of the last to leave for site. It added a very bitter-sweet tinge to the Swearing in Ceremony.

One of the first things that we did at Final Center Days was to get our site placements. I am pleased with my site, though I was not expecting what it came to be. I am going to be going to Zavhan Aimag, which is west of Ulanbaatar. It is a fly site, thought when the roads are passable it is about a 35 hour drive. I will be living in the Aimage center, Uliastai. My information sheet says I will be living with my supervisor in a newly built house. I get one half, my supervisor gets the other half; we both have separate entrances. My place of work is called the Vocational Training Center, which is a state run business school. What my information packet says I will be doing, though it can change, is mainly working with economics teachers to train students on project proposal writing, project implementation and monitoring. I will also be teaching English for about 6 hours a week. Twice a week I am supposed to be working on business skills training for students. There are then some other organizational development tasks that only occur once a year, along with working with local businesses. The school itself has 50 teachers and 529 students. It has general education and vocational training departments, along with a dorm for some students. There are 11 master workshops, 1 mechanical workshop, a computer lab and a 10,000 book library; along with a sports center. Zavhan is one of the more isolated aimags in Mongolia mainly because it is very mountainous. I have been told it is very beautiful. I will be going there with one TEFL teacher, who will live within walking distance from me. My technical trainer is also located there, so I will have plenty of help getting settled in I do believe. I think I am going to love this, we shall see. One of the biggest ‘IF’ is how well I get on with my hashaa family. I am not worried. This should be a very interesting next couple of weeks.

So the final Saturday before training was done was our ‘family appreciation day/picnic’. We went out to this park about a half a hour from Sukhbaatar, on the way we took 3 wrong turns. Roads in Mongolia are not novice driver friendly, I am glad I don’t have to drive here. So we got out there and spent the entire day out there eating, drinking, and playing games. Our families decided to treat us to Hoodock, I think it is called, which is meat cooked with hot rocks. The meat that was chosen was goat, this was the first time I had goat, and intestines at that. So the goat was fresh, they bought it and then brought it out in a trunk of one of the families car, and slaughtered it there. It was kind of hard to watch them kill the goat and then butcher it. America is a really sanitized country and we don’t normally have to watch that. But o well, it is common here so I guess I will have to get used to it. So they cleaned that and then made some blood sausage out of the intestines, as you don’t want to waste parts you can eat… Honestly it doesn’t taste that bad, it is just hard to chew. So after they butchered the goat we just hung out, some people played volleyball others Frisbee and others just hung out. Lunch was a nice spread of watermelon, xiam, potato salad, cookies and blood sausage, with some vodka of course. Not a bad lunch, though they like to force more food and vodka on you than you want. After lunch we wandered outside with the food and then passed the vodka glass around again, but this time we all had to sing a song after we took a drink. Some of us know a song or two, other, like me, don’t. I ended up singing a song along with the accompaniment of my host mother, I can’t sing, but at least they didn’t boo me and tell me to sit down. The song was one about a mother’s milk tea. It is currently a popular modern folk song. Once that was done I ended up going and taking a short nap. Once I came out we played some more Frisbee and hung out and chatted. More vodka was passed around, a couple of times. We watched them make the Hoodock stuff. The process is to heat some rocks as hot as possible in fire, then put some water in a sealable metal bucket of sorts and put in, alternating between the meat, potato, carrot and hot rocks, the goods. It took about 2 hours for the food to cook. During that time the party went on. MMM…once the food was done they brought it down. One tradition with this is that the hot rocks are legend to heal sickness when you hold them in your hands. All I can say is that they are hot. The meat and vegetables were eaten ‘cave man style’ with our hands. I will say that the goat meat was some of the best meat I have ever eating. It was delicious. It could be because I new it was fresh, but I don’t know it was good, same with the vegetables and broth. The broth itself had a real smoky flavor from the rocks, as they were heating in the fire and had ash on them when the put them in with it. The food was wonderful, though it was hard to wash our hands. Once dinner was done, and more vodka was passed around, it was dancing time. The Americans for the most part didn’t do so well with that. After that it was more Frisbee and then time to go. We spent a good 8-9 hours out there. It was a good day, good food, good fun. Some lessons learned, well reinforced: 1. You cant escape the vodka. They may or may not pour you small shots, but you cant really get away from it 2. You cant escape food you don’t want to eat. Blood sausage, while I didn’t dislike it, it is not something I would like to eat regularly. Just chew and swallow. You gain more respect if you eat it instead of refusing it. And sometime you cant socially refuse it. 3. Learn Mongolian Songs. I don’t know any song, American or other, in its entirety. This is going to have to change. It is one of the pastimes of Mongolians to sings songs at celebrations. So ya…time to learn to sing 4. Learn to dance. Mongolians like to dance. It is something I want to learn anyways but ya. Time to learn

So training is over. Time to reflect. This is what I thought about the whole Pre-Service Training that PC/M gave us. Over all I will say it has been a good experience, I feel as ready as I probably could be for service, given that it is all in 11 weeks. Language The language was hard. We had our Final Language Proficiency Test on August 8th. In the official language proficiency jargon we were supposed to reach a level equivalent to ‘Novice-High’, whatever that means. I take it to mean that we should be able to survive in Mongolia. Not to hard. I got a Novice High. Overall the language training has been a bit tough. Four hours a day, Monday through Friday. It was a lot, though our teachers were overall good and helpful. While the language program in general could be improved, especially the text book that they gave us. I think it all went well. I think I will be able to survive in this country now fairly easily, I hope. I can read and write better than I can hear or talk. I don’t talk much by habit, my personality and all, so there may be a reason for that. Cross Culture Learning the culture has been a bit of a mix bag of challenges. We had a twice a week two hour class on cultural issues, ranging from sex, alcohol, and dancing to how to live in a ger. I feel that I learned enough to not get myself stabbed over some cultural misunderstanding. I feel that it was a lot of info, really fast, and that it didn’t sink in very well. While some of the stuff on alcohol came in handy when my host uncle came up, a lot of it will be forgotten until we get to site and need it. I think a booklet or a PDF file or something should be given out to help us out. But hey, that is half the fun; a long as I get out a live, whatever. CED No one really knows what we will be doing for CED work in reality. 5 of us will be working for Chambers of Commerce; the other 3 will be with other organizations. So training was a bit vague and loose. What it did give us is a basic understanding of the types of business, the scale of business, and the current challenges that business will face, along with some basic hands stuff, such as a case study and a business symposium. I think it all went well, and given everything as it was I don’t think they could do that much more. Once we get to site we will know what we need to get help on, so we can go from there. I feel ready, as long as I get a good translator… Host Family My host family was good. I am perfectly satisfied with how this experience turned out. While I am a quiet person and kind of felt like a house guest most of the time, I made it what in the end I probably wanted and needed; a hands off family that let me do my own thing. While I am kind of sad that I didn’t get the close relationship that on a level I would have liked, they are busy, and I was busy and on a level didn’t want that added level of stuff; though the language practice would have been great. In the end I can only blame myself for anything that went wrong; though nothing major went wrong. My family made me a shirt. It is gray and has black with silver scroll work on the boarders. It is really nice.

Now I am sure that as you are reading my blog that you are interesting in either me or Mongolia, though in reality you do need to be interested in both. So if you haven’t done much reading about Mongolia here is a little primer about the country. This information has been taken from the book “Land of the Blue Sky: A guide to Mongolia” that had been recently been published by Peace Corps Mongolia.

Geography

Mongolia is the world’s largest landlocked state at 1.57 million square kilometers. It serves as a buffer state between it’s to massive neighbors, Russia and China. It is about the size of Alaska for comparison. Mongolia is the least densely populated country on the planet, with less than 3 million people living in it.

While Mongolia is situated in northern Asia, and is often cold there is a vast difference in the different areas of Mongolia. In the northern Mongolia is Lake Khuvsgul, the deepest lake in Central Asia, it holds about 1% of the worlds fresh water. There are numerous small and medium size rivers that flow through northern Mongolia, making it the bread basket, and greenest, though most humid part, of the country. The eastern part of Mongolia is characterized by endless steppe and grassland. It is one of the last great unspoiled grazing ecosystems in the world. It also holds the generally accepted birth place of Chingis Khan, Dadal Village. In the south is the Gobi, which means desert. The west holds the mainly mountains, especially the Altai Mountain Range. Mongolia is covered by 40% mountains. The western area is one of the more picturesque areas of Mongolia due to its glacier caped mountains.

The climate is continental, which means hot summer and cold winters. There are about 260 days of sun every year. Snow can be found on the ground from October to April, though it rarely snows a lot at any one time.

History

The history of Mongolia is dominated by one figure, Chingis Khan. The known history of Mongolia stretches back to 300 BCE, when the nomadic tribes untied for the first time to raid and pillage northern China, which precipitated the building of the great wall. Between this time and when Temujin was born permanent unification failed, though the tribes still had successes against the Chinese and other enemies. If you are interested in Chingis you can find many other sources so I will leave it at that he is the main hero of Mongolia, for good reason. After 1400 and the breaking apart of and collapse of some of the successor states of the Mongol empire, not much happened. China conquered and rules Mongolia until around 1911, when, with Russian assistance, Mongolia became a semi-free state. In 1924 Mongolia became the Mongolian Peoples Republic, a Soviet vassal state, which lasted until 1990, when Mongolia truly became a free state.

One reason why the history of Mongolia is so short in some cases and sparse, is that it has relied on oral traditions, as many North American Native American tribes do. While there is history all abound in Mongolia, it wasn’t until Chingis Khans ago that written was adopted and it was written down.

Politics

Mongolia has a parliamentary democratic. There are two major parties, one the Mongolian Peoples Revolutionary party, or reformed communists, and the Democratic Union Coalition. The parliament is called the Great Khural. The president is head of state, while the prime minister is head of government. There are 72 seats in parliament.

Some of the pertinent issues that face Mongolia are: environmental pollution, corruptions, and various social issues, such as STD’s and human trafficking. One sticking point for human rights activists is the state-sanctioned secret executions and alleged ill-treatment of prisoners.

Economy

Like in most post-communist countries the transition to a market economy was difficult. While the early to mid 1990’s was a difficult time, the economy has recovered and is growing. Mongolia’s economy has been traditionally based n agriculture and livestock. There are 40 million head of livestock in Mongolia. Read GDP has been growing at a fast pace, though there are several negative trends. The main one is inflation, which in 2007 was15% by official government numbers. Also despite rising prices for some of the raw material resource, such as gold and copper, production only increased minimally. In regards to economic relations, due to geographic constraints most trade is conducted with Russia and China, 34% of imports from Russian and 50% from China.

Religion

Mongolia has traditionally had a tolerant stance towards religion, Chings khan created the first empire that embraced religious freedom. Mongolia still follows this tradition. Mongolia has traditionally been dominated by Buddhism and Shamanism; there are many different customs that are in secular society that have their roots in either one or both of these traditions.

Shamanism is less of a religion as it is a category of beliefs and practices. One of the most important features in Mongolia is shy worship, which places the sky as the supreme male deity. The female earth along with hundreds of lesser spirits joins the blue sky. Shamanism relies on a shaman to act as an intermediary between the spirit and human realms. Shamanism today has been marginalized due to the communist repression, and Buddhist influence. One cultural practice that has been adopted into Mongolian daily life is that travelers walk around Ovoos three times and toss a rock onto them on each pass for good luck.

Buddhism is the most popular religion in Mongolia. Mongolian Buddhism is Tibetan by origin and aspires to release an individual from the endless cycles of rebirth. Buddhist monasteries were one of the few permanent structure located around Mongolia historically. Though under communisms many of the monestaries were left in ruins, and the monks executed or exiled. Post communist Mongolia is still working on rebuilding the Buddhist infrastructure with the help of other traditionally Buddhist countries.

In the western region of Mongolia is a significant Kazak minority which are Muslim. This along with other minority religious, such as Christianity, finish off the tapestry of Mongolia’s religions. As anywhere abroad there are a fair amount of missionaries around, the Mormons being the most visible.

Language

The Mongolian language is hard to learn. It is in the Altaic family of languages. Its written history only dates back to the time of Chingis Khan, though its alphabet has changed about 10 times since then. Currently Mongolia uses a modified form of Cyril that was imported from Russia during the 1930’s. Most Mongolians over 30 are conversant in Russian, which is a legacy from the Communist days. Currently English is the fastest growing language that is being learned, though Russian, Chinese and Korean are also somewhat popular.

Arts

Mongolian art has traditionally centered on its oral and pastoral traditions. During the communist period Socialist Realism was imported and sponsored by the state, though it has given way to more traditional and traditionally inspired art. The oral tradition has made folk tales a very important part of Mongolians literary landscape. While the oral tradition is failing, many of these tales are being written down. Also folk songs are VERY popular. Many times when a person is traveling, especially in the country side by public transportation, people just break out into song. Many of these songs are about ones mother, ones horse and ones country.

Traditional music is based around folk songs, they are sung at any occasion. While there is a national symphony that was set up by the USSR, it primarily played western music, though there has been Mongolian written music for it. There are several types of traditional music, though I wont go into them. The traditional musical instrument is the horse-head fiddle, which has two horse hair strings and a trapezoidal sound box.

Popular culture in Mongolia follows similar trends as in the west. Movies have become very popular, with about 3 Mongolian movies produced each year. Musical genres are as varied in the US, though it includes a lot of music inspired by traditional music.

Well this may have been something I should or could have done earlier, instead of towards the end of training, but o well. I like my host family, they are very nice. My host father, Bayamuk, 44 years old, I don’t have a clue about what he does for a job, though he spends a lot of time in the countryside with his herder friends. He also has a very thick accent so I rarely can understand anything he says. My host mother, Amaglan, is 42, she works as a manager of some sort with an AIDs project, I think. I have 3 host brother, the oldest Ulanu is 24, Mayamuk is 15, and the youngest is 10. I have never been able to remember his name. Ulanu just graduated college, he went to become a Mongolian history teacher, Mayamuk is in school and he also is the salesman at the families shop, and the youngest I think is in school, he is semi-feral. We have a helper person, her name is Ulana. From what I can gather she is my host fathers, brothers daughter from an aimag down south. I don’t know the terms of her being here, though she mainly does all of the cook, cleaning and other miscellaneous chores. I mentioned before that the family owns a small shop here in Korpus, it is the largest of the three small shops around. They spend a lot of time there, and I spend most of my time at the house, so I really don’t hang out with the family much. Kind of reminds me of family back home in way, so I don’t mind. I mainly read, study and do whatever when no one is around. Across the river the family also has 9ish cows which they milk and the sell the milk or make yogurt out of it. It is a wonderful family, I am the third volunteer that they have hosted, though I will say they are a bit more hands off than I would have preferred, but I enjoy I all the same.

The word Ger, or гэр, is the general word for home. There are specific words for house, and apartment also but ger is normally just used. Now when I would think of a ger from the American perspective I would think of the felt yurt. And they are felt yurts. About 40% of Mongolians live in gers. I have heard differing takes on weather the apartment or yurt is better. Apartments are nice as you don’t have as many chores to do around the house, though most apartments are old soviet style block apartments, which means it is hard to fix anything. Also in the winter apartments have central heating via radiators, I mean city wide central heating, so they don’t get to warm. I have heard that they tend to be 50-60F. Kind of cool. Gers have more chores, but you can keep them as warm as you want in the winter. There are also a lot of man points involved with living in a ger I hear, mainly in regards to the chores. I am not sure which is best.

Ok so on July 13 my host aunt and uncle stopped by, nothing big back in the states but here it is a time for celebration of sorts as transportation is so bad. So vodka, beer and food was brought out from the shop. Though I was called out a bit latter, though host mother did have me come out for dinner and to attempt to chat, which was cool; though my language is more survival, not conversational so I was very quiet. This was the first time I drunk with the host family, or host parents more precisely. The one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind was how it reminded me of the couple of times I drank with Russians when I was in St Petersburg last year, it was a bit uncanny; though Russian drinking culture was exported to Mongolia. The main similarities were that Vodka is for toasts, not for siping, though here you can just sip if you choose to, Russia you cant. Beer is more for sipping. Food is the chaser, not juice. Vodka is never mixed. The food was ham, break, pickles, and fruit, pretty close to when I was in Russia. Main differences were in Russia it was pepper vodka, with tomato juice for the chase, along with food and it was a lot more. In Russia it is drink till you pass out, here it is more you have bottle to celebrate your visit, but that is it. Once you are out you are out. It is more for social occasions than just habits, as alcoholism is frowned upon. I find this really interesting.

I have noticed other similarities and potential influences. The main one, other than drinking culture, was during Naadam’s opening ceremony I noticed some Russian/Soviet style choreography and dancing, one of the Mongolian sitting next to me pointed out one Russian dance. From my Russian history, and little Mongolian history I can point out the two time periods for why this is. During the reign of Chinggis sons, they conquered up to Kiev, which placed all of modern Russia under Mongolian, or Tatar rule until around the 1500’s. Three hundred years of Mongolian rule made Russia more culturally similar to Mongolia than it did to Europe, though it was Christian country. This is one reason why Russia will never truly be a European country, but I digress. Peter the Great and his successors tried to make Russia into a European country, though a lot of subtle Mongolian and other Asian-style cultural traits lived on, though I cant really point them out. The book Natasha’s Dance is really good for explaining this all. So that is one time of cross cultural exchange. The second was under soviet rule, from 1924-1989. This is when it went the other way, Russian or Soviet culture being exported to Mongolia. This is where the drinking culture, dances, choreography, etc came from. So over time there has been a lot of cultural blending between the two cultural groups, and you must not forget that Russia is influences from other nomadic tribes in Central Asia and many other ethnic groups, so that can have an impact.

I just find the topic interesting. Read Natasha’s Dance sometime, it is fascinating.

Naadam is the second largest festival, after Tsagaan Tsar, in Mongolia. Naadam celebrates the three manly sports of wrestling, horse racing, and archery, along with Hoshor, which is similar to a “hot pocket’ in the states. The national Naadam is July 11 and 12th, though most towns and aimags have their own some time before or after that. In Sukhbaatar Naadam is July 9th and 10th. The first day of Naadam, I met up with Nathan, one of the other volunteers, at 9:20 to go in with his mother and one other volunteer at 9:30. In many parts of the world outside of the industrialized countries time is a bit of a fluid thing, we didn’t leave until around 10:15. No matter, though we did miss the opening ceremony, though I heard that it was no big deal. So we get to the stadium, having found the other PCT’s by the market. The opening ceremony at the stadium more than made up for missing the opening ceremony on Sukhbaatar Square, it was awesome. It started with a parade, with a army or police band playing the Starts and Strips Forever, it made up for missing the 4th of July. And then there were some traditional Naadam songs and some dances. It was all awesome. The traditional Mongolian dress and regalia is amazingly beautiful. Once the opening ceremony was done wrestling started. There were three areas for the competition, wrestling was in the stadium, archer was outside of the stadium and horse racing was in Bog 5. We watched wrestling for about and hour and a half, it was interesting. Mongolian wrestling is different than western wrestling. There are no points or anything, there are very few rules. Hell there are no weight classes, the goal is to be the first person to get an opponent body on the ground. That is a bit simplified but it is the gist of it. Once of the PCT’s from Bog 5, Trip, offered himself up to wrestling, he got crushed. After that we went to find lunch, it was a futile attempt as the lines were long and they weren’t cooking very quick, so I didn’t get any realy lunch, o well. I did end up buying a silver silk traditional Naadam shirt though for 12000 Tugricks, it is really nice, though I think I paid a bit to much. Once that was over we wandered over the archery competition to watch one of the PCV that is in Sukhbaatar compete. She didn’t do that great, though I am impressed still. The goal of archery is to hit a small red square that is about 60-75 meters away, hard to say the least. Once that was done the group walked back and watched a movie. Kind of anti-climatic but o well. The second day of Naadam was very lazy. I didn’t really do anything as I didn’t know what other people were doing. I was, or I thought I was, going to be going to the horse races with Ulanu my host brother, but he spent the day fixing some truck that has been in the hashaa for a couple of weeks. So while it is Naadam, it doesn’t seem to be that important of a holiday to an extent. Though as we had two days off for Naadam we have class Friday and Saturday morning form 8 until 10, joyful. I will say though it was a nice holiday, though lower key than I was expecting, though that may be because I am in Korpus.

Probably one of the best items I brought with me to Mongolia that I though about not bringing are by far my hiking boots. Selenge Aimag is beautiful and has wonderful areas to got hiking in. We in Korpus are lucky because we are right in the hills/mountains. It is about a 20 minute walk to get up to the top of one of them and the views are amazing. About every week we have gone on a group hike, and most times I will go for short hikes during the week on my own. The views are great and the exercise is wonderful. The one downside is that the Russian boarder is so close that we are limited in how far north we can hike , as some in our group found out when the inadvertently went to the boarder. This I will say for sure though, if you want to go on a backpacking trip abroad, Mongolia in late June/early July was be a perfect place.

So we had Mid-Center Days this past week. Mid Center Days are three days of training that makes more sense to do as large groups. We came down on July 2nd in the morning. We had classes from 9-5 Wed, Thur, and Fri. The classes were on stuff like placement site selection, medical issues, Mongolian holidays, cross-sector projects and some technical sessions. One important side note is that on July 1st there were some riots in Ulanbaatar and a protest here in Darkhan about the election. I don’t personally know the details about it, as I wasn’t watching TV or anything that evening. The important point is that there was a 4 day prohibition on alcohol sales in UB and in Darkahn. Put a slightly different edge on atmosphere in the evenings, almost. The evenings, even with the prohibition were very enjoyable. While there was a prohibition on sales, the front desk at the hotel was still selling beers to it patrons, aka us. Though that only lasted for the first night. So we bought a couple and ended up hanging out in someone’s room. Someone or some people found as store that was still selling vodka so there was several bottles of vodka laying around. It was a good time, though it felt like a college party, which is something I never cared for. There were also more than a few current PCV’s that came into Darkhan for Mid-Center Days, which was cool. Thursday night was the best by far. Caddy our CED trainer for the first half of training had us all over for dinner. Several other current CED PCV’s also came, which was cool. We had pseudo brushetta, strombolie and pizza. It was amazingly good food. Throughout the evening a fair amount of other PCV’s and trainers stopped by. We even had two RPCS from Africa around, one from South Africa and one from Botswana. They were really cool, good times chatted. Now throughout the evening we ended up going through probably 8-10 bottles of vodka between everyone, or its equivalent anyways. Though we probably had 25 people that came through, and they are only ½ liter bottles also here. Where it all came from I don’t really know. Jason, one of the current PCV’s birthday was also that day, which no one knew about. He turned 30 and his goal for the entire day was to take 30 shots of vodka. He met us at the hotel along with one other PCV, Solamon, and led us to Caddy’s place. At that time he was at 13 shots, that was around 7:30, most of us left at about midnight and he just had his 29th shot, and threw up. That was kind of ridiculous. It was a great night overall I will say. Now for the big day, well in one sense anyways, the 4th of July. This is my second year being abroad on Independence Day, last year I was in Russia. For that my friends and I went down to the Strelka on Vasilevsky Island and had some beers and latter in the night watched the laser show, which was synced to classical music with a techno beat to it. This year after training was done we had a party, we had burgers, hotdogs, watermelon and prioshok. It was good food. Once we were done eating was had a dogball tournament, it was trainees v trainers. We had 4 teams each, it was even by the end of the tournament, 3-3. The rest of training is still ahead of us. Naadam, which is one of the largest Mongolian holidays is next week. Naadam is centered around the three manly sports of Wrestling, Archery and horseracing. We have 2 or 3 volunteer entering themselves into the wrestling, I may do that next year if I learn how to wrestle. Each city and aimag has its own Naadam festivals, and then the national festival is July 11-13 I think. In Sukhbaatar it is the 8th-10th. During those days we don’t have any training, I think. After that we have our last 4 weeks of training, which is kind of intense. I have to really start working on the language more than I have been. Once our training is done we go back to Darkhan again, for final center days, or Darkan: Part Three. If I remember right we will receive our assignments on August 12th, so only 5ish weeks until I know what I will be doing. Crunch time is here!