I’m in a guest house in UB now, after having moved out of Arvaikheer permanently, and everything’s a little too close and cluttered for me to say how I feel about all of that at the moment. I will say, though, that my final bus ride was less emotional than I would have liked it [...]

Things are coming to a close! It’s insane that I’ll be going back to America so soon. I sort of lack the expressive powers to be able to sum all of that up in words right now, so I’m just going to post some pictures of recent events with brief explanations. If you hate reading, [...]

…because “Spring” just doesn’t cut it. The pictures of snow from earlier 2009 entries of this blog may have been the only times we had ANY precipitation last winter/ spring. One or two times, maybe. This year, though, I feel like it’s snowed at least three times a week in Arvaikheer since October– often to [...]

Welcome, friends, to a speedy and cheerful post. I just wanted to upload a few pictures of our recent Annual Fifth Grade English Alphabet Celebration, of our new library in progress, and of some satisfying cosmetic dentistry. To give you a little background, many primary schools around the country choose a random day in the Spring to [...]

Hello all. I just got done reading my buddy Olivier’s blog and decided it was time to do the responsible thing and put some stuff up here. Just some pictures of the last few weeks and some updates. My sitemate Esu and I ( ^ ) just spent two weeks out west by the Kazakh border [...]

Just some pictures and quick explanations. * Zaya’s (former university student’s) house From the Left: Mandukhai, Zolboo, me, and Zaya’s little brother I opted to lose the del, as you can see in these pictures. It just got too heavy to walk up and down the mountain in. Plus, I wanted to attract fewer xenophobic threats from out-of-towners who [...]

Today was quite a day for holidays. Many of you probably celebrated Valentine’s Day, so congratulations on that, I guess. Luckily for me, though, the coinciding first day of Tsagaan Sar completely overshadowed any bittersweet Valentine-oriented specialness this year. It was quite en eventful day! Let’s start with last night. Mongolians celebrate Bituun–Tsagaan Sar Eve–with their [...]

A quick and disjointed account of all things recent. News and Happinesses Peace Corps finally approved the library project outlined in a recent post,  so my school will soon be able to acquire the necessary materials to set up a comfortable, student-centered, student-run learning space with books and electronic resources in several languages. Remember the sinus infection I [...]

It’s 3:07 a.m. I can’t sleep. It might have something to do with the raging sinus infection I have–you know, the one I somehow managed to contract while killing a debilitating throat infection with a ten-day course of bubonic plague medication. There is some wild pathogenic magic going on in these parts. I think the [...]

Sometimes I like to get above the town to Undurlig (Mongolian for ‘peak’)  for a few minutes to kind of center myself whenever the weather permits. I used to have to walk an hour to get there when I lived on the south side.  Now, though, it’s right behind my house. (Many of you might [...]

My hashaa family– Mom, or “older sister Zaya,” as she prefers, my 13 year-old brother Garidaa, and my three-year old brother Tingis –just came over for a quick and long overdue exchange of gifts from my trip to America. I’d hinted to little Tingis over a late night teatime a few weeks back that I [...]

Hello to everyone who reads this thing! I’m posting the proposal from the library renovation project I mentioned in a recent post. My counterparts and I have been working on it for a few months now and trying to secure funding, and some parties have expressed interest in giving material support of one kind or [...]

My peaceful readjustment to the Arvaikheer routine was interrupted last week by an urgent email from Peace Corps Medical. It said that we were all required to return to the capital before January 15th to receive our H1N1 vaccines. I shouldn’t call it an interruption, really; I was actually kind of looking for an excuse [...]

We had another Three Sun day yesterday, and though the pictures I took weren’t as magnificent as the one I ripped from Google, these ones should illustrate: It was a weird weather day. It was barely warm enough for precipitation, and you can see in the image above that the sky was all white, which [...]

I’ve recently returned from another jaunt to America, and it’s only appropriate that I talk a little bit about what it’s like to be a Peace Corps volunteer who’s gone back to the States not once, but twice. In a word: Amazing. The first time I went home [see previous entry], the whole experience felt like [...]

Soooo, again, it’s been a while…I’ve been holding off on the posts recently for two reasons–one, because I’m well into my second year and have therefore run out of novel things to discuss with respect to cultural observations, and two, because my internet visibility has expanded to attract the attention of some very disturbed and extremely vocal readers. Some of [...]

My excuse for the late post–no internet access (or, rather, no time for internet access) since my return to Mongolia at the end of last June. Apologies.  Anyway, I figured it would be appropriate now, on a nice little Saturday night in Arvaikheer, to dedicate an hour or so to a post about what it’s [...]

I just had an experience that absolutely necessitated an immediate blog post on Mongolian food culture. The team leader of our university foreign languages department initiated a lunch-preparation group a few months ago in which each of the 11 faculty members takes turns making food and bringing it in to work at around 11:00 am [...]

Apologies, once again, for the insane amount of time between my last post and this one. Part of the intensity of springtime here in Mongolia, as you’ll see in this entry, is the unreliability of electricity and technology like the Internet in the face of a tempestuous climate. But things seem to have calmed down [...]

As I prepare to write this entry, I’m trying to think of ways to include an explanation of my post-party-tipsy state into a disclaimer about the quality of the post. No need now, I suppose. Just get ready for the coolest entry ever…because this one’s about the coolest holiday in Mongolia: Tsagaan Sar. Tsagaan Sar means [...]

So I decided that  I’m going to post sections of the research I’ve been doing here from time to time. These sections will probably lack photos or videos, so I understand if you don’t want to read them =) The paper is tentatively called “Proxemics, Communication, and Collectivism - An Analysis of Residual Nomadic Interpersonal [...]

I would be remiss in my attempts to give any semblance of an accurate portrayal of Mongolian culture if I neglected the enormous party element any longer. So, without further adieu, I give you the epic party post. I think one would have to live in Mongolia for a few months, as I have, to begin [...]

Apologies for the inconsistent posting! I  just returned from a 10-day business trip (sans internet) around various parts of Mongolia, and the experiences I had made me realize that it was about time to discuss the challenging world of travel in this fascinating country. Prepare for a wildly anecdotal and generally all-over-the-place post. Giving an accurate [...]

Part of the beauty of Mongolia’s complex cultural, historical, and geographical landscapes is the intensity of the contrasts therein. Perhaps the starkest of these contrasts is the one that exists between Mongolia’s rural and urban populations. This wild discrepancy shows itself in nearly every aspect of the two halves–be it in air quality, visual aesthetics, [...]

After a first entry filled with carefully vague allusions to my whereabouts, I discovered that I am, in fact, allowed to disclose my location–provided I don’t give the exact situation of my house in relation to other landmarks in the town. So, I decided to do an entire entry on my city! I said before that [...]

So, I’ve been promising friends and family that I’m going to create a blog for my Mongolian experiences for about…seven months now. A few things happened during the holiday season, though, that finally pushed me out of the realm of mere planning…There are so many things that go on here in my life that necessitate [...]