Hands Down

What an amazing trip! After I finished work on Thursday I went over to our country director`s house to catch the last of Thanksgiving dinner. I managed to get a turkey wing, some veggies, and pie. Then we went to a party at a volunteer`s apartment nearby, then to kareoke, then to a club. It was a preivew of what IST (in service training) will be like in three weeks when 40+ volunteers from my group are all together for the first time since training. IST is being held at a resort outside UB then most of us will go into town to celebrate Christmas. There`s bound to be plenty of foreigners to talk to again. I`ll have to pace myself this time. Combined with the bad air in the city my throat was soar from talking to British people about British politics and an Israeli guy about Israeli politics. Hopefully there are some Canadians there next time.

I noticed one more contrast in UB that I forgot to mention in my last post. Check this out.

Yes, that is the Grand Khan Irish Pub where I enjoyed breakfast with my Irish VSO friend Lorraine. I suggested it was like naming a Mongolian restaurant after Brian Boru.

Update

I'm staying in UB until Sunday, but I thought I'd let you guys know how my trip is going so far.

Visiting Arvaiheer was definitely worth it. My office hired a driver for me so I had the car to myself. Drivers usually cruise around trying to fill every possible inch of a vehicle before leaving town here in Mongolia. The trip only took six hours on mostly paved roads and I had a great fried chicken meal when I got there. No restaurants serve chicken in Arkhangai and Peace Corps medical has lifted the ban of eating it. I then checked into the my friend Laura's office. She works for the Gobi Initiative, another Mercy Corps operation. Their offices have a lot more people and are more established. Most have them have a few English speakers so it's easier for volunteers to get stuff done. I don't even have a dedicated translator so I can't interact much with clients. They're working on finding me someone though. The visit was worthwhile, because I learned more about their operation and the kinds of activities and trainings they do. Laura has been involved in two trade fairs and brought a county fair feeling to both. I'll be working on one for my aimag most of next year and I got plenty of advice and examples to take back with me to Arkhangai.

On Friday, we went to the Loar's (Sierra and Jesse) ger to watch a movie and eat pizza. Apparently Laura and her husband, Hector, do this every week. Jesse made the dough and we each got to cook our own pizza in an electric wok. When we arrived there was an exchange of goods that the Loar's had just brought back to UB. Living in Mongolia outside of UB is kind of like being in prison. You're always waiting for a package from your family or ordering contraband deliveries.

I took my first Mongolian bus from Arvaiheer to UB on Saturday. I got there on time and waited an hour and a half for the bus, aisles included, to fill with people and cargo. This was a more typical Mongolian travel experience, but at least I had enough leg room. This trip took eight hours on good roads and my ipod lasted the whole way thanks to my tune juice. I got a cab to the UB Guesthouse, which except for being really hard to find the first time, is a great place to stay. They have hot showers, free DVDs and internet, laundry service, and a plethora of foreigners to talk to. Sadly, they lack sexy, sexy dancers.

This is my first trip to UB since July and on that trip we were sheparded around by our trainers. Now I really have a chance to explore the city and, believe it or not, I can find my way around pretty well. I've been working most of the day, so I haven't been able to do many tourist things. I'll have to wait until I'm actually on vacation. At Mercy Corps headquarters, I've learned more about the whole program and now I realize why RASP doesn't have the same programs as Gobi. We're a much younger program and our offices are smaller. I'm hopping to bring some of Gobi's methods and input to my office though. That's how volunteers can help, because the two programs don't really talk to each other enough.

I'll have more to say about UB after our Thanksgiving dinner at the country director's apartment tonight. A few things that have struck me so far are all the contrasts that exist between UB and the rest of the country and within the city itself. First, to understand how important UB is to the country you'd have to put the 20 largest cities in the US into one and place it around St. Louis. Everything in the country goes through UB including most roads and rail lines. It's the only place you can get luxury items like real cheese and coke light (diet coke) so every volunteer comes here with a shopping list.

The contrasts within the city are small, like a guy in a del selling time on a mobile phone, or just odd like Los Bandidos the Mexican/Indian Restaurant, Strings the club with the incredible Philipino cover band named Nightshift, and Marco Polo the Italian restaurant with the strip club upstairs (so I hear). There's also the fact that most service workers speak English so when I ordered "sharsen toomc" at Dublin Irish pub the Mongolian waiter replied "yes, french fries".

The driver picked me up early so I didn't have time to burn pictures, but I'll take more and put up some galleries next week. For now, you'll have to enjoy this picture my friend Amazing Ben made of me as Ghengis Khan.

Priceless.

I don’t do windows

I had dinner at my tutor’s house with one of my sitemates last night. Otgoo, my tutor, brought some fish from her family’s house by Lake Hovsguul. Being in a landlocked country, I haven’t had fish in a long time. It was good, but the highlight of the evening was getting to watch cable TV. They have a few random English programs like this channel called NOW which just has weird shows about racing and video games. Then there is the German channel that does Deutschcentric news in English once a day. I am always surprised to see what American things they choose to dub into Mongolian. I watched, in a ger with a bunch of herders, the movie Wonderland with Val Kilmer as John Holmes. That was helpful. I was not sure how "wad" translated before.

Oh, you are wondering about the headline. Over here, all the apartments have two sets of windows and you have to seal them well or else you will lose all your heat. I tried before, but after a lot of banging and caulking (hee hee) there was still a draft. So, Otgoo said she would send some of her students over to help me. Apparently, that is normal here. So today three teenage girls come over, I give them a bucket (to clean the windows) and some duck tape, and they went to work. Luckily, I got two rolls in the mail, because they used it all. Now all the windows are sealed and it is a stable 67 degrees. I might have to break out the space heater later though.

I have plenty of warm clothes to wear on my trip next week. I (actually my mom) bought four pairs of long underwear of varying weights before I left. They go from silk to fleece, but I only wear the silk ones when I’m alone. They make me feel sexy. What? Oh well, I think I will post a bunch of galleries when I am in UB and the internet is faster. Expect more from there next week.

Traveling Man

Hey, gang. I know it’s a while since I rapped at yeah, but I’ve been really busy. The business plan for the dairy market is coming along. I have a much better sense of what goes into a plan after working on the word and excel portions. Other than that, work has been slow and I was somewhat disappointed that I did not have more too. I think the main thing is that my office has never worked with a volunteer and my job was always going be less well defined than a teacher’s was. That’s why it was good that one of the Mongolian program staff came out from UB to check on me. She gave me some good ideas as to how I could be more productive. For instance, I didn’t know that my counterpart was translating stuff into English herself and leaving sections incomplete. Now she asks me for more help and our respective language skills are getting better.

One of the other suggestions was for me to teach a community class. I sort of resented the idea of having to teach English at first, but now I see that it can really businesses. Therefore, I came up with idea of teaching a class at the local market. I could teach the vendors how to say the names of all the items they sell in English and how to give prices etc. By the time all the tourists come back next year, they will be able to talk to them. We talked to the market manager and he said it was a good idea. My counterpart also suggested I teach at the government building. I will see what the demand is, but with two classes and work, I should have plenty to do.

I also heard that Mercy Corps approved my big Thanksgiving trip so now I will be going to visit another volunteer at a Gobi Initiative office and spend a week in UB. My sitemates are already jealous that I get to visit other parts of the aimag. Most volunteers just go from home to school and only travel on Peace Corps business and for vacation. This trip means I will be going once a month from hear until February. I’d better save my money now.

Here is a map of the trip. Tsetserleg is the farthest west. Averheer, in the Gobi, is in the south and UB is the easternmost point. After this trip I will have made a big circle through the center of the country. I might get to go to more places in the Gobi and maybe even out to the far west next year. (Update: This map shows all of my travels as of November 1st, 2006.)

Here is a picture of me out side a hotel shaped like a giant ger. It was in Choolot soum. I got to go along on a bakery technology training there this weekend. I basically just watched a bunch of women bake cookies, bread, and cake for two days and was repeatedly ordered to taste everything. I love my job sometimes.