Next year in Vegas

The January meeting in UB was kind of surreal. It was held in the Chingis Khan hotel, not to be confused with the Khan Palace hotel around the corner. You can’t swing a marmot in UB without hitting something named after Chingis. The hotel is really nice and if it weren’t for all the Mongolians, you’d think you were in any other hotel conference room in the world. The meeting itself was 9-4 Monday to Friday. All the aimag and UB staffs were there. Each section got to give a presentation. I had a reputation for making good Power Points in grad school, not to toot my own horn. So, it was kind of painful watching the Mongolian presentations. It takes of almost twice as many words to say something in Mongolian than in English. Most of you know what it’s like to see a someone read and entire slide worth of text. Now imagine that and then having a translator repeat three sentences into your ear. You feel gypped and bored at the same time.

All the other Mercy Corps PCVs got to give presentations. I feel kind of out in the wilderness sometimes, because the word RURAL is on the front of my program’s name. I asked the new country director to send an experienced counterpart out to my aimag to help my supervisors make a real work plan for me. I should be careful what I ask for. This week they’ve been pressing me to write a plan before I have more help and I’ve had more offers to teach English all over the place. I want to concentrate on teaching at the market and doing some computer lessons. I’ll have a better idea of what I’ll be dong after the final Peace Corps training in February.

Everyone in the country is busy preparing for Tsagaan Sar. It’s the Mongolian celebration of the lunar New Year. Regular new year’s, which the Mongols absorbed from the Russians along with vodka and bad dance music, is celebrated in the last week in December with big employees only work parties. You’d think a people so prone to gossip would let spouses in to tamp the rumors down. New Year’s eve itself was weird, because around 12:00 almost everyone left the club I was at and went home. They all came back a few minutes later. Apparently, it’s bad luck to be out at the stroke of midnight. Tsagaan Sar officially lasts three days and mostly involves visiting relatives’ families in the order of seniority and giving gifts and such. It’s supposed last three days, but I get the impression that in the countryside it turns into a month-long mutton induced bender. Should I hyphenate mutton induced?

There are some other developments that I won’t get into now. I’ll see how Tsagaan Sar goes. Then I should finally get started teaching at the market and working on a long-term non-mercy corps project. I look forward to comments and mail as always. Don’t click on the envelope unless you want to send a post to someone else. And no, it’s not as cold as they say.