(Means "how's things?")
This update is certainly overdue, as the title suggests. Lest the post be greeted with undue enthusiasm, I should warn you: the boundary between writing for pleasure and writing for an audience has been blurred of late. I've been reading through (at my dad's recommendation) the Wheel of Time series and am currently finishing up book five (of, I think, 15), so that's been coloring my vernacular. Also a bunch of books to prep for the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT).
That's the starting point, I think: one of the more likely futures that Emily and I have discussed after Peace Corps has been a career working in the Foreign Service, and diplomacy more generally. The test itself is apparently extremely difficult, and even though we won't take it until February, we've been preparing. I think that I can, for example, label every country on the world map (though I'll be damned if I can recognize flags). We can also converse in an educated way on the past 500 years of world development, and one of the books I'm reading is giving me deep insight into US foreign policy since WWII, fascinating in its own right.
The above paragraph sort of speaks for itself in terms of what we've been doing since the last update, at least partially, in that the latter part of the summer represented a lull, which we filled with studying. It was a bit of a slog, to be honest, but now that school is back in session (and has been since Sept 1), we've got more interesting things to report.
First and foremost: school is back. There's an adage about the chaos of the beginning of the year, I'm sure, but because I can't remember it, you'll have to make it up yourself. Schedules changing weekly, students coming and going as their schedules change, figuring out the mindset of the students you're advising, using that "secret information" to tune your classes, not to mention keeping your personal and social lives in order. As an example of the last point, Emily and I have played host to at least six different houseguests in the past month alone: two couch surfers making their way to Germany (from here! by hitchhiking!), two PCVs (shorthand for volunteers) visiting from the east of the country as we all headed out to Eagle Fest, and two other PCVs who live in our aimag (state) who were visiting for the weekend, and at least another six who visited during the day. It's been like running a bed and breakfast at certain points. That's not complaining, by the way, just observation; running a BnB is one of Em's and my retirement plans.
Though I'd love to share the vision we have for that BnB, I figure many of you reading this perked up at the mention of Eagle Fest. It was in Bayan Olgiy, the westernmost aimag in the country, and which is populated mostly by Kazakh Mongolians. The aimag itself was gorgeous -- the drive out, for instance, went something like this: driving through a valley between two mountains and next to a river and filled with trees that were brilliant orange on both sides of the river, then climbing out of the valley and into the vastness of the steppe, represented by the peaks of mountains on all sides and given depth by the snow-covered peaks behind them. Add to that the hugeness rendered by the unbelievable distances in all directions, and you've got a lot of time for contemplation. AND, in the city, they had a coffee shop. A coffee shop! Unbelievable.
The festival itself was more of an exhibition than a festival, with eagle hunters competing for various prizes including best-dressed, who could get their eagle to come the farthest when they called, and who could get their eagle to land most precisely in a targeted area. The day was mostly cloudy with a strong, strong wind coming in over the mountains that framed the whole thing. Or perhaps I should say this: on one side were the mountains, on the other side was a wide open vista that looked something like this:
After we got back, the school schedule resumed. In between now and then, we've tried more to get our schedules set and get our clubs started, the fabled Dr. E came to visit us and give us flu shots, and we had our teacher's day celebration. Below are some pictures of that stuff. We've been anxiously (until recently) watching the US election cycle in the meantime, and I've been getting way too hyped for the coming year of college basketball. The cat is healthy and happy, as are we.
I'm simplifying quite a lot, here, but honestly, there's not too much to tell other than what I've mentioned above. Life in Mongolia is no longer as foreign as it was before, and our successes are beginning to outweigh our frustrations as we get into the meat of our second year.
Regardless, we miss our friends and family back home as much as ever. Drop us a line, or find us on Skype. In the meantime, pictures:
Picture from the road to kind of give you a feel for where we were.
Much the same.
Look how effing big it is!
The sky constantly blows my mind out here.
It's like driving through... I don't even know. Cloud city, but not the one from Star Wars.
A lake we passed on the way. A younger Mongolian kid was sitting in the front seat, and he seemed disinterested. We said, "Isn't this beautiful?", to which he responded, "I've seen it a hundred times."
Teacher's day blurriness.
SUPER SERIOUS
MONGOL STEEL
The fog came in very, very thickly one day this past week. There's a mountain there, barely a mile away. Super claustrophobic.
There's the mountain to the left, and some recently-snow-covered ones to the right. Winter approacheth -- the temperatures have dropped into the low 40s for the high. As of Sunday, we'll be hovering right at freezing. Or so I'm told.
