The breathtaking, the mundane, and the breathtakingly mundane

November 11, 2015

Okay, so. Yes. Mongolia.

Fallout 4 came out yesterday, and I can't play it. It's probably for the best; I'd want to play it immediately, before any of the patches and bug fixes came out. When they initially released Fallout: New Vegas back in... I think 2010, it had so many bugs and glitches that it was basically unplayable for a while. It made a lot of people mad. I doubt they'll make the same mistake with this new title, but hey. I'm a bright-side kind of guy.

But Mongolia! It's cold here. Single-digits cold, and it is, as you might have noticed, not even mid-November yet. It has also snowed three times now. None of the snowfall would qualify as a lot, but it was enough to cover the ground in about two or three inches. The second and third snows were basically just flurries that lasted for most of the day; if you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't see it. That kind of snow.

The snow, specifically, had an interesting side-effect – I was able to start noticing paths that I hadn't known about before, due to foot traffic. There isn't much grass in Mongolia, so people just kind of walk anywhere they can to get where they're going, and trails don't really form until there's some way of knowing where people were. Snow provides that visual cue, and people have begun taking these specific paths.

One such path I discovered takes me a different way to and from my school, which is nice. Instead of traveling along the paved roads, I dive into what could only be described as the “ger suburbs” by way of a narrow path between two hashaa fences. Most gers are situtated in a fenced in area called a hashaa where they can dig an outhouse, store fuel for the winter, take care of the various minutiae of life that can't be accomplished in a ger, park a car if they have it, and keep a few animals to slaughter for food. These hashaas tend to be lined up next to each other (like a typical suburb, the key difference being their location within the city), sharing a fence for maybe two or three hashaas until they run into a street, usually made of dirt and stone.

Anyway, as I mentioned, one of the paths leads between a series of fences in between hashaas so narrow that, at one point, you have to lean one way or the other to avoid scraping up against the fences. It's kind of surreal; it makes you feel a little claustrophobic given how wide open the steppe is otherwise. I mean, seriously: the closest impediment to my normal view of the lands around the city are mountains which are at least three or four miles away, and that's only on one side. If my very old compass and my poor sense of direction can be trusted, they're away to the south and southwest. (Quick side note – occasionally, when the weather gets bad, low-hanging clouds completely shroud the mountains from view. Not even the foothills are visible; just a wall of gray or, in the case of a dust storm, brown.) Otherwise? Open steppe for as far as I can see.

So, when you're walking in between two fences so close that you have to lean this way and that like Michael Jackson in the “Smooth Criminal” music video, it feels claustrophobic. But when the fence suddenly ends and there aren't any buildings to obstruct your view, you are suddenly assaulted by the openness, the vastness. It feels like going outside after having been sick and bed-ridden for a week, but it feels this way every time I walk past it (not quite every day; I try to vary my routes).

Mongolia has its challenges, but these kind of awesomely commonplace things make it worth it.

In other news, Emily and I are now extremely busy. The first quarter of the year has passed and the second quarter has begun, and my schedule is now packed with nine classes (each 80 minutes), five sessions of office hours and advising (another 80 minutes each, but it's been great to get to work with students one-on-one), seven clubs (typically an hour each), two sessions of lesson planning each week, a shift teaching at the new language library which our Korean volunteer friend Grace just opened on Monday, a session learning Korean, and the odd tutoring lesson. They tell me this will only last until January, when a good portion of the third-year students will graduate (they go for 2.5 years). Then it'll be dull again.

Which is fine with me. I also agreed to serve as one of the National Coordinators for the “Write-On” creative writing contest here in Mongoland. And I just turned 29, so I need my rest. We had a good ol' fashioned good time for my birthday, iffen yer wonderin'.,

The electricity just went off (as I was writing this). Let's see how long it takes to come back on.

In the meantime, I have attended two official “opening ceremonies” for two projects undertaken by my Korean volunteer friends. One was the aforementioned language library, which I encourage you to “Like” on Facebook (Uvs Foreign Language Learning). The other was the unveiling of some new and frankly incredible kitchen equipment for the bakery students at my college (it's a technical college, remember). This included several huge standing mixers, a large stacked oven, several stainless steel tables, aprons and hats for the students (bright orange, mind you), serving platters, new refrigerators and, the thing I'm most excited about, an espresso machine. An effing espresso machine! I've been lamenting the lack of a coffee shop basically since we got here, and now there'll basically be one in my school that I can go to any time. I am, perhaps, unduly excited by this.

What else? I dunno. Electricity's still out, but it's only been five minutes. There's been a fair amount of utility work done recently; maybe that's it. I refuse to believe that the schools didn't pay out electric bill again. No, okay, I just looked: the traffic lights are out. Phew. [Thanks again for the binoculars, Natalie.]

Electricty is back. Huzzah! Only ten minutes this time. A good reason to post, I think.