More pictures and semi-random thoughts.

Can a thing be semi-random?

A few more pictures, and some quick updates:

It is now -40 during the day and -50 at night. The doors to the porches are literally frozen shut -- the condensation from inside the apartment (cooking and breathing and whatnot) freezes at the base of the doors over night. I actually went to a store near us, and on the inside of the store's door, the lock had been frozen. We're not talking about a keyhole lock or something like that, but a normal kind of lock you'd expect to see anywhere.

Also, there are a few manhole covers around the city, and they spout steam. The steam does not, however, usually make it all that far -- it forms a sort of vent of the sort you'd see when someone on a science show tells you that life probably originated around hot vents spewing sediment at the bottoms of the oceans. A spout, of sorts. It's neat.

Other than that, Tsagan Tsar (Lunar New Year) approaches, and it is now dark as late as like... 630. So that's cool. That's up from 330-4 earlier in the year.

In any case, here's some pictures:

We had our creative writing competition this past weekend, a wild success that saw something like 86 students in our aimag center alone. I forgot to take pictures of that, though, so here's a picture of the main road in our city.

ACTION SHOT OF EMILY TEACHING!


ACTION SHOT OF ERIC GETTING WAY TOO CLOSE TO THE BOARD! HE NEEDS A HARICUT!

A feel for how foggy/smokey it gets overnight when the temperature dips below -40. It's usually worse earlier on.

See if you can spot the windows leaking heat.

A few of our kids from the WriteOn classes Emily and I taught together.

The school I work in. ... oh, sorry. In which I work.

An only-slightly obscured view of the mountains to the... either North or South or East or West of our apartment. One of those.

A view of my (Eric's) walk to school.

Frozen windooooowwwwww.

Another view of my walk to work. It is followed immediately by the next picture, which is the "interior" of that break in the fence.

The break in the fence. Two people attempting to go through at the same time always turns into a dance.

And lastly: Mongolian ambulance is bigger than your ambulance. 

Super amazing and enthusiastic blog post

January 17, 2016 (Sunday)

Still very, very little happening around here. I've been re-upping on my Korean lessons, which is good, but starting at the end of next week, there will be no classes (for me to teach at the college) for threeeeeeeee weeks. This is because there is a national holiday in February called Sagaan Saar, the celebration of the lunar new year. The actual holiday takes place over about three days, but my school operates under the department of labor in Mongolia (not the dept of education). That's how they do, you know?

I have no idea what I'm going to do. Work on clubs and lesson plans, I guess, and get really good at Spades again. If I could find some wood to carve, I'd start making a mah jong set, but I don't even know where to look. Ah well.

It's finally dipped into the -35 to -40 degree range, which is somewhat exciting in its own way. I will say, though, that there are still kids outside (when it's sunny) playing soccer. I can remember times as a kid when people wanted to cancel classes because it hit 0 outside. One of the many consequences of an overly litigious society, I suppose.

A funny observation: up until the past few days, I've been warm enough in my apartment that I've been able to wear shorts (albeit with long socks and slippers) and not get cold. The diving temperatures outside have made that impossible lately. Just think about that: the construction and insulation is good enough here that, until it hit -35 degrees, I was able to wear shorts inside without getting cold.

In Mongolia, they measure the winter by a series of nine nine-day periods (i.e., 81 days), in which things get progressively colder until about the 4^th period (which I believe we're in right now). I've made up my own system: comfortable without slippers and in a light long-sleeved shirt; comfortable with slippers and a light long-sleeved shirt; comfortable with slippers and socks and a light long-sleeved shirt; comfortable with thick socks, slippers, light shirt; comfortable with thick socks, slippers, thick shirt; and the current temperature, comfortable with thick socks, slippers, pants, and a long-sleeved shirt. It's a major consolation that February is generally warmer and sunnier than January (still in the -20 to -35 range, though).

Um... let's see. This past Saturday, Emily and I taught together for the first time (outside of Monglish night); a seminar on creative writing. We taught one class of younger students and one class of 11^th grade and up students, each two hours long. In the younger class, we got through far less of our material, but in the older class we finished almost all of it. We focused a lot on writing a good introduction. It went well, we think, even if we did step on each others' toes once or twice during the first lesson. A little of that is to be expected. We'll do it again next Saturday, then the following Saturday we'll have a creative writing competition (under the auspices of the WriteOn International competition, a Peace Corps project started in, I think, Georgia).

Our weekly Monglish night meeting was BIG this week, with probably 15 people. That might not seem like a lot, but in the past, it was five or six people sitting around on the couch in our apartment. Monglish night has fast become one of my favorite things to do, because it's specifically not a class. We're just practicing English with a bunch of people who want to improve, playing games and not taking it too seriously. It is incredibly refreshing. I am wondering, though, if maybe breaking it up into two groups might help things flow, if it keeps getting bigger.

UhhhhhhhhhhHHHhHhHhhhHhh otherwise I've been keeping an eye on the markets' continual dive, and reading doom-and-gloom reports about 2016 and the end of society as we know it. One way or another, 2016 is probably going to be a bad year economically: the first few weeks of the year serve as predictors for how the rest of the year will go almost 75% of the time. I also read a report from Lloyd's of London, among the most respected insurance companies in the world, predicting... well, predicting bad things. Food supply shocks and resulting food riots, water shortages and an increase in instances of disease, and in general failure of governments and societies to adapt quickly enough to any number of climate-change driven catastrophes. Lloyd's thinks that, if we continue with business as usual, human society by 2025 won't be recognizable as such.

Okay, I'll back off of that. It's occupied a lot of my time and thinking lately, though, so I couldn't resist a little bit of morbid speculation. I am getting well off the tracks here, though, so maybe this is a good stopping point. yeah? Yeah. 

Oooh! Pretty Pictures!

January 5, 2016

Lot of downtime lately, which is why updates have been less frequent. Only a few minor and (seemingly, only seemingly) unrelated observations, then some PWITTY PICTOWS. 

I accidentally typed 2015 when I started this entry.  

Amy and I go to the gym a few times a week, and have noticed an influx of new people over the past fourish days. Apparently, resolutioners are just as much a thing here as they are in America. 

-18C is -0.4F. From there, each degree drop in C is accompanied by a 1.8 degree drop in F (e.g., -19C is -2.2F, -20C is -4F, and so on). You can also take -40 as your starting point, as it's the same in F and C. It may very well work above freezing, but I'm too lazy to check. 

Mongolians do not care for bluegrass. 

Dungeons and Dragons is hard to play online, but still fun. 

I am not very good at writing poetry, but I still do it. 

Emily has a pie pan now, and is currently (as I write) making a chocolate pie. 

That first breath you take when you go outside in -30C weather kind of hurts and will trigger coughing. 

Wearing glasses in the Mongolian cold is somewhat impractical. Your glasses will both A) freeze over as you walk to wherever you're going because it's too cold to leave your face exposed and the water freezes as soon as it has a place to collect, and B) fog up so badly that you can't see when you get into a building that has the slightest bit of moisture. 

The king wears a king hat and lives in a king house. 

We miss having a cat. 

We miss our friends and family more acutely during the holiday seasons.

I might like advising as much as I like teaching. This is encouraging. 

January is the coldest month in our city. However, the winter has thus far been warmer than average. I blame El Nino which, as my Dad and I discussed, is supposed to last anywhere between 9 months and 2 years. If it lasts two years, maybe we'll make it out of here with two "mild" winters where it doesn't get colder than -35!

A big white dog followed me from just outside my apartment all the way to school one day. It was nice, but I felt bad that I didn't have anything to give him. 

And now, pictures: 

Ice frozen on our window that NEVER MELTS but sure looks cooooool.

The decorations in the main square in Ulaangom.

My school's Shin Jil (New Year's) party. The expression on that guy's face kind of says it all.

Emily's good side.

Emily's other good side.

Emily, Amy, and my foot.

Emily cooking while Amy studies the wall intently.

The mountain view from our apartment. In the winter, we're so often encompassed by clouds of smoke that you usually can't see them. If I didn't know the mountains were there, one could probably convince me I lived in the clouds.

 Emily, Grace, and the back of Amy's head.

 One of the streets near our apartment.

The full size of our bathroom. I'm not kidding. I'm standing with my back against the wall.

 A gnarly bruise that I got I-don't-know-howing during the New Year's party.

 Emily in front of her school.

The interior of Emily's school.

Emily posing in front of the sign just outside the Foreign Language Library.

A picture from training in which the photographed were totally sober.

My favorite Mongolian picture so far. Not only for the dudes, both of whom are awesome, but also because of the colors.

A view from Grace's apartment of our city in the snow.

Look! Yoga! I'm the one doing a flawless downward-facing dog in the background. Emily is the one clad entirely in pink and red.