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.

“When I drink water, it comes out of my ears”, and other stories

December 20, 2015: “When I drink water, it comes out of my ears”, and other stories

Happy birthday, brother. You're so old that archaeologists are starting to become interested.

Another long delay. These things happen.

"These things happen." I feel like that would be an ideal phrase for any PCV in Mongolia (and, probably, anywhere else). Take the title of this post, for instance. I don't mean to convey the image of a river (or even a trickle) of water running down the side of my face. It's more a leaking feeling, really, and I can only tell that it's water when I wiggle my finger around in there. But still, that thing sometimes happens.

Also, on my walk to... well, anywhere, my breath freezes in my mustache. It's kind of charming, in its own way. We've hit “steam coming off of my pee” cold, as one of my colleagues would put it. This is also the type in which your breath is not so much “able to be seen” as it is “you can't see behind it.”

Okay, so. Let me read back over the previous entry and see where we left off.

Yes. Quite. Indeed. Oh! Good fun, Eric, good fun.

I haven't seen a snowglowbow since the first, but some other things have happened. I'll try and work my way forward: the sports competition was a complete dud, mostly because I suck at volleyball and my feelings are, at times, easily hurt. For example, after I've been standing in a gym for two hours with no one to talk to and replaced on the team by a 50-year-old dude in blue jeans. Woe is me.

The week after that was better. My CPs and I are getting along better and better as time goes by. Part of this is, I think, that a cafeteria has opened up in my school which serves honest-to-god coffee, not the instant coffee mix commonly served here, which is at least 65% sugar and dried milk. They also make really good pastries and lunchy dishes, so I try to spend more time in there when I'm not teaching or advising. See and be seen, as they say. Much else was blessedly uneventful, though the power was turned off again due to entirely foreseeable and controllable -- though not by us -- circumstances. It came back on, though, so no harm done, really. Just frustrating.

Other than that, things were mostly routine: school, clubs, advising, teaching at the library, reading and watching the Walking Dead, things like that. My Kindle died somewhere in there because I foolishly thought the inside pocket of my jacket would keep it close enough to my body to keep it just warm enough to not freeze the screen. Alas, alas, alas! I swear: if my external hard drive bites it, I might be coming home. I know that'd be a terrible reason to stop service, but that's the entirety of my entertainment now. My laptop's HD is tiny, so the external is holding all of my music, tv shows, and movies. I've backed up my music on the cloud, which is good, but the rest of it is too much to do anything with. 

Harrumph.

Moving along: the most eventful thing in the past month has been In-Service Training, or IST. IST was a week-long training scheduled for us PCVs and one of our CPs, and it took place in UB (Ulaanbaator). For this, I chose a good friend who used to be a Russian teacher, but who is now looking to become a better English teacher – the school stopped offering Russian and went to English only. We get along well, she's about my age, has three adorable kids, and had never been to this kind of thing before. We worked together throughout sometimes-tedious (sorry Peace Corps) and sometimes-useful training, and ended up getting a lot out of it. New techniques to teach different skills related to speaking, listening, writing, and reading English. A key problem here thus far has been, as you might expect if you've ever taught, motivating students to learn, participate, do their homework, and study. 

I work at a technical school, so the students are mostly interested in learning about their particular craft, and not so much in learning English. Many are set in the notion that this is what they will do for the rest of their lives, be it carpentry or boot-making, and it's frankly difficult for me to argue otherwise. This has been a particularly tall hurdle to jump in advising -- if they want to work with international companies, suppliers, or foreigners in any capacity, then yes, English is essential. If they don't? It's like trying to convince high-school me (or present-day me) that I need to learn geometry. Why? I'm not good at it, I don't like it, and I'll never work in a field that requires it. That it expands the mind's horizons could be said of pretty much anything.

That said, IST provided me with a lot of tools to keep those less-interested students engaged and learning (against their will), while simultaneously providing the more eager students outlets to get better. As far as homework, well... that remains a tough nut to crack, but hey. I'm here to help, not grade.

The training itself took place in a very nice hotel, which provided the opportunity and impetus for us PCVs to hang out, reconnect, and behave stupidly at night. It was a lot of fun, to say the least. Emily had gone in a few days beforehand for some extra training for the regional subwardens, or safety officers. Wondering what I did while she was gone? I read and watched the Walking Dead. That's what.

On an unrelated note: I found a beard hair hiding in my sideburns that was as long as my ring finger. It was awesome. On a now-related note, Emily and I bought a wedding ring for me that I can actually wear. It was 80,000 tugruks, which is about $40, is a gold composite, and is very thin. I like it because it fits, doesn't hurt my hand, and matches Emily's mom's ring (me mah-in-lah), which is also gold. I'm terrified it's going to break, but it has not as of yet turned my hand green.

What else? I tried to bring two containers of contact solution and a bottle of Tabasco on a plane, which was stupid. In my defense, we left at 620 am, which meant getting up at 4 am. Our electricity was off for what I judged to be about five days while we were gone, which made a mess of our refrigerator and left me furious, but it's back on now. The internet is not on, however, a problem we will be taking care of tomorrow (the 21^st). (Remember when the world was going to end three years ago? Good times.) The second quarter of classes is drawing to a close, which means two things: one, that I'll be far less busy, and two, that it's going to start getting bitterly cold. It's currently -28 C, and set to continue a downward trend. I've never seen temperatures this cold in person, but I'm still not impressed. When it hits -40 C, which is also -40 F, I'll be impressed. Mostly with myself, but still. The days are insanely short; the sun rises some time around 9 and sets no later than 430. Tomorrow will, at least, be the solstice, so days will start getting longer again. I wasn't able to get a phone in UB, unfortunately, but I've still got my fingers crossed for a missing package to show up.

This is getting long. I'll cut it off here. Emily and I miss you all, and wish you a very happy holichrisannukwanzewyear. Or just, you know, holidays.  

The Sunsnow Glowbow

November 26, 2015

Apologies for the delay since the last post; I hate to keep my adoring fan waiting needlessly.

Which is okay, because this wait was not needless. The first quarter of the school year ended, and my life became far, far busier. Classes, clubs, housework, social engagements, more classes at the library, more clubs at the library… I hate to whine so publicly, but hey. I did.

What? The title? Yes, well, that’s the term I have coined for a natural phenomenon which I have only seen here in Mongolia. It happens when the sun shines amid minimal cloud cover, which too recently has covered the entire sky, dumping snow on our fair city. Though snow no longer falls, the moisture in the remaining in the air freezes, causing tiny ice particles to form, falling to the ground. You can't even see them unless they're caught in a sun beam, much like a mote of dust hovering lazily in the light of a window. But when you could see the floating ice, the air itself seems to sparkle, as if someone has thrown glitter from a passing plane. Add to that the barest glimpse of a rainbow behind the clouds, and you get a Sunsnow Glowbow.

Mongolia is a strange, strange place. Another example: it’s been snowing quite a lot recently. There was a stretch of about a week where it snowed all day every day (and most of the night). It was essentially a constant flurry, so accumulations are still barely more than ankle high in most places, but I can’t even imagine the shitshow this would cause in the states, especially where I come from, when combined with the below-0 temperatures. Mongolians just take it in stride. Literally – I've seen kids sprinting at full speed across sheets of ice that I can barely get over safely with a granny-shuffle.

What's more, there are no snow plows here, so cars just continually drive over the snow, packing it down into a thick layer of ice all over the road. It’s much the same on the sidewalks; eventually, it will be too cold to drive a car, so people do a lot of walking. Obviously, that much ice is not tremendously safe, so the city devised a simple way of dealing with it. Each institution is responsible for clearing the snow and ice in front of their establishment, out into the road. People show up with shovels, hoes, picks – I even saw one guy using a discarded wooden sign – and they clear the street and sidewalks, inch by inch.

Of course, then it snows again, and the roads freeze again, but at least the ice is only an inch thick instead of two or three, right? I will say this for the whole thing, though: it makes walking/sliding home a lot more interesting. One must choose one's path and speed very carefully.

Shifting gears a bit as we move on to some other things: today (Friday) is a sports day at my school, with teachers competing against teachers. I'm on a team with at least ten others, one of whom is a dude who is famous in this aimag for being a mountain climber, another of whom is the tallest dude in my school (even taller than me, though just barely), and another of whom is my four-foot-something counterpart. I've been asked to play in the volleyball and basketball events. I like our chances. More on this story as it unfolds.

As of the time I'm writing this, it's Thanksgiving at home. Dinner would have finished a while ago, and people would be staggering home (NOT DRIVING DRUNK, RIGHT?). We here in Uvs province celebrated last weekend, as that was the only time our fellow PCVs could travel in from their soums and, as you might imagine, Mongolia doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving. You may have seen the picture on Facebook; Emily, Amy, and the two aforementioned out-of-towner PCVs made a hell of a meal – roasted chicken, garlic and herb mashed potatoes, scalloped cheesy potatoes, honey-braised baked carrots, homemade wholewheat rolls, gravy, cake, snickerdoodles, and beets. It was an absolutely delectable meal. (That list might seem to suggest that beets were considered a dessert, but that's not the case. I just don't like beets very much, so they came last.)

I assisted by doing some prep, but wasn't much help otherwise until cleanup began. Later in the evening, the vodka came out, and we attempted to drunk history Thanksgiving, which was fun. I haven't seen the final product of that, but I imagine it will be just as much of a circus as I remember it being.

Umm... not too much else to report. Emily and I have started teaching at the library, I've started doing a “movie club” at the school with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we'll be heading out to UB for some training in about a week and a half (two weeks for me), we're learning Korean, and I plan to start learning German soon, and um... that's about it. Thanks for reading.

I reiterate my recommendation to listen to Sufjan Steven's most recent album “Carrie and Lowell” – it's kind of incredible how he can mix the sweetest melodies and instruments with the most heart-wrenching lyrics, though some of the songs he's written are the definition of melancholy (the Fourth of July, for example). Instead of asking you to wallow in the misery, this album helps put your life into perspective. For me, at least right now, things are simple and uncomplicated, blissful and wondrous. For the most part, you can choose your happiness. There may come a day when the sadness overwhelms, but today isn't that day. As always, I recommend a set of headphones.  

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.

Happiness

Written by Emily

Dear family, friends, and others,

I want to talk about happiness today. This is my first blog post so I might ramble, forgive me, but I am just so full of happiness that I can barely contain it. This is actually an interesting turn of events because for the past few weeks Eric and I were both feeling a little bit down. He wrote about it in his previous post. Things were feeling hard at school, we had electricity issues, and it was getting colder. For me, the past few days have really turned everything around, and that’s what I want to share with everyone.

There is something The Disillusionment Phase that says most first year teachers burn out or have a crisis around October or November. I see how it can easily happen to any teacher, no matter how “good” they are. I think this type of person focuses so much on what is right in front of them that they can’t see the bigger picture. My bigger picture happened on Friday night at my school’s Halloween party.
I've been working in this (relatively) new advisor position, and it's been a challenge -- hopefully I'll get to write more about that next time. But in one of my advising sessions, the student and I got to talking about Halloween. The next natural step seemed like hosting a party, in this case at my school's dormitory. 

SO: first off, we had a whole week’s worth of English events that were planned by one of the 12^th grade classes. These kids are seriously amazing. They made up games, wrote trivia questions, printed certificates for the winners, and decorated the auditorium, plus so many other things I didn’t even see. All I had to do was show up for the events and say what they told me to say. I’ve never seen this level of dedication in the American school system and I was so impressed. And it wasn’t only one class getting into it! At every event we had a large group of students show up, and at the Halloween party every student wore a costume or painted their face really scary. On Friday we played games at the party and we had too many volunteers each time. I feel like this week sold me on how important it is to work as a group. An individual student nor I by myself could never have accomplished all that we did as a group. I’ll remember this success for a long time, and it will help me the next time I get down about something.

I was really happy at the party and that leaked over into everything else. Along with my fellow PCVs and KOICA volunteers, we have 3 really good projects planned that will come to fruition within the next few months that (hopefully) will make a big impact on the community. I was able to find some nice secondhand boots for a good price. At the market our favorite fruit lady gave us a free apple each. Our German friend invited us over to his apartment last night and we played games. My cilantro is doing well and my water plant has a beautiful pink flower on it. The snow covering the mountains near us is absolutely gorgeous. I ate lunch and spoke Mongolian with the school secretary and we pretty much understood each other. My school has a week break from classes in order to plan for next quarter, so I don’t have to teach at all this week. Yoga class yesterday was great. I just learned that boxing is pretty popular here so I will try to find a class I can attend. There are super cute cats that live under and around our building that we are trying to make friends with. I have the time to learn about the stuff I didn’t have time to learn in college and grad school. I’ve been looking at rental houses in SE Asia for next summer and there are some mind-blowingly amazing options. We can and do talk to our families and friends whenever we want.

There are too many things to be happy about! Sure, there are still plenty of small things we could worry about, but what is the point in that? What I want to say to everyone is: why would you ever choose to focus on the bad when the world is so incredibly full of good things?

I am living my dream, even with the bad things. Eric is amazing enough to live it with me. How many people can say they are truly living their dream right now? I think not so many. And it is hard work and sometimes frustrating or lonely, but no one ever said it would be easy to live a dream. I think it should be hard so you will appreciate it that much more. I know I am an overly optimistic person, but it is such an amazing feeling to be nearly overwhelmed with happiness on a daily basis that I want to share it with everyone so maybe I can help someone else feel it too.

Here’s to another wonderful day in beautiful Mongolia!