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!  

WHOA WHOA WHOA

October 22, 2015

So much to say (no, that has nothing to do with DMB, Katie), so little time. Or, no, wait. Lots of time.

It's been a sort of rough couple of weeks since I last wrote a real entry (I wrote a... another entry that is more like a journal entry, if anyone wants to read it). Not bad, really, just not smooth. At all. In any case, I'd like to begin with a quick thank you to a friend for reaching out to me, and with good advice. I don't want to name you by name because that'd be kind of like...singling you out, and no one likes that.

Least of all students, I've come to learn. Some of you saw my post on facebook about this, but it bears repeating: I was teaching a new class that had specifically requested my presence in their classroom this past Monday. We had a decent lesson; the students were a little bit timid, but that's mostly because they were trying to get used to my style, I think, which is very different from a typical Mongolian teacher. I was, admittedly, already in a sour sort of mood, having slept very poorly the night before. But when the end of the class rolled around, and my CP and I handed out a test to the students, it got worse. Two students turned in a blank sheet of paper with their names on it, and at least three of the six that I actually got to grade before class ended got lower than 50%. Discouraging, to say the least.

What with me being me, I allowed that to set the tone of the next two days. Things became bitterer in my mind, and I sort of phoned it in on Tuesday, to my shame, and ended up receding into my head that night and being all moody. Poor Emily. Wednesday started out pretty poorly, but thanks to the unending patience of my exquisite wife and the aforementioned good advice from a friend, it turned around before the evening.

Which is good, because we had a dinner with the American consulate that night. Surprisingly loose and good-natured, the two Americans and two Mongolians joined us at a nearby restaurant. For the occasion, the city had set up a bit of a cultural show, including two seriously talented singers (first female then male), two undoubtedly gifted dancers (same mix), and one virtuoso morin khuur player. The first singer was accompanied by the morin khuur player (a sort of cello-like instrument with two strings – here's a link of a dude playing the morin khuur while also throat singing, which is equally cool but did not happen during dinner), and sang an extremely evocative piece that ranged from shrill, almost shrieking highs (though not unpleasant) to sultry lows. I couldn't find an example of that, but her voice... I can think of two general parallels: the Pink Floyd song, "The Great Gig in the Sky" but more controlled, or the music from Gladiator with the undulating female vocalist. 

The dancers mimed (in rhythm) the kind of pastoral lifestyle that is rapidly being left behind in this country – lassoing a horse, shooting arrows, completing the necessary tasks for survival. All Mongolian dancing, I have learned, channels the rhythm of riding a horse at a gallop, a sort of quick but controlled back and forth that they tend to embody with their shoulders. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but one thing in particular caught my eye: the stage was very small, and as a result only one dancer could fit on it. (Don't picture a theatre stage, but rather something you might see at a wedding – a platform raised maybe an inch or two off of the ground and set apart solely for its own sake). The female was thus relegated to the regular floor, which was marble, and difficult to gain any traction on. She had to constantly readjust her foot as she attempted to sway in time with the music and keep her stance, which was low and bent at the knee. To her credit, though, she didn't slip once, and the performance was quite excellent.

I can't say much else about the morin khuur player except to emphasize his tremendous talent. In the video above, I suggest watching the placement of the player's fingers, and how they eke the different sounds out of an instrument that has no frets and two strings. [A quick note on the "kh" -- it's actually more of a "huuh" sound, like the H in the word "him", but with a sort of guttural accompaniment. In the Cyrillic alphabet, forced on the Mongolians by the occupying Soviets starting in about 1921, it's represented by an X. kkkhhhhuh.]

This whole experience was a welcome relief from a somewhat comically unfortunate week (actually almost two weeks back, now that I think of it). First, our electricity went off for about eight hours on Sunday. At first, Em and I figured it was just for maintenance, or something; it happens fairly often around here. My first hint that this was not something normal came when I went to turn on the water, which usually goes off at the same time, and noticed it was still on and still hot. My second hint to abnormality came in the evening, when I looked across the street and saw that the lights were on in the opposite apartment building, then walked outside and discovered that our apartment was among very few dark ones. About half an hour later, Em and I learned that one of our school's accountants had neglected to pay our electricity bill, and the company had, perhaps understandably, cut us off.

An unfortunate position to be in to be sure, but not terrible. Our gracious neighbor and fellow PCV Amy allowed us to come over to her apartment and make a simple meal of rice and beans, and by the time we got back to the apartment, Emily's CP who knows a guy who works in the power plant had managed to get our power turned back on. So, no harm no foul, really.
The next day, some electricians from my school came to fix some undeniably jankey wiring in our apartment, which was cool. Electricity was on and everything.

But – there's always a but – the next day at about 1130, the power went off again. This time, we immediately contacted the offending school and implored them to pay the bill. They did not do this, evidently, until about 130 the next day.

I don't want to dwell on this for too long because, again, it wasn't that bad, and Amy let us come to her place again for food. We had enchiladas, which was definitely an effective consolation. But that is not to say that we were not seriously annoyed. We actually had to shut off the heat (radiator) in the kitchen and open the window to make sure our food didn't spoil in the refrigerator (it's been in the 20-40 degrees Fahrenheit range for about two weeks now). I actually had a moment before we went to Amy's where I recognized the surreality of the situation, though: I was sitting in the hallway drinking cognac (because it's either cognac, vodka, or beer) in the hallway of a Soviet-style apartment in Mongolia with Emily -- to take the edge off -- while wearing a headlamp to see because our school's accountants had forgotten to pay our bill. How do you make that up? You don't. You just don't. 

In the end, I suppose there's no use crying over spilled milk. Evidently, the bill has been paid, and we have seen no problem since.


There's this whole story about meeting a French girl, a German dude, an Australian girl, and a New Zealand dude (how do you say that? New Zealander? Emily insists on saying “Kiwi” which I'm sure is somehow racist), not to mention our existing Korean girl friend and getting drunk with the lot of them in the German dude's apartment, but who wants to hear about that?


My music recommendation this week: Kendrick Lamar. Anything. If you haven't heard his music yet, shame on you. Start with “King Kunta” if you haven't heard any of his music. And I'd recommend this to anyone who is a fan of music in a general sense. It's somewhere between funk and hip hop and rap, music that only this man is making. 

Thanks for reading. 

Posts for Posterity

October 14, 2015

This entry is less about what's happening with Em and I and more about things that I've been thinking about; more like a journal entry, exactly the kind of thing people don't like about blogs. Just a... just a little heads up. 

There are many things that I don't know about my time here thus far, or the time to come over the next 22 months. What I do know is that I will be a different person when it's over.

Granted, that doesn't mean much. We're all different people from one moment to the next, really. (Emily and I had an extensive debate about this that I won't recount here but which I thoroughly enjoyed.) I know people who claim they've had a sandwich or a particularly tasty bowl of macaroni and cheese that changed their lives.

The question here, though, is in what way I will change. What kind of person will I be when this is all over? For example, I think I have a decent handle on the kind of person I am right now – I tend to notice negative things before I notice positive things. But after a while, all of those negative things start to converge, especially when you're thinking about people. How many different ways can you complete the following sentences (you don't have to believe it)? ______ are terrible drivers. ______ are always late. ______ eat weird food. _____ love to drink _____. _______ are selfish. _____ are arrogant. ______ are stupid. ______ are crazy.

The blanks can be filled with dozens if not hundreds of different responses. Obviously you don't need to believe the things that you put in there; I think the point is that someone believes that. Maybe more to the point, several someones or groups of someones believe that.

Asians are terrible drivers. French people are always late. Rich people love to drink brandy. Men are selfish. Atheists are arrogant. Republicans are stupid. Women are crazy.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this; even as I write these things out, they seem self-evident. And maybe, intellectually, they are and always have been to me. But now, the truth of this is so much clearer than it ever has been that I don't know how to process it. We humans love to simplify; it makes a chaotic, indifferent universe seem like it has a rhyme and a reason. I had to know these stereotypes to create the responses, right? I had to, on some level, believe them – why else would I pick them? Women are terrible drivers. Italians are terrible drivers. People from Florida are terrible drivers. Why did I go with Asians? I don't know.

I'm worried that my cynical attitude, no matter the balancing that Emily's relentless positivity provides, is going to explode into some sort of full-blown neurosis that leads me to become a super-villain, or something. I've already begun to accept that climate change is going to happen because we're too short-sighted to do anything about it. Part of me even sees it as a good thing; humanity's cauldron must – and will inevitably – be stirred every so often.

Good God. I tried to avoid exactly this kind of post, but I can't help it. I just won't publicize this one. If you made it through, I salute you.


Let me know what you think. 

Dust storms and other mundane things

October 6, 2015

Despite my incessant whining, very few people read this blog; confusingly, the number of readers has dropped by about half. As such, I have decided to back off the “every week” thing. Besides, if I stuck to that schedule, there wouldn't be enough time to distance myself from things that make me angry (like students not studying or doing their effing homework), or annoyed  (like how every single child under 12 in this city only knows how to say "Hi", and does so when they see me over and over and over and over). This has been an overwhelmingly positive experience thus far, and it wouldn't be fair to characterize it differently just because I was having a bad day when it was time to write a blog post.

We'll start this week with weather: it's been in the 60s and 70s for the better part of a week, up from the much chillier 20s I mentioned in the last post. Today, however, saw a high in the upper 40s, with a low back down in the 20s. Yesterday we had a massive dust storm that lasted literally all day -- it was like a day-long rainstorm, but with much stronger wind, a brown sky instead of gray, caking of dust all over you instead of rain, and a constant stinging in your eyes. I've never experienced anything remotely like this – even the dust storms at my (and Emily's) training site(s) didn't last for longer than an hour, tops. This one started at night while we were sleeping, when high winds slammed open the large, metal door to the stairwell outside of our apartment, then shut, then open, then shut, then open again ad nauseam. It continued on through the night and as I walked to school, then died down just long enough for me to walk home in relatively clear air. Not fifteen minutes after I got inside and sat down, it started up again with a vengeance. The sun illuminating all of those floating dust particles turns the sky an eerie shade of orange, like Breaking Bad's sepia-toned vision of Mexico. (We took some pictures early in the day that are posted to Emily's Facebook wall.)

Yesterday also marked the first site visit from one of the Peace Corps higher-ups. He came over for dinner with his driver (while the dust storm continued to rage). We made homemade nachos (the whole thing, including the chips) and tsuivan, a traditional Mongolian dish. I saw “we”; I rolled out the dough that became the noodles for the tsuivan, but everything else was Emily and two of our site mates. That higher-up visited with our counterparts and watched us teach classes today, then headed on to the next site. I don't envy his schedule, traveling from aimag to aimag and meeting with as many people as he's had to meet with, all in the span of about... I think two weeks. Maybe less, definitely not more.

We've had a few maintenance problems lately, including a busted O-ring on the faucet in the bathtub. The fixture itself was a piece of garbage to begin with, so it was replaced entirely. The process took about four hours and a total of six Mongolians. The reason for that, I think, was that none of them were actually plumbers, just some handy dudes the landlord knew who said they could do it. Things broke, things got dirty, and water was sprayed everywhere, but in the end, they installed it perfectly, and everything works quite well now. I'm still frustrated that they only seem able to fix one thing at a time, but hey. Baby steps are still steps.

This past weekend, we celebrated International Teacher's Day (it was actually October 5, not the 1^st, which Christina quite correctly referred to as International Ballet Day). On Friday, Emily went with her school to Uvs Nuur, the largest lake in the country, and I went with one of our other site mates to a celebration of how awesome we all are (teachers) at a nightclub. So far as I can tell, it's the only bonafide nightclub in the city. Then again, I haven't actually looked, as night clubs aren't really my thing. Also: Emily told of at least six fights between drunk Mongolian men. If they're drunk enough to fight each other, it doesn't seem all that far-fetched to think that they might take my resting bitch face and lack of understanding as some kind of sleight, and try to fight me as well. Even if I could take one drunk dude, it's safe to say that I could not take one and five of his potentially-sober friends.

As I mentioned in the last post (I think), I attempted to start a tutoring program for students interested in learning extra English. Every slot I offered was filled up by the time it started, but by the third day, only two students had actually shown up. That was, as you might imagine, frustrating, so I canceled the rest. Apparently the mistake I made was to schedule the tutoring later in the day (sessions from 4-6, usually). I've decided to focus my attention on clubs and community work, instead. 

Oh, yes: we've gotten reliable access to the local sports complex, including a fairly well-appointed workout room. This has been a lifesaver for me; depression was starting to creep back in, and for me exercise helps to expunge that insanely well. It also helps to deal with the seemingly constant stream of afflictions I've been going through, including a sinus infection on first arriving in Mongolia, a weeks-long bout of irritable bowel syndrome, an incredibly painful and acute bout of gastro-intestinal issues, another sinus infection or cold (not sure which), and an allergic reaction that makes my hands incredibly itchy. Bleh.

All in all, aside from constant disease, slacker teenager students, and perilous dust storms, things are going pretty well. Meditation helps.

Lastly: anyone who likes folky rock music (Chris, Jaron, Matt, Alex), give The Paper Kites a try. I recommend starting with “A Lesson from Mr. Gray.”

The motions

September 22, 2015

Eric wrote this

Just a quick one, today. Been getting colder around here, and will drop into the negatives (celsius, which translates to the about the 20s F). The mountains, which had initially had snow on them from about two weeks ago but which had since melted, are again snow-capped, and this time with a lot more snow. I hate cold as much as I ever have, but the upshot is that the hot water came back on. In one of those moments of synchronicity that really keep life interesting for me, I've started re-reading the Lord of the Rings series, and came across this song (altered to be about beer in the movie – the extended version of the Fellowship GETONMYLEVEL) which perfectly matches my opinion on the subject:

       Sing hey! for the bath at close of day

that washes the weary mud away!

A loon is he that will not sing:

O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,

and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;

but better than rain or rippling streams

is Water Hot that smokes and steams.

O! Water cold we may pour at need

down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;

but better is Beer if drink we lack,

and Water Hot poured down the back.

O! Water is fair that leaps on high

in a fountain white beneath the sky;

but never did fountain sound so sweet

as splashing Hot Water with my feet!

Teaching is going well, I think. The students seem to like us, though the teenagers are pretty typical teenagers, for the most part (i.e., too cool for school or too hormonal to participate). I've set up two classes outside of my regular hours, one for the English teachers to prepare for an aimag-wide and national English test/competition, and another for the non-English teachers to improve their English and, perhaps, compete in the same Olympiad. The non-english teachers' class varies in attendance, but I've had at least six in all three so far. Usually it's more; as the last post (which was devastatingly under-read, sniff-sniff-whine-whine) attempted to demonstrate, time and punctuality work differently in this country. I've also just posted notice for individual and group tutoring at my school; I posted it earlier this morning, and as of 4 pm have had seven students sign up. Not a bad start at a trade school, I warrant.

Ummmm other than that? I dunno. Emily's school bought her a full-length, winter deel (pronounced dell) today, which I am jealous of. I'll need a coat for this winter, as the one I have simply can't compete with -40 (which, if you forgot, is the same in C and F). Emily bought a bottle of cognac, which is the only liquor one can get here that is not vodka (or scotch, but who can afford that?). We're both getting over a bit of a head cold, too; Grace (me mah-in-lah) (mother-in-law) bought me some hankies before I came here, and I went through no fewer than eight of them on the worst day. (I then had to wash them by hand, compounding the misery.) It was gross. (So was washing them.)

I cooked dinner last night (and the night before, if grilled cheese counts). I'm unaccountably proud of that.