Oh my god I can't believe it

I've never been this far away from home


June 29:
I am back in America, and have been for almost exactly one week. Here is what was most notably different from Mongo-town: 1) It is very green, and the grass in my front yard is almost excessively thick and verdant. I also felt a little guilty mowing it the other day. Think of how many goats I could have fed instead! 2) Pillows 3) The smoothest roads ever. All the highways in the well-funded Northern Virginia road system looked brand-new to me as I was driven home from the airport by my loving family

I left Mongolia on June 20 by train to China and flew out of Beijing on the 22, and the last bit was a definite whirlwind of packing and ridiculous traveling. I meant to make nice little updates during my last few weeks in Mongolia but never really felt like pausing from the whole thing and taking the time to write - plus I was in the countryside for three of those weeks and did not have the chance to say hi to you from there. But here's a wrap-up of how things went since I last wrote . . .

Spent eighteen days in Ikh Tamir soum, Arkhangai aimag doing field research on fence-building in the countryside for my final project. This picture is of three of my small friends who lived in the five-ger spring camp that I stayed at. Mostly this is the Best Place Ever and I was lucky enough to get to go back to Ikh Tamir after my program ended and play with these guys and their many friends for another week.

One of my seventy five thousand pictures of fences that I took. I also attended a Fence Party, helped build a fence, and went on a fun tour of the neighborhood to watch my host father talk about fences with the rest of the folks in the area. This picture is from the neighborhood tour day, when the fences were plentiful and the clouds were spectacular. The fences I was studying were being built as a small part of the Green Gold project, and my research was a look at the social and environmental effects of building these fences. I mostly learned a lot about the strength of the community and immense practicality of the fences, and then wrote a forty page paper about these things.
Had legit Mongolian Barbecue (none of this stir fry RPU nonsense - if it has vegetables that aren't potatoes, it cannot be authentic Mongo). This involves a goat that was slaughtered that day, hot rocks that you have to toss because this is good for your health (on the same day Hannah and I were advised also to eat yellow flowers and drink very sulfurous spring water for our respective healths as well), and organs cooked on the side (Heart and lung are what I recommend if you ever find yourself having to select goat organs to consume).Oh, here is a very beautiful little lake called Singing Lake because of the many sounds it makes. There's a song for this lake (how fitting) that our friend from Gobi Cashmere sang for us as we left these peaceful waters, which were marred only by the path of two well-photographed swans and the reflections of a drowsy herd headed back to the ger (Still in Ikh Tamir) (Hannah, do you like my descriptive imagery, I think it might be able to Transcend Cultures)

So Hannah and I bopped around Ikh Tamir for a week without a translator (and, consequently, without doing any research besides occasionally looking very hard at a fence) which was glorious. Then we went back to the city where it was cold and rainy when we got to the train station and nothing was green any longer and of course I wanted to go back. I wrote my paper, presented it at the UB Hotel (I said it during orientation and I'll say it again - SIT likes us to be fancy like this), saw Altan Urag live at a really fun and huge brewpub called Ikh Mongol, went and built a ger with the rest of the students out in the east, bid adieu to my comrades who flew back on the 13th, then promptly headed back to Ikh Tamir.
It was beautiful.

Well, of course there is more, but I think this is the end or very near of my accounts.

July 15
Ithaca, NY
I've been putting off posting this for many reasons, one of which is was that I took a brief jaunt outside the States again but more importantly am reluctant to end the story. I was ready to come home when I did, but I was also itching to stay (and at this point, kind of wish I had for the World Pastureland Congress and Naadam). Home isn't as much a location as it is a state of mind, and I found it in many places these past few months. One day on my second trip to Ikh Tamir I went on a sulky hike after 3 of my friends rode off on an overnight rabbit-hunting adventure (I was sulking because I couldn't go with them) and after a while found myself at the top of a wee mountain that overlooked the valley as well as the spring camps. And I sat and decided to come back to this place sometime, somehow. So until then . . .

Well I'm changing all my strings

I'm gonna write another travelin' song
(for you especially, Alex!)

This weekend, we went on a 3-night excursion to Eastern Gobi province involving baby camels, holding hands and running blindly under the stars in the dark desert, a mountain whose spirit you made wishes to by writing your heart's desire on a piece of paper and burning it in a special stove, and a taste of sea buck thorn wine (Product of Mongolia. I am not sure what sea buck thorn berries really are, but they are Mongolian apparently). But I mostly just want to tell you about the 10-hour train ride there. It was fantastic. The following is dishearteningly long, but you can always just go to the bottom and look at the pictures, which are unrelated but hopefully still interesting.

9:50 Train departs from Ulaanbaatar.

11:00 Language class on the train. It takes the eleven of us students at least 10 minutes to figure out who is in which compartment. Baganaa, our teacher, tells Julie and I to take 15 minutes and find somebody (a real live Mongolian!) on the train, introduce ourselves, and learn what we can about them, then report back to him.

11:15-12:15 Here are the people we meet:
1. Serbian geologist:
"Are you a geologist?" the slightly greasy-haired but very affable looking man asks Julie, pointing at her super hardcore hiking boots. She looks down, and says, "No, I am studying crop and soil sciences. Are you a geologist?" she asks, pointing at his super hardcore hiking boots. He is. Just arrived from Serbia and working for some joint-venture company in Eastern Gobi province, where we are headed. This was in English, and we thought about just having him be our person we learned about, but then decide it would be nice to join up in a game of cards with
2. Three old Mongolian businessmen:
They're gambling, so we don't join in, but they have us sit and we say we will just watch. Only one of the three talks to us, explaining energetically that he has been to Miami, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and a whole handful of other American cities once we introduce ourselves as American students. This guy is wearing gray sunglasses, a fedora, a brown tweed jacket and is fantastically friendly. The three of them are having a grand old time throwing cards down and yelling when they lose, keeping score in indecipherable lists of numbers on a sheet of newspaper. Suddenly, they all get up to smoke a cigarette and so we follow them out of the car, coming across
3. A whole bunch of men smoking between cars very amicably. But curiously enough there is one man handcuffed to the door. Though intrigued, Julie and I keep walking. The next car is second-class - not divided 4-bed compartments like we've been in the whole time, but an open car with beds and seats. Here it's noisier and more exciting. We chance upon
4. A man in a nice blue suit:
He is quite young and shyly asks us if we speak English. So we have a brief conversation about where he is from (Ulaanbaatar) what he does (works for "My Store", a chic new grocery store. I explain excitedly in Mongolian that my host family shops at the "My Store" on Peace Avenue, and I like it very much, and he doesn't understand at all).
Next we decide to head back and figure out why the man is handcuffed. But clearly the ticket to hanging out between cars is a cigarette to smoke. We buy two from the food cart lady (It is very easy to buy individual cigarettes and pieces of gum in Mongolia) and I put mine behind my ear like I know what I am doing. But as we double back, we see
5. About twenty college students, mostly girls:
And they are having the most fun ever. Really. Everybody is laughing like it is what they were born to do. A boy and girl are sitting across from each other, playing this game involving tracing hands and then guessing numbers or something and with each move they burst into giggles. So we ask how to play, and someone gets the best English speaker, a very nice girl in a yellow silk shirt, to talk to us. I didn't get the game at all, but sat and watched the card game and chatted a bit with her. They're juniors at the teacher's school in UB, going on a weekend trip together to the monastary's energy center (This is what it is famous for- having good energy that heals the spirit and body) just like we are. They share a bowl of candy and aaral (dried curd, if it's not too hard it is quite good) with Julie and I, and then we continue on our merry way.
We run into the Serbian geologist again, and talk to him some more, and he decides to smoke a cigarette with us. So the three of us go between cars where it's noisy and breezy, and sadly all the other men have left - including the mystery handcuffed man (Much later we find out that he got in a fight on the train and was thrown off at one of the many stops). The geologist finds it hilarious that we were going to pose with our cigarettes, and we explain our program and discuss mining with him as Julie and I try to smoke our cigarettes, failing pretty miserably. Lots of coughing, giggling, and dramatic tapping of ash into the cunning metal box on the window. The geologist makes several jokes that we completely don't get, including, when I tell him my name is Di, "Tea? Okay, can I meet you at five?" I looked hesitantly at my watch, not understanding. Eventually he explains "You see, the British. They like to drink tea, usually at five PM." (I told him it was really four o'clock. I hope I was right) And we laugh as we return to our language lesson, where Baganaa is hanging out with other students, having given up on our return.

13:00 Language teachers have hung a piece of butcher paper in the hallway and are writing the lyrics to a Mongolian song. A small woman is helping them with a line they're forgetting. The friendly old businessman who was playing cards in the next car stops by and corrects a few words. A few minutes later, there's music playing down in another compartment in the car . . . turns out the woman is a musician with a famous folk ensemble, traveling with the general director of the Philharmonic Orchestra (a very well-known composer, Boloroo explains to me) and she's playing the Mongolian dulcimer and he's singing and it's amazing. The friendly businessman is somehow now in that compartment, too, singing along. They go through five or six songs, all belting out and harmonizing and us students and teachers crowd in the hall, enthralled. A woman who had been sleeping in the neighboring compartment pokes her head out and I worry for a moment she's going to complain and the music will stop. But she just asks one of us who the musician is and then nods approvingly when somebody tells her the answer.

13:30 "Di, we need your help!" our field coordinator calls, drawing me away from the music and into the next car. He's standing with a young man in a crisp white shirt, and I get all excited when I realize that this man must speak Chinese! He does. Ulzii-aah thought he looked bored, and struck up a conversation with him, but this man did not understand Mongolian. So I sat and talked to him for a while, learning that his job was to get visas for Chinese oil pipeline workers in Eastern Gobi reapproved in Ulaanbaatar. At one point, the famous composer and Boloroo my language teacher drop by the compartment and we have an intensely multi-lingual conversation - the composer wants to thank the Chinese man for switching seats so that he could be in the same compartment as his companions. Boloroo translates this Mongolian to English, and then I translate to Chinese for the man. Occasionally I am able to go straight from Chinese to Mongolian, but as we keep talking I get all my languages confused and start speaking Chinese to Boloroo, or English to my Chinese friend. Oh, but it was exhilarating.

14:30 Learning the song that the language teachers had written out for us. Six of us students were crowded in a car with 3 language teachers, and we sing terribly and loudly and it's great fun. Nobody really learns the song (this becomes evident the next day when we go to this special ovoo where you drink vodka and then hold your hands up in the sky and sing this song, in honor of Danzan Rabjaa, a very interesting lama (Buddhist monk) who used to sit at the spot that the ovoo is now at. The language teachers sang as we all kind of hummed along, arms up towards the setting sun). Afterwards, I ask Ulzii-aah if he had heard us from the next compartment. Yes, he had. "Was it beautiful?" I ask him jokingly. He responds slowly and deliberately, "Yes, it was beautiful. Beautiful like a crocodile. . . . screaming. . . . in the jungle. I wanted to strangle."

17:00-19:30 Standing in the hall as a dust storm envelops the train, making the light all golden and the air in the train slightly difficult to breathe. I talk to the Chinese man (I don't remember his name) about all sorts of things, like how he went to a martial arts high school that Bruce Lee attended. He's just two years older than me, but joined the army instead of going to university. My Chinese vocabulary is kind of atrocious, but he tells me that my pronunciation makes me sound like a Cantonese native speaker talking in Mandarin - in other words, better than a foreigner's. This is somewhat comforting. I give him Julie’s mobile number so we can try to meet in UB and I can go eat real Chinese food at his company’s cafeteria.

20:00 Arrival in Sanshand.

My bedroom in my UB homestay.

Really nice ger in Khustai National Park ger camp: Lily cut my hair by the light of a headlamp the night we stayed here.


Wild, wild horses. Reintroduced to Mongolia at Khustai National Park.


Khustai National Park , about a 3 hour drive from UB


Bell at Khamryn Khiid


All but one of the ladies on my trip, on Wish Mountain (women were not allowed to go to the summit so we just took pictures and laid around in the sun instead)


Bell on corner of shrine and ovoo, Wish Mountain (later there were goats climbing on the ovoo enjoying the offerings of rice and barley)

Me and a skittish botok.

Red means stop. Do not go.

On staff at school we have a very responsible (and lovable) gentleman who ensures our safety through fantastic (illustrated) briefings before each of our many excursions. I have stopped taking notes, although perhaps some of us could use a few reminders still, but these are from orientation week in UB when of course I wrote down everything they told us (okay maybe only what I found funny):

3/2/08 12:46 Class
Tyclaarau - tos-laar-ay: Help me!
1) Be careful when crossing street!
2) Drunken men. Stay away
3) Pickpocketing
4) Don't drink cheap vodka (poison incident)
- Gem International is good
- Spirit Bal Buram also

3/7/08 13:52 Countryside Homestay Briefing
- No peanut butter
- Don't burn self on fire, or put trash in fire
- Baby animals may pee on your shoes/things

Went to Erdenet (copper mining town, responsible for something ridiculous like 30% of Mongolia's GDP) on Friday. Here is the huge noisy factory that refines copper and molybdenum ore to concentrate. It was noisy and dusty and there was lots of creaky metal and bubbling toxic gray stuff - everything a factory should be.

After the factory tour, we drove around several lakes of waste outside the town. Here is the one we stopped at. It was enormous - like Lake Mendota, maybe - and all full of this sludge and white dust. We were equipped with face masks. So mining, which many view as the only way to jump start Mongolia's economy, obviously has environmental implications.






Russian-Mongolian Friendship statue in Erdenet. (Erdenet mine opened in the 1970's with lots of help from Russia, the nation owns half the mine today). Here are four of us American students, two language teachers, and the three guides from Margad College who arranged our Big Day in the Mining Town. Sorry you are not in this picture H-na.

This Friday we're going to a national park nearby where there are wild horses! On our extensive schedule, at 7:30 PM on Friday evening it is Environmental Video Night. Woo hoo!!!!!!


Sorry the formatting of these pictures is awkward, I'm not patient enough to try really hard. Regardless, here is an assortment of photos I've been meaning to share:



Tugriks & long underwear. All you really need in Mongolia.







Dinner during orientation with Liz, when we haplessly ordered a single buuz instead of an order of buuz like they had on the picture menu (5 little buuz all together on a plate). Little did I know how many more buuz I would have to eat in my stay here. This meal is about 3243258 more colorful than most of the ones I have had since. Which is why there are no pictures of them.

Our school is actually a townhouse. So this is just outside the building. A Korean family with "very naughty children" lives next door. It's very cozy and tricky.

Look at the awkward baby camel on the right!!! This herd caused our caravan of vans headed from Kharkorin to Ulaanbaatar to slow down a bit. The camels had some trouble with the snow drifts, which was as funny-looking in real life as it is in your imagination.

First thing they say's "take off your shoes"

And they'll say they want your story, but they'll get confused
By all those words you use

I am writing to you from my new host sister Khulan's laptop. It's early on a Sunday afternoon and I'm still in my pj's effectively, with no plans of changing until before the ballet tonight (Giselle at the national opera theater, SIT likes us to be fancy like this). Yesterday I moved into my second homestay for the semester, a three-week one with a family in Ulaanbaatar. I'm still living on Peace Avenue, as it were. Good old Pax Av. . . but we have a car (A land cruiser with a canvas picture of trees on the spare tire that says something like, "We have to take care of our environment!" - Really.) and I believe I will be seeing more of the city because of it. Last night went shopping up the street that the US Embassy is on, except a lot further west. I like the clothes, except they are all too small and from other places so there's no real reason to get them here (China. America - saw United Colors of Benneton, Mossimo, of course Abercrombie in various boutiques around town). Also in that shopping area I saw a lot of Mongolian hipsters in skinny jeans, colorful sneakers and inventive hairstyles. I am tempted to get some velcro shoes here so I don't have to lace up my shoes all the time ever. Will keep you posted on that. I sure know how to keep you guys on your toes about my Mongolian adventures.

So this is a drastically different living situation than in the ger in Galuut Soum. My mother speaks English extremely well, as does my sister. Pops is less fluent but I can still communicate with him better in English than Mongolian probably. There's a lot less ambiguity in the day-to-day, and I'm very comfortable in my room and getting food out of the fridge and stuff, but kind of just sitting around and smiling cluelessly in the ger is something I miss a bit. Me knowing the rules makes me responsible to follow them . . . and yes, there are rules. I think that I am much less of an interesting novelty in this family as well - they have a 22 year old daughter who recently graduated from the University of Hawaii and is now working in Utah, so America is familiar to them somewhat.

Oh but it is quite cute because both of my parents are chemists (educated in Irkutsk) and we bonded over that a little bit. My dad showed me pictures from a business trip to Erdenet to look at the copper mines or something, and I properly identified a distillation apparatus and an atomic absorption spectrometer. Ha! Also last night Dr. mom had 2 friends over, both of which were also chem students with them 25 years ago. The woman is now a traditional musician of some sort and was very sweet. So I got to thinking about how maybe 25 years from now I will still be friends with my chem major crowd, and that made me prematurely nostalgic for the prelim parties, mathematica bashing and poster-stealing and things like this. SHOUTOUT TO BAKER LAB.

My parents are at the sauna all day and my sister is at a birthday party so there wasn't anybody to go to Giselle with me. I called my friend that I met at the American Center for Mongolian Studies and she's meeting me there, so that will be nice. Tomorrow we're visiting the Zorig Foundation together - last Monday met Oyun and Bayar, siblings of the late democratic leader Zorig who are v involved with it. Last week's lectures ("Politics, Economics and Social Change") were pretty incredible. Learned lots about history and current issues in a very stimulating way (having the secretary of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party come talk to us, for example. He brought a TV crew (perhaps it was unrelated in retrospect) for the English language channel with him, so we were all on TV and four of us were interviewed afterwards) and let's face it, I do love learning. I'm going to see if I can get some English-language material on the new election law and past political campaigns.

Had dinner with a friend from Cornell (Sam from the men's polo team who is currently doing acting and modeling in Japan, except now he's just traveling Asia until May probably and happened to be in UB, a lovely coincidence) on Friday at Mongolian's first vegetarian restaurant which opened 3 weeks ago. The people there were extremely eccentric - they were Mongolian vegetarians, for starters, but also kept dropping by our table with meditation tips and explanations of what vegan means in case we weren't sure. Sam said it made him think of the cult-owned coffeeshop on the commons in Ithaca. I haven't been, but I can imagine the parallels quite easily. I had fake chicken (toficken? faux-ltry?) and there was pumpkin soup and it was pretty packed with tourists by the time we left. Anyways that was a funny place, there are some ex-diehard veggies in our group (poor Lily hadn't had meat for like 18 years before she came here) who will frequent the restaurant I am sure.

Last item of (relative) note - went for a run for the first time in over a month on Friday as well. Nobody runs here, much less in shorts (it was gorgeous out. It is probably also gorgeous out today, but I am too lazy), but I stayed mostly away from stares by going out of town along the river that the Lion Bridge goes over. Except this turned out to be slightly sketchy in terms of no people and barbed wire and weird construction sites and stray dogs crawling under fences so I think I will rework my route or definitely have company next time I go out.

Bayaartai!

We're going down the road

to tiny cities made of ashes

All I wanted to do the entire drive back from Bayangkhongor (unnecessarily 4 days long. but that is because we visited a moderately sized city made of ashes, its name was Kharkhorin) was listen to this song, naturally I didn't think it would make sense to bring my ipod to visit the nomads. None of the eleven of us had a charger. It was tragic. Next trip, I suppose.

I wrote this earlier this afternoon. I just got like, 20 free minutes of internet by accident. Love this cafe.

30 March 2008
Student Hostel

I just dropped off laundry with a few of the kids here- I was planning on just throwing in my two pairs of pants and a sweater and chipping in a few thousand tugrik for the luxury of not having to wash the pounds of dirt out of the jeans I wore for two weeks straight in the countryside. We were misled about the size of the load though, and I just officially spent seven dollars on a load of laundry. Oh well. Cost of living in Mongolia- reasonable if you live like the locals (eating buuz), somewhat distressing if you indulge, which it is hard not to do after returning to UB and having options like apples, a coffee at the UB hotel, Chinese food. We get 12000 TG per day for food on weekends-3000 for breakfast, 4000 for lunch, 5000 for dinner- which is a lot, especially since nobody’s found a place to eat breakfast yet anyways. Finally figured out that produce and cheese at the State Department store is marked by how much it weighs, not how much it costs…so the six gala apples for 1,055 TG was indeed too good to be true (1.055 kilos was about 5500 TG which isn’t too far off of American prices I guess).

Enough grumbling about spending money-the past three weeks I think I spent maybe five dollars on candy and pickled vegetables when we went to visit the soum center (equivalent to a county seat). I am back in UB after a 2 week homestay with a herding family in Bayanghongor aimag (Galuut soum. It’s mentioned in the Lonely Planet Mongolia as having a canyon “worth a visit if, for some bizarre reason, you are in the region.” We visited that very canyon after the epic soum center visit that happened halfway through our stay-the river in it was frozen so we all climbed down and slid around happily on that sunny, windy day. It was in that canyon – which opened up eventually to a picturesque landscape of mountain-river-hillside with ger-vast steppe – that I decided to try to spend as much time as possible outside in my remaining time there.

Here's the view basically from outside my ger and up the hill a bit. That is my little brother in the picture, the sun set between the mountains and over the river.

The second week (time post-canyon) was better than the first week, which was always bound to be a little awkward since I couldn’t speak the language and had little idea what was going on. I also drank a lot of milk. These three factors combined made me empathize a lot with why babies spend so much of their day sleeping. I got about eleven or twelve hours a night, it was extravagant and glorious. I also had a bed and a sheepskin lined deel tucked around my mummy bag each night, so was never cold, for which I am grateful.

Mostly what I did each day was wake up very slowly to my family starting the fire, doing some early herding (or something outside. I was always still in bed), and telling me to “relax a little, relax a little”. The first word we looked up in my crappy black-market purchased dictionary was “amarax” which I think is a very nice way to say relax (ah-mah-rah). It is also the word I heard the most in my ger, maybe after “Tea?” which was offered to me and others constantly. Eventually I would get up and put away my sleeping bag and thermarest (thanks Vanessa. I think there might be some baby goat poop on it, but not very much) and have a bowl of milk tea (milk, wee bit of salt, effectively no tea) with last night’s dinner in it. You take the buuz that have gotten cold overnight (all the fat is congealed) and break them up and put them in your tea – Buuz cereal!!!

Then I would do my language homework, walk up to the big pile of rocks that was my favorite bathroom, sit around the ger, write letters, take pictures, and around 11:30 ride to language class at whomever’s ger it was at that day. Typically my uncle/brother Sunday-Monday (his name was Nyamdawaa, which Tuya my teacher told us means Sunday-Monday, which is the best name ever) (okay the reason he is my uncle brother is because he is my father’s eighteen year old stepbrother whom my parents effectively adopted, and he always lied about his age and said he was sixteen because he was shy about being small. The picture is of him herding, he was very good at it) would take me to class, but my mom took me once and my dad a few times as well. The horses responded incredibly well to my host father’s “chou!” commands, so those were particularly nice rides. It’d be about 20 to 40 minutes. I figured out how to post when trotting on the second day, and cantered a lot subsequently, which did a number on my tailbone one cold day my deel kept flying out from under me. Riding was very fun, even though my horse was not really all about doing what I wanted it to (huge fan of stopping for a bite of snow whenever possible).

Language class was always pretty fantastic. We’d sit around one of the gers for two hours while the mother made us lunch, and I ate more candy than I would have thought possible in the meantime. Delicious. After class our corny little language group (me, Hannah, Dan, Paul and Tuya the teacher) would do an activity such as soccer against Zaya’s language group and their families on the flat plain by Miriam’s ger. Or hike up the hill behind my place that turned out to be a mountain that never ended, but at the very eventual summit we ate peppermint patties and could see the soum center and Tuya mysteriously had some Red Hot Chili Peppers on her fancy cell phone so we rocked out to that. This is a picture of a class in my ger . . . Tuya and Hannah are sitting on my bed. Paul's deel was and is ridiculous.

The best post-language class afternoon I would have to say (although soccer in riding boots and deels was wonderfully ridiculous, and all the dads were impressed with my ball handling skills) was the smoky two hours spent in Paul’s ger playing cards with the young men who were in charge of getting us to class and back (Sunday-Monday; Paul’s very goofy 20-year old herder who was unrelated but took care of the governor’s yaks since she had a newborn baby, or something; Sober Munkoo, Tuya’s good natured and good looking twenty year old brother -Hannah and I both left Galuut Soum with pretty big crushes on him; Paul’s adorable thirteen year old brother and his super smily wonderful father (who on the last day stopped me and Sunday Monday on our ride home from a volleyball game to show me a NEWBORN BABY YAK that was possibly the best thing ever); I suppose I should now mention Drunk Munkoo. He had incredible teeth, and was always drunk, an important character in the cast of the community as he traveled from ger to ger each night and at language class the next morning we shared tales of his exploits (shaving his beard with a lighter, being helped onto motorcycles, playing anklebones with impossible dexterity) from the previous night. But mostly his teeth were amazingly white and straight and glowed.) Anyways, eating candy and playing cards with these people until almost dark – the herding was done by the time SundayMonday and I got back home – was a time I hope to remember for awhile. I lost a hand towards the end and was out of the game so I broke out my harmonica and practiced You are My Sunshine and Amazing Grace while everybody got all excited about the game around me. The picture of some of these guys is from our last day when we went on a fast ride (in an effective herd of horses, this was thrilling. I galloped at the end) and hike up to the tallest rock in the area) [l-r lea's dad, mikaela's dad, sober munkoo, Sunday-Monday, Miriams little brother home for spring break, Paul's older younger brother)

On the last Friday of my homestay (we left on Monday) we went on a group trip after language class to visit an old monastery nearby and some Buddhist paintings on the side of a cliff by a river. It was very windy and gorgeous to see water. Later that evening I accidentally deleted all of my pictures (formatted my memory card when I was checking how much space I had left) which, well, was upsetting. So there are many images that I am sad to never get to share for real. Don’t worry, I filled up my memory card the last two days anyways. Here are some of them:

My family - This is a funny picture for at least two reasons 1) My hair, which my mother did Mongolian Schoolgirl Style the last few days and 2) My little brother throwing a fit in the corner, as per usual. Most people had trouble believing he was a boy because of his long hair and that he was dressed in pink the majority of the time. I believed it after he ran around naked all night the first night in the ger, and after I saw him beating up on the baby goats. Oh, gender roles. L-R 3 year old brother, Pops, Mom, cousin, me, sister, Sunday-Monday. The all-important Machine (Car) is behind us, i think it used to be a russian ambulance. We unveiled it for this photo shoot.

My host siblings. Awwww. I'm sad my sister was only home on weekends (countryside children either board in the soum school, or, in my sister's case, live with other relatives in the soum center while attending school). But we were lucky to have transportation to get her every weekend. My little brother was certainly something.
Later on our last day in the countryside, a volleyball game. The herders loved wrestling and volleyball. The net is a rope (I think a few reins tied together) strung between two rocks. I liked soccer better, but hey. My team almost won the mini-tourney Tuya started.

Me on my "free-spirited" half-wild horse that my father trained, with Sunday Monday in the back. Also that Eternal Blue Sky.

I’m in UB for a month of school dotted with excursions (Erdenet for a day, Eastern Gobi for a weekend, I think we’re going to a National Park, and then somewhere else I forget) and a three-week homestay that begins on Saturday. I will have much more opportunity to update (we visited Kharkhorin, where, Cornell, the silver tree that my goodbye party was inspired by once stood) and hope to capitalize on that. I’m going to eat a delicious gala apple now though.

Happy National Women's Day!

Hello from Mongolia. I made it here last week safe and sound, and continue to be in good health which I am grateful for. Internet is a little tricky here - I just have access in internet cafes and wireless is a bit harder to come by (although certain ridiculous places like Sukhbaatar Square and the Irish Pub are hotspots, I doubt I will be lugging my laptop out to write to you from the shadow of Sukhbaatar's statue. Maybe in May or June) so I'm just going to post a lot very sporadically. I found a sweet internet cafe right by our student hostel that can take my memory stick, so I'll upload a bit of what I've been writing this past week. I'm going to Bayangkhongor province on Monday to live with a herding family for two weeks in their mobile spring camp ger. I'll have language lessons (which i'll be riding to on horseback) in the morning and help out around the ger and do some interviewing or whatever in the afternoon. And stay warm at night, and hopefully make friends with my three year old host brother! We had two lamas come to school to read some Buddhist texts and do a little purification ceremony in preparation for our trip yesterday. Tomorrow our deels (Mongolian traditional dress, google images it! mine is magenta) arrive, we're going to the ballet in the evening and flying out Monday morning. Last night I went to the neighborhood market (I forget what my neighborhood is called. It starts with the letter B) which I thought was like a grocery store but instead turned out to be an indoor food market. Lots of people buying cakes to celebrate Women's day, a holiday I haven't quite figured out except it involves buying lots of roses, chocolates, wine, and cakes, and the national history museum being closed. Which works fine for me. I picked up some dried persimmons for my homestay family, as well as some pastries for breakfast and gummies which we ate with abandon last night at the hostel. It's incredibly warm outside today, makes me sleepy for a nap. I am now going to wrestle with the monster that is pre-enrollment for my fall classes, and hope you are all doing well. Following are things I've written on my laptop in the few spare minutes i've had this extremely busy orientation week:

2-29-08
Beijing, Beijing Institute of Technology (my grandfather’s apartment)
Not sure when I’ll be able to get this on the internet, but I have my computer open to quick back up my hard drive before I make the last leg of my trip. I left from Dulles at noon on Wednesday, and arrived in Beijing late afternoon Thursday local time. It’s Friday morning now, and I had a good seven hours of sleep . . . we’ll see how long I can stay up tonight (goal is eight P.M.). Oh jetlag. Beijing (as well as Ulaanbaatar, I think) is 13 hours ahead of EST. I had a pleasant flight. Sat next to a young Tibetan man who was returning home after four months in Charlottesville (I know!) helping to open a library devoted to Himalayan studies. UVA kids you should go check it out. He recently started a foundation (link to website) to preserve Tibetan culture through filming documentaries (and teaching high school students about filmmaking). His family is nomadic and it sounds like there are numerous parallels between Tibetan and Mongolian nomadic life. We spoke in Chinese, so I hope that all these things I am saying are right, but my Chinese is a bit shaky. It felt really good to use it, though, and it was a pretty fascinating conversation.
My mom’s been in China the past two weeks, and she came to get me at the airport. It was wonderful to see her and get Starbucks at the airport (before I left Dulles I got a mocha frap in honor of my last American purchase, ironically my first foreign purchase was also from Starbucks. Also, it’s very confusing to try to order Starbucks in Chinese, because I can’t read it and hardly know what the drinks are called in English, much less their creative Chinese translated names). I loved my mom for being so her when she said in a very “only my mom would ever do this” way told the tall girl replenishing the sugar packets “You are very pretty!” And she was, especially when she smiled at the compliment.
All of my father’s family came over last night for dinner and to see me. I love them, and am glad to have gotten to see them on my way out. My second uncle has been to Outer Mongolia (Inner Mongolia is part of China, Outer Mongolia is the country proper) and he told me about it a bit, and he was excited to hear that I’m trying to go see Lake Baikal after my program ends in June. Apparently it took him seventeen minutes to fly over the width of the lake once . . . it is huge. My cousin Di Wen is in her fourth year of university, which is an internship instead of classes (I think) so she was able to come by. This was exciting. . . .
Today I am re-packing a bit (Air China apparently allows only 1 20 kilo bag to be checked . . I have maybe 70 pounds (30 kilo? I have no idea) in two bags so this will be interesting), visiting my grandfather, and meeting Cesar, a friend from high school who so very coincidentally is studying here – at the university where my parents met, no less. I’m very excited to see him.
Tomorrow, I’ll head back to the airport for my 8:20 AM flight to Ulaanbaatar. It was lovely to have my mom pick me up at the airport in Beijing and a little scary to think that the next time I come here I’ll be flying somewhat more solo (Except, probably not at all, I am sure my family will come get me) but also I think I will be better at traveling in places where I am a little lost. We will see.
Miss you!
P.S. I forgot how incredible Chinese food is. Just putting that out there.

5 March 2008
Hello from Mongolia! So I might be able to post these, but not anytime soon. I will write a bit regardless. I am sitting in my student hostel bed listening to some Nickel Creek with Liz and Hannah. We have the Mongolian alphabet to memorize tomorrow, and some phrases for the black market visit tomorrow to review. Where to begin? Ulaanbaatar (I am still practicing how to pronounce this word. Ulaan is straightforward, baatar is like “butter” with “baa” in the beginning) is growing on me. It is kind of like a small Russian Beijing. A very small Beijing, I guess. We’ve mostly only seen Peace Ave (Enktaivan something) and a tiny bit of Chinggis Ave . . . I’ve probably walked up and down a two or three kilometer stretch of Peace Ave at least twenty times. I don’t really know what I could say here that hasn’t maybe been observed already – I feel like my perspective is very shallow and limited so far, but I will try to paint you a picture of my day today, which was pretty representative of everything so far.
Woke up at 7:20 when my roommates did – there are 4 of us in two rooms, three in mine and Lily sleeps with the fridge that sounds like a throat singer whenever it charges or whatever it may be doing. In the kitchen we also have a hot plate with two burners that does boil water, but barely . . . a table, some chairs. The best part of these hostel rooms are the big windows that let in all that good Mongolian sunshine pretty much all day. The rooms are pretty warm, although it’s always hard to get out of the sleeping bag in the morning (we do have beds, but on top of the covers is probably the cleaner way to sleep). We have a sink and tub, the water can go either to the sink or the shower and it’s been hot enough whenever I’ve wanted to shower, but I don’t plan on that being consistent. Toilet is in a separate little WC by the door. Overall, we are well accommodated, and don’t have to use group bathrooms or showers like many other hostel residents. It’s a comfortable living situation. We’re on the fourth floor, which is a nice way of getting warm after being outside. Security is through one of the four lady guards, who check our student I.D. cards each time we enter. It’s funny that these little old women are in charge of keeping out all the bad people, they are as far from my concept of security guard as possible. But I feel safe once inside the hostel. Outside, the lighting is kind of poor and there is a “well-populated” uncovered manhole right around the corner where many UB homeless live. It’s a pretty central location in the city though – maybe a forty minute walk to school to the east, and fifteen minutes to Sukhbaatar Square to the west.
For breakfast I had some bread, jam, tea, and a few of those mini-clementines from China. They sell a lot of bread in shops, today’s was a nice sourdough sort of loaf. We’re trying out yogurt (in our health lecture, we were recommended to have local yogurt so as to help our digestive systems become accustomed to the local bacteria) except Liz and I accidentally bought a bag of milk last night instead of yogurt. I think Mongolian for yogurt is about the same as English, but, not close enough I guess!
Instead of taking the trolley to school, we walked to Sukhbaatar Square and met our language teacher Zaya outside the opera (where we saw an interesting opera our second night in town). We all walked to the American Center for Mongolian Studies, and were introduced to the resident director, a Cornell alum. He used to live on the corner of Stewart and Seneca when he was a grad student, which is two blocks from my darling apartment back in Ithaca. Small world. ACMS seems like a fantastic resource for our independent study projects later on. After an hour or two there, we split into groups and took taxis with our language instructors to school, where we had a quick tea (Every day we have tea time from 10:40 to 11:00. It is my favorite part of the day – yummy Mongolian black tea that is much like PG Tips with fresh milk, endless sugar cubes, a hot water machine . . . and at least two kinds of cookies. Tea is pretty crucial when it’s cold all the time). School is a townhouse with four rooms on the main floor where we have classes. One room is like a small seminar room at a college, with tables in a U shape around a projection screen. The dining room has a couch, armchair, coffee table and rug and the tea table. Also the filtered water machine, where I fill up my Nalgene before going home each day. I had my first small language class today, we got to be in the dining room (how cozy!). Julie, Liz and I learned the Cyrillic alphabet. Challenging, but I am excited to be able to sound words out now. I have to end this sometime soon so I can practice writing and sounding out the letters. Our first day of language (hello! my name is, what is your name? how old are you? etc) was very overwhelming and I couldn’t keep track of what we were learning, but later today I found out that I had actually retained most of it. So I hope that the phrases from today will steep in my brain a little and I can break them out at the black market tomorrow.
Lunch was after the language lesson (which goes on for about 1.5 hours). We have a cook for the school who has turned out delicious and pretty diverse lunches for us every day. Today was a sort of lentil onion soup, yummy chicken, pasta, and cabbage salad (like coleslaw). I guess that doesn’t sound very Mongolian. Yesterday she made miso soup and Japanese beef curry (like my Mom makes at home, it’s Derek’s favorite food) and rice and that was completely delicious. Always plenty of bread and nutella, and interesting juices. We are well taken care of.
Then we had a lecture on the Great Khaans by a man whose name I wrote down but I am too cozy in my sleeping bag to fetch right now. He was extremely knowledgable, used to be the director of intelligence at the Mongolian equivalent of the CIA. Much of what he spoke about was covered in Jack Weatherford’s book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which I read back in Ithaca and enjoyed a lot. Anyways, it was a nice history lecture. I like history very much. I haven’t had a ninety minute lecture since high school, however, and that took a little readjustment. I think that’s the format for the rest of this semester. Hopefully all the lectures will interest me as much!!! Mongolia’s position on China is something that I am still trying to feel out . . . there have been times when I feel a slightly uncomfortable as a Chinese person about how China and the Chinese are viewed or portrayed, and I want to figure out how representative these moments are. I mean, people accept me visibly as Mongolian, so I am not really worried about how I personally will be treated most of the time, but it is something I would like to learn and understand better.
Then we broke back up into our small language groups to go on a buuz scavenger hunt. Buuz are little Mongolian meat dumplings, much like shao mai in China except they only have meat as filling (no rice or mushrooms). Mongolian food so far, by the way, has been much more diverse than just meat and flour. We are, however, in the city, and I am sure this will change in a week when we fly out to Bayangkhongor aimag for our countryside homestay. Took the trolley to the hostel, dropped off things, had a snack, walked to Seven Summits outdoor gear shop at Chinggis and Peace. I need a second water bottle, they had a Sigg-like one but it was 12000 tg (12 US. I estimate 1000 tg=1 USD, which is not quite right, it’s more like 1170 but it’s erring on the side of both thinking and spending less) which I found pricey and hope to find something more reasonable at the black market tomorrow. Liz finally found a sleeping pad though, which is good . . . Bought three rolls of TP at a street kiosk, found a buuz café (Elephant Buuz Café is its name) on Peace Ave, called our language instructor Boloroo (this looks so easy to prounce, but it is prob one of the harder words in Mongolian I’ve learned . . . vowels are impossible! Phonetically, the best I can do is Both-lo-ro) super awkwardly in English to tell her where the buuz café was using a pay phone in a shop, had buuz and cabbage salad. They have mantou buuz, which are like Chinese baozi, which I found cute because it is like buuz in Chinese mantou. Anyways. Walked back, took a shower, here I am.

I got the wanderin' blues

and i'm gonna quit these ramblin' ways . . . one of these days, soon


I'm going to Mongolia in a month. Surprise! I will do my best to tell you about it here. In the meantime, my new favorite hobby is checking the weather in Ulaanbataar and feeling smug about how hardcore it is there/how relatively warm it is here.