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.