Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Life on the Steppe

Another couple weeks in and time has continued to fly. We’ve definitely found our rhythm of Mongolian class for 4 hours in the mornings, a break for lunch, and then another 3 hours of technical and/or cross-cultural training in the afternoons. On the whole, I think the classes have been as good as one could reasonably expect—especially the language training which I’ve been especially impressed with—though they certainly aren’t without their trying moments. For instance I’ve got a packet on the Mongolian health insurance system that could cure insomnia, and some of the advice we get on how to take of care of ourselves can get a little patronizing, but overall I think it’s been quite well run.

After class we all head back for dinner with our host families, who are in charge of all of our meals, and we’re supposed to be working on list of cultural and domestic activities meant to prepare us living on our own. Most are fairly inane or banal like learning games and cooking Mongolian food, but we’ve also got a few along the lines of herding sheep, observing an animal being slaughtered and learning the Mongolian waltz, which are going to be interesting to say the least (especially for those of you who know how well I can dance).

We’ve also started getting a few good stories under our belts from the last couple weekends. The first was the 13 mile hike that a group of did last week. It started with a hike to the nearby ruins and temples tucked into the hills, and ended with a trail-less ascent of the highest peak we could see from our town. Aside from the fantastic view from the top, my favorite highlight was the boulder fields we crossed that were littered with spiders the size of a silver dollar that would spin webs over every other crevasse.

A couple days ago we also had our first Mongolian karaoke session at the same place I went for my host sister’s 21st birthday—which, it turns out, is because it’s more or less the only night club in town. The main area is also exclusively decorated in red and green, including the lasers, which more or less makes it feel like a perennial disco Christmas party, though aside from that it’s actually surprisingly nice, all things considered. A group of the volunteers here in town all got together with our Mongolian teacher, Oogii, “Aw-gi”, (who I’ve actually gotten to know quite well since she is also a close friend of my host family), and a few of our host family siblings and parents, who we got to tag along for some dancing before moving upstairs to our own karaoke room. Unfortunately only a few songs in the power for the whole town went out, but we still had a great time hanging out by candle light waiting for the power to go back on before the police finally came and told us we should probably go. Undeterred however, we managed to pull some strings and have one of the volunteer’s host mothers open up her ДЭЛГYYP (“delguur”)—i.e. convenience store—for some snacks and drinks before migrating to one of the volunteer’s gers for the remainder of the evening.

We also got some mozzarella brought in from UB (Ulaanbaatar) the other day, so a bunch of the volunteers got together to make some pizza. We only got a couple slices each, but thanks to a good friend of mine who provided me with some last minute Italian seasoning and garlic powder they were still absolutely delicious.

Of course it hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however. On Saturday we played a few games of basketball against the business volunteers in almost 100° F heat, which left me with a skinned elbow, a bloody nose and a good case of dehydration despite drinking almost 3 liters of water while we were out there. More so than anything else though, it left me in desperate need of a shower—a real shower (i.e. the kind that doesn’t come from my lime green, plastic tumpen). However, I still had yet to activate my ATM card so that meant a trip to the bank in my sweaty athletic gear, towel in hand, to withdraw the fee I needed for the local bathhouse. Two banks, three attendants and 45 minutes later, I’m walking home in the midday heat, dirty as ever, because “activate an ATM card” never came up in any of the games of charades I’ve ever played.

There were also a few aesthetic details about Mongolia that I’ve realized I failed to mention in my last post. The first comes from the fact that until only a handful of decades ago, Mongolians never used to have anything that wouldn’t get eaten or biodegrade if they just threw it on the ground. This in turn has meant that it’s about as easy to find a public trashcan here as it is to find a blonde Mongolian. Consequently, my first morning here, I awoke from jetlag at about 4:00 am and decided to watch the sunrise. And as I looked across the field outside our dormitory, I noticed the ground was literally sparkling, giving this already picturesque scene a truly fantastic quality. That was of course until I realized they were the shards of countless broken vodka bottles… However, you would be surprised how quickly you get used to the broken glass. What takes a little longer is acclimating to the partially decayed quadruped jawbones and vertebrae speckled amongst the rest of the litter. And what almost certainly takes the longest of all is getting used to the post-slaughter piles of evacuated sheep-bowel contents that occasionally get wrung out along the side of the road. My apologies if you were planning on eating any time soon.

Rumor has it we’ve also had the first member of our M-21 group early terminate (ET). Most of us only knew him for a few days, but he was a cool guy, and hardly one that we would have expected to leave so early. Apparently though he was quite unhappy with the level of English he would be teaching and decided to leave before he got too far into things. I guess you just never know.

The weather has also gotten impressively volatile as of late as well. Contrasted with the early morning frost we had when I wrote my last post, we’ve recently been going through a bone-dry heat wave that regularly gets up to nearly 100° F as I mentioned before. It also comes with pretty spectacular, tree-bending wind, which I’ve heard is usually more characteristic of the spring here. Especially in the afternoons, you can sometimes watch small sandstorms blow in across the town stirring up a sandy haze and generating little dust devils on the corners of buildings. However today the wind finally blew in another cold front, and with it a mild thunderstorm that left us less than dry even after only the few minute walk back from playing frisbee in the park.

Overall though I’d say everyone’s been having a really enjoyable time, and we’ve got a few things coming up to look forward too. We’re about to have our summer holiday for Nadaam, the festival of the three manly sports, and the other volunteers are all coming back to our site for a view days so we can all spend some time together. I have no doubt it will provide some more stories worth sharing.