Uh oh, watch out. Two Friday's in a row. Something's must be going on.

January 10, 2009

After a few hours of reading, a couch surfer came here. He had messaged me a couple of days ago and said he wanted to experience what it’s like outside the city. I told him he was welcome to come to my place for the weekend. His name is Donnel, and he’s from the San Francisco area. He seems to be a fairly nice guy. It was time for lunch when he got here, so the first thing we did was make a trip to the store. We made a simple meal of pasta with onions and sausage. After that, we walked up to the OBOO. OMG, it was freaking cold! This was the windiest day that I’ve experienced so far. I thought my face was going to freeze off. My nose was numb by the time we got back to my apartment. The scene was really cool out there, though. The wind was blowing the top layer of the snow across the ground, and it made a really neat effect. I took a video of it, but it doesn’t do it justice. It looked like a frozen desert wasteland. Felt like it, too.

When we got back, we just sat around talking and watching music videos. Don taught me how to play Cribbage. Have you ever heard of that game? There are some funky rules and scoring, but I like it. When Moogie finished practicing for some kind of teacher concert they’re having soon, she came to my place. She had already been drinking, so she was feeling pretty good. My plan was to buy some drinks for us, then ask her to cook, but since she’d already been drinking, I just asked her straightaway. She agreed to cook boats for us. Sweet! I didn’t have quite enough meat, though, so I had to go and buy some. At the store, I started digging in the freezer, looking for what I wanted. The owner told me that all they had was innards. Yuck! I sure didn’t want that. As I was about to leave, another customer told me that there was some meat in the next room. I had never even noticed the other door, so I was skeptical. When I opened the door, it was dark in there, and I could see someone on the other side of the room, laying down and smoking a cigarette. I started to leave, but the guy assured me there was someone, and meat, in there. When I went in, the guy stood up and a couple of other guys I’ve never seen followed me in. Immediately, my hackles raised and I was worried about my safety. After some confusion about what kind of meat I wanted, the guy picked up a big burlap sack and took it over to the store. I don’t know why they kept asking what kind of meat I wanted, since the guy only had one kind and I kept telling him that was the kind I wanted. In the store, the guy pulled out an entire leg of mutton and asked me how much I wanted. I got one and a half kilograms for 3,500tg. Not a bad price. When we left, Don bought vodka.

Back at my place, we had a good time sitting around talking and preparing boats while taking intermediate shots. I still don’t like vodka, but the kind he’d gotten was smoother than some others I’ve had. Don made a game of seeing how creative he could get with his boat pinching. Moogie got a good laugh out of them all. Mongolians seem to have this preset idea of what boats – and other foods that are pinched, but basically the same thing – are supposed to look like. I told her that I don’t really care what they look like, as long as they cook right and taste good when they’re finished. We probably made somewhere around 50 boats, and when it got down to the end and everyone else was finished, I polished off the last few. As I’ve said countless times: I can’t get enough of those things.

When we’d finished, one of Moogie’s friends from school came over with another couple small bottles of vodka. Her name is Nomin. I’d seen her a couple times before, but I’d never met her. She was really nice. She doesn’t speak any English at all, but I could understand most of what she was saying and was able to respond in kind. Older PCVs had always told me that alcohol was somewhat of helper when it comes to speaking better Mongolian. True or not, something seemed to be doing the trick. Granted, we didn’t talk about anything too deep, but I was able to do alright.

January 11, 2009

Don and I woke up late today, and after eating breakfast/lunch, we went to the school. Moogie had told us that people would be there playing volleyball and asked if we wanted to play. I told her I would go, but I probably wouldn’t play. She made it sound like there was some kind of big competition going on. But, just in case, I did dress for the occasion. When we got there, it was just a few people, hitting the ball around. Okay, I could handle that. We hadn’t even started a game yet when Don said that his brain couldn’t handle it and he was going to walk around outside. Apparently, he was still feeling pretty bad from last night. Luckily, I had stayed true to my secret hang over cure: I drank lots of water before I went to bed. It works every time. I stayed and played three games and didn’t do too bad. People were still playing when I left a couple hours later.

When Don got back, he said that he wanted to go and watch the sunset and take some pictures. So, we bundled up and took off walking to the hill that’s over there. When we got there, we saw a further hill that the sun was just going behind that might offer a better view. To get there, we had to walk through the ger district. That was my first time over there, so it was kind of neat. A couple of kids had built a snow fort. That was my first time ever seeing anything like that. I was sure to tell them how cool I thought it was. They beamed their smiles at me in return. We had good timing in getting to the other hill. It was only another 10 minutes before the sun went behind the distant mountains. On the walk back, we got to see the full moon rising. It was supposed to have been the biggest one of 2009 last night. We saw it when we were out last night, after it was already normal size, and noticed how bright it was. Tonight, as it was rising over the horizon, the moon looked several times bigger than normal. As always, I got some pictures that you’ll be able to check out eventually.

When we got back to town, we stopped at the ger that I was taken to when the last couch surfers were here. I was expecting to see my friend, but I was told she was in the city. I don’t know who the two women were that were there. The older lady was hard of hearing, but very nice. After telling the younger to give us tea, she said down with her prayer beads and kept herself busy fingering each one while reciting her prayers. When we left there, we went to Densmaa’s place. Our goal was to ask about the train schedule, but she made us sit down and have tea and some snacks. Then, after she found out what we wanted to know, and secured a ride for Don to get to the train station, she made us stay while she cooked dinner for us. That, as always, was cool. After coming home, we’ve decided that we would go to bed early tonight. We are pretty tired (me even more so, from the volleyball) and we have to wake up early. If you know me, you know that I’m not looking forward to that.

January 12, 2009

I read an article on MSN about a couple who got married in a Taco Bell. It seems that someone loves the place more than I do. I could eat there almost everyday of the week, but I don’t think I would want to get married there.

This morning, we woke up and were on the meeker at 6:30. Densmaa had set up a ride for us to get Don to the train station in the other part of town. We got there, I ordered his ticket for him, and then I was brought back, where I promptly went right back to bed for another hour. I was still tired when I woke up and got ready for work. At work, I was in a bit of a daze as I continued to work on a life-skills lesson. Luckily, I’d already made an “action plan” a few weeks ago. But when Oko came to my office to write one up, it took me a few minutes to remember that I’d done it. I had most of the important words translated, too, so that helped a lot. Now I just have to see about finding a translator for the lessons that I’m typing up. If I’m lucky, Shuree will be able to do it for me; but she’s really busy these days. I’ll keep you posted.

Densmaa told me today that I won’t be teaching English to anyone but her, Oko and Javkhaa. As I said before, I don’t mind that. She set a time schedule for 3 o’ clock, everyday. Wouldn’t you know it, though, at 3, Oko was the only one in the office. We went over the words from the other day, and then I went over some other stuff with her. Right now, her English is the worst, but I bet that it will improve quickly. She’s shy when it comes to speaking English, but she’s willing to learn. I think she’ll do alright. I’ve been talking to her in English when I say something, and then saying it in Mongolian. I’ve noticed that she already understands many of the things I say, even though she can’t quite say them herself yet. She’s doing pretty good about helping me with my Mongolian, too. We took turns quizzing each other today. Even if I just learn a few words a day, that’s better than nothing. I even used one of the new words in a conversation this evening. The word was ‘stamp pad.’ I don’t know when I’ll really ever need to know that word, but since Mongolian words have so many different meanings, depending on the context, maybe it will help. We’ll see.

For those of you who check out some of the other blogs that I have links to on my blog, please check out the Advance Humanity blog and click on the posting titled It’s Saturday Night! That’s Travis’s blog and he lives in the same place as Alex. Both of them were with me during training, and they are a couple of extremely cool people who made my summer very memorable. There are a couple of videos of them being goofy that I’m sure will give you a snapshot of what I mean by “memorable.” Enjoy!

January 13, 2009

Not long after getting to work this morning, Oko came into my office. She had a project proposal in hand and told me that when Densmaa had asked for an “action plan,” that is what she wanted. Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? So, I sat down and started working on that, not being in much of a hurry. Javkhaa came in shortly after and they were both sitting there watching me. Along with them telling me to continue to write when I paused to talk to them, they gave me the feeling that I was expected to have it finished today. I spent the first half of the day working on that and really, oddly, quite enjoyed it. The first part of it reminded me of writing papers for my classes in university. I really liked the creativity part of it. As I said before, I like writing. There’s something about thinking of as many synonyms as I can for a word, then deciding which one I want to use in a particular sentence. I don’t think it really shows in my blog, though. Using the words I did, I knew that they would be hard to translate, but I used them anyway.

After lunch, I quickly finished and took the final product to Oko and Javkhaa. They seemed to be amazed and said, “You are a very fast writer.” I just smiled at them. Densmaa came in and helped translate the easy parts, then left us to take care of the rest. Um, that’s a little backward, don’t you think? Oh well. We sat down and got to work, with me making the pages of the dictionary dance a flurried shimmy in my hands. I was reminded that some of the things we might say in English just don’t translate to Mongolian. And a couple of times, I would show them the translation and they would look at me funny. Turns out, the first translation isn’t always what we would think it should be. I can’t think of the instance from today, but once, I talked about how dull my knife was. Densmaa didn’t know the word “dull,” show I showed her the translation. She looked at me and said that can’t be the word I meant, cause knives can’t be dull. I told her that they most certainly can be, then I showed her the word “sharp” and told her “dull” is the opposite of that. We then flipped back to “dull” and she found a word that was the third or fourth translation. The first one meant “not smart.” Translation is so difficult sometimes!

Last Friday, when I left the bank, one of the ladies from one of the stores I frequent hollered at me, “Bagsh ah, bagsh ah!” (Teacher! Teacher!!) I’ve become used to people thinking I’m a teacher, so I didn’t correct her. When I followed her into her store, she asked me if I would tutor her younger brother. After telling her that I would not tutor him every day and that, because of Peace Corps policy, I couldn’t take payment, we decided that he would come to my place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at 6:30, for one hour of tutoring. I wish I’d have made some kind of deal for food. I didn’t think about that until today, when they actually showed up 10 minutes early. I was extremely surprised at that. Her brother’s name is Ambaa. He’s 26 years old, and studied English at university. His English isn’t too bad. He just needs some practice. This evening, we went over basic questions like “What is your name?” “How old are you?” “Where are you from?” “What do you do?” and other trivial questions. Like most people who know the least bit of English, his grammar is what needs the most work. The hour went by fairly quickly and when he left, he asked me if he was to come again tomorrow. When I told him Thursday, his face fell. Oh well. I’m not trying to have someone over here every day, teaching grammar.

January 14, 2009

A few years ago, I learned about how the ancient Jews’ directions were different that today’s. For example, their north was our east. That explains how they “went down into Egypt.” I thought that was weird then, but I just chalked it up to that being so long ago. I didn’t really think about how a people decide what is what when it comes to cardinal directions. And I sure didn’t think that it could be different today. I was surprised to learn that it is different in Mongolia. Everything here is backwards: north is south, and east is west. I learned this during training, but I’d kind of forgotten about it until I was writing something yesterday that required a direction. Once I heard the explanation for why this is so, though, I understood. You see, Mongolians are the reason that the Chinese built the Great Wall. They are the ones who kept raiding the Chinese. In turn, the Chinese often retaliated, and when they became considerably more powerful, the Mongolians really had to keep an eye out for them. As a result, Mongolians always – and still to this day – faced their homes to what we would call the south, so they would be able to see the Chinese coming. After hundreds of years of orienting themselves this way, I guess it just became natural for them to refer to that direction as north. It really makes it hard when asking for directions sometimes. If you are facing what we would call north, looking at the bank, and you want to go to the store that is to the right of it, you would have to tell a Mongolian that it is on the left side, or west. It’s quite confusing. I always have to stop and think things through before I speak. Luckily, there hasn’t been anything important for me to worry about when it comes to getting directions.

This afternoon, I was in my office, working on a bit of Mongolian, when Oko came in. She said, “Trip, come on. Are you ready?” “Ready for what?” I asked. There was a big meeting with our office, the kindergarten, the hospital, the Social Insurance place, the social workers from both parts of town and both schools, and some students from both schools. We started out by going around the table and everyone introducing their self. For the next two hours, I sat there as they all took turns talking about whatever it is they were talking about. I really don’t have any idea. And I had to pee the whole time, so that just made it worse. At the end, Densmaa asked me to introduce the like-skills project that I’ve been working on – very quickly. I had something prepared, but it wasn’t made to be very quick. Expecting her to translate what I said, I started my spiel about what life-skills are, then was stopped after two sentences. I was told that maybe we would go over that later, and then Oko stood up and talked about it in Mongolian. I was a bit peeved, to say the least. Immediately after that meeting, all the social workers and students stayed, and then Densmaa gave a quick overview about the scope of the project. They asked some questions that I had thought Densmaa knew the answer to, though she didn’t, and I thought to myself, ‘if I had a chance to give the spiel that I have prepared, most of these questions would be answered.’ We ended the meeting with setting another meeting for Friday. I sure hope it goes much better. Pray for me, or cross your fingers, or whatever it is that you do to send luck to someone on the other side of the world. I’m sure I’ll need it.

This evening, I was in the middle of reading when I heard a light tap at my door. I had no idea who it might be as I opened the door. It was two of the students from school; two girls. One of them speaks enough English to kind of sort of get her point across, and the other knows just a few words. The one told me she wanted to ask me a question about a lesson she was working on. When she showed me what it was, I knew I was going to have my work cut out for me. There was a story about what reality shows are, and examples of different ones: American Idol, Survivor, The Bachelor, and another one that I can’t remember. On the surface, the questions had nothing to do with the story. The directions were to answer the questions, and depending on how many A’s, B’s, C’s, or D’s you had, you would be able to tell which reality show you most wanted to be on. You know, kind of like one of those silly Cosmopolitan quizzes that teenage girls take. (Yeah, I know about those. I actually like reading Cosmo, sometimes.) The questions used words that had two or three meanings, and, of course, they weren’t the first translation. She would translate a word, and then I would have to tell her the translation that was meant. It took much longer than I wanted it to. Especially, since they were the kind of giggly girls who talk in their own language and share private jokes. I was ready for them to go before they did. They’re cool, but that’s not the kind of thing I wanted to do this evening.

January 15, 2009

I began my day by working on the letter to the class that I correspond with in the U.S. I received two sets of letter from them at the same time, and all of them but one asked me several questions in each letter. The one girl didn’t ask one question in either. I thought that was a little funny. Still, I was sure to write to her. With a few breaks, it took me all day to finish. Boy, was my hand hurting when I finished. I enjoyed it, though, knowing that they will really like it. In the first letter to them, I wrote the numbers for one through 10, and some of them used them in their letters to me. Today, I wrote all of their names in Cyrillic. It’s a little bit hard, since you have to do it phonetically, and I’m really not that good at pronouncing all the letters correctly. I think I did a good enough job, though. They’ll get a kick out of it.

One of the breaks I took was kind of forced on me, unwillingly. A lady came into my office with some papers that had a bunch of fill-in-the-blank English sentences. After lots of confusion, and asking Oko, I figured out that she wanted me to answer the questions for her kid, whoever that is. I didn’t want to, but I did it anyway. It was a bunch of questions photocopied from a workbook, and it was soon evident that a native English speaker did not write the original. There were several questions that weren’t technically grammatically correct, and some had misspelled words! Then, there were many sentences that should’ve used the word “might”, but only had “may” as a choice. Now, some liberal writers and speakers might say that it’s okay to interchange the two, and you definitely may do that if you are one of those people; but I’m a style nazi when it comes to writing, and I don’t think it should be encouraged. All of that put together – me not wanting to do it in the first place; grammar and spelling mistakes; and the misuse of “might” versus “may” – made me mad about the whole thing. It’s bad enough that I have to teach English, but by doing something like that, I was teaching improper English. I won’t do it again, without sitting down with the student and making sure they understand what is correct.

This evening, Ambaa came again. Khishge came, also. She’s one of the silly girls that came last night. She’s one of the best English speakers of her class, and she was there with me last week when Ambaa’s older sister asked if he could come. She asked if she could come, also, and I told her yes. I’m finding that the one of the biggest problems for Mongolians are those words like a, an, the, is, am, are, was, were, and the like. Those words don’t exist in Mongolian. Those words are either automatically implied, or you change the ending of a word to get at the meaning. They’re doing alright, but they will need a lot of help with reading comprehension. I wrote a sentence that Khishge said (My favourite subject is English, because it is an international language.), and after reading the sentence several times, Ambaa couldn’t tell me what her favourite subject was, or why. We’ll work on that.

After they left, I finished my letter to the kids and put it in an envelope, then sealed up a very small package for my BFFE, the Rectangle Head. It’s all rednecked up with all kinds of duct tape. I want to make sure that no one tampers with it. After that, I exchanged a few emails with one of my absolute favourite people. You know who you are. Thank you for that. It was very fun. I needed that.

Did you know that, if you have RealPlayer, you can download videos from Youtube? Yep, you can. I’ve downloaded several music videos that I like. Very cool. I thought that you might be interested, too.

January 16, 2009

Today, there wasn’t much going on at all, so I stayed in my office for most of the day, working on some Mongolian. I know all the words for think, want, wish, with, hope, desire, have, fancy, long, feeling, heart, sounds, talk, speak, and spell; but there are a lot of phrases I wanted to know using those words. That’s what I worked on all day, taking a few breaks to go and talk to Oko and Javkhaa. I got four pages of new phrases. That’s a lot. Especially since they are all figurative phrases, which changes the words and meanings.

This evening, I haven’t done much of anything. The meat that I got last weekend was all rib meat, so I cut it all off the bone, then steamed the bones with my dinner, and put some hot barbecue sauce on them. There was just enough meat left on them to give me a good appetiser. While I ate my dinner, I started watching Schindler’s List. Have you seen that movie? Whew, it is long; right at three hours. I took a break half way through to clean my kitchen. I’m going to go to UB tomorrow, and will spend the night, and I don’t want to come home to a dirty kitchen. That’s the worst, isn’t it? I think so.

It’s the end of another week for me. I hope you have had a week as good as mine. Write when you can. I always enjoy hearing from you, even if it’s just to say hi. Talk to you later. See ya.