Ploofle

More pics up today of my family, house, and random chores my family was inspired to photograph.  I’ve started up wood chopping and enjoy it quite a bit – it’s the only really strenuous chore/activity I’ve done recently.  On one hand, not sweating too much during the week is good when you only bathe once a week or so.  On the other hand…well, you don’t get to do much.  I hope to lug more water and take more baths when I’m finally in my own place.

I have my first language assessment on Monday and our teachers here are all sorts of anxious about it.  It will include self-intro (jikoshokai! woo!), talk about your Mongolian and American family, general free conversation, and two situational role-plays.  It’s all oral, too.  I’ve been working pretty hard, so I feel ok, but it’s going to be rough for everyone, I think.  When you stop and think about it, being able to say all that in 4 weeks of instruction or so is pretty mind-blowing.  That plus we’ve learned something like 6 verb conjugations and a variety of noun (nominal? linguistics ppl out there, correct me if I’m wrong) cases – there are something like 7 of them in Mongolian.

I’ve been kicking myself more about not appreciating home (both where I live and where I’ve lived) lately.  I keep on finding myself imagining places I’ve been and people I’ve been around and how nice it all was.  I think eventually I’ll come back with a greater appreciation for just about everything “out there”.

I’m looking forward to the mid-training convocation-like event coming up next week – a hotel room where I can keep my own hours, take as many hot showers (as opposed to bucket baths) as I want, and stay out as long as I want (oh, 10pm or so) sounds great.  I really like my host family though, and I know already I will miss them when I finally leave.  They were saying that they hope I get placed in the aimag (provincial) center nearby so I can visit!  Otherwise they said I better learn my Mongolian song (damn) well so that when I call them to keep them up to date I can sing it on the phone and make my Mongolian mom so proud that she cries.  They’re pretty funny people

It’s been cooler and more rainy this week.  One thing that’s nice about the complete lack of structures is that I can forecast my own weather pretty well – you see the rain coming in hours before it shows up and can prepare accordingly.  On the other hand, I still have stringent underwear-ironing and general laundering rules, and rain guarantees I’ll have dirty pants.  My knuckle blister/scrapes from the last laundering are healing up though, so I think I’ll be ok henceforth in the laundering department.

I hope to write some of you soon by physical mail – by the time you get it though I’ll likely have to get the reply to my actual site (with a  6-week roundtrip), so I’m up in the air whether I will do email or letters.  Stamps here are pretty cool and I know how nice it can be to get a physical item…

Ok, sleep time – I stayed up earlier this week pretty late to finish “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and my teacher had me stay after class to make sure everything was ok, I was so out of it.

Tags: mongolia, peace corps

That pretty much covers how I’m feeling at the moment.  I also have a slight stomachache for some reason.  I’ll probably wait until the rain lets up to get the bread I’ve been asked to buy and go home.  Yesterday my host family said that we were going out to the countryside at 5, but I didn’t think they meant 5am.  Wooo was I wrong…quarter to 5 here I am woken up and bundled into a car with a ride that was kind of like the kiddie roller coasters at Six Flags.  I have pictures of me looking at cows and holding a baby goat for next week, but the pseudo-highlight was the sheep that was hogtied and thrown into the trunk of our SUV.  I went back to bed when we got home at about 6:30am and by the time I woke up at 10:15am or so, it was hanging in pieces in our house’s side porch.  With a drippy nose.

This week has been exhausting – we had 2 hours straight of Mongolian conversation with volunteer host family members – it was rather like speed dating only much much tougher.  I also ate a grilled cheese sandwich yesterday – I spent the first few minutes just smelling it

My stomach hurts now, though, and I’m not sure why.  I’m looking forward to getting home when the rain lets up.  I also got to talk to Bonnie for a long time which was super nice and got a letter from her yesterday.  Real paper is awful nice…I need to work on remembering to bring my letters to actually mail here.

Finally, vinegar – I bought some per my water distiller instructions to clean out the scaly deposits on the inside today and it’s super strong.  Clean now, though.

Alrighty, back home – I’ll be closer in to a town for my mid-center days, although I’ll also be undergoing an oral language assessment next week I’m not looking forward to as well >_<

Oh, I also have posted some pictures – due to the vagaries of WordPress plugins I’ve changed my folders to have only the Mongolian pics be public so that it displays right here.  If you want the full URL though it’s this: http://picasaweb.google.com/charlener/RandomMongolia 

Tags: mongolia, peace corps

Internet and phone is super sketchy where I’m at now, so many of these future posts will be backdated to the day I actually wrote them.  I am up in my host family’s area now, and they’re really nice people.  That reassures me beyond belief, so I am fine so far with the being put to bed for naps, sleeps, etc., plus the 3-5 meals/snacks a day, plus the sometimes oily food, plus the incredible amounts of dairy products I am now eating.

Mongolian lessons have started in earnest now – I have 4 hours of Mongolian a day, plus 2-3 hours of either cross-cultural or technical (health) training a day.  To give an idea of the pace, I learned the Cyrillic alphabet in a day (thanks in no small part to my host family 6-year-old who made me read an absurd amount for two hours that day in addition to class from my dictionary of all things) and we’ve moved on to conjugating past tense verbs and other random things.  We learn probably at least 10-15 new words a day.  The conjugation is kind of like Japanese, only moreso – there can be endings in (roughly) -aac, -ooc, -eec, and -00c rather than just aru/eru.  Those last two are approximate, too, as they’re backwards-ee’s and theta’s.

I so far have (at home) learned to do my own laundry, cook a basic Mongolian meal, do dishes, and play a game with sheep’s anklebones.  The food is tasty so far, and the amount of manure-avoidance necessary to get to school is quite the adventure.  I believe tomorrow my host family is going to teach me a Mongolian card game and/or something that sounded like “karaoke” – but the word for “tomorrow” is the same word for “later”, so all I know is that both of those items are in the future for me.

Sleep time now – I’ll try to keep people posted, but currently I am safe and (relatively) intact.  Hope to hear from you all soon – I’m totally envious at mail call of those who get cards or letters

Tags: mongolia, peace corps

I have 2 more days of training in my big 48-person group, then I go to my home stay up north. They’ve given me lots more stuff to haul around, including a pretty hefty water distiller, lots of books, and language dictionaries. I’m taking as many hot showers as I can at this hotel as I don’t know what I’ll have available with my host family. In addition to passing my language proficiency exam in about 11 weeks, I have to also pass a survival/practical skills test. This includes chopping wood, cleaning a wood stove, tying knots, being able to prepare for snow/sand storms, how to use a ger roof flap, being able to navigate around on microbuses, cooking Mongolian food, and other random things. I’ll be super awesome after that, I suspect… not native, but more country than some of the city Mongolians in UB.

There is a trainer-trainee basketball game in about 6 weeks and I hope to play in it and kick their (trainer’s) asses. I played yesterday and probably will have lots of bruises. The gym here is supposedly the fanciest in Mongolia – it’s full-court, has nets, and kind of a rubbery playing mat surface. Gotta run to breakfast…

Tags: mongolia, peace corps

I have 2 more days of training in my big 48-person group, then I go to my home stay up north. They’ve given me lots more stuff to haul around, including a pretty hefty water distiller, lots of books, and language dictionaries. I’m taking as many hot showers as I can at this hotel as I don’t know what I’ll have available with my host family. In addition to passing my language proficiency exam in about 11 weeks, I have to also pass a survival/practical skills test. This includes chopping wood, cleaning a wood stove, tying knots, being able to prepare for snow/sand storms, how to use a ger roof flap, being able to navigate around on microbuses, cooking Mongolian food, and other random things. I’ll be super awesome after that, I suspect… not native, but more country than some of the city Mongolians in UB.

There is a trainer-trainee basketball game in about 6 weeks and I hope to play in it and kick their (trainer’s) asses. I played yesterday and probably will have lots of bruises. The gym here is supposedly the fanciest in Mongolia – it’s full-court, has nets, and kind of a rubbery playing mat surface. Gotta run to breakfast…

Tags: mongolia, peace corps