Ploofle

Despite all the random tech postings, I actually still reside in Mongolia and it’s high time I actually talk about that for once.

The weather’s cooling down for real now – overnight I close my apartment window and use my fleece blanket, and yesterday I actually was a little chilled in pants and a long-sleeved shirt. The weather here, though, tends to have this downward trend made up of dips and peaks, so I hope to get a little bit more warm weather a time or two before it settles into Fall.

The days definitely aren’t as long as they were a few weeks ago. Light starts fading about 8pm and it’s full dark by around 9pm now. The fruits and vegetables still remain pricey, though, and oranges and bell peppers haven’t come back yet. Thus lots of apples and onions for me.

Yesterday we had a birthday/welcome back party for Khovd volunteers. It was really tasty – instant falafel and latkes were fried, yogurt-garlic-dill sauce was made, and chickpeas were boiled and smushed for hummus. Add to that fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, homemade wheat pita bread, peanut butter-chocolate cake, and several melons and you got what here definitely is a feast. We even had leftovers – I suppose that’s what happens when you end up having only two guys at site, one of whom never eats, compared to the four originally.

We watched women’s volleyball and basketball, which was cool, and generally picked on each other, which was of course fun

Lately at work I’ve been starting to get into other interesting things – like helping improve the quality of service at the adolescent reproductive health center in Khovd. I haven’t done anything concrete yet; more reading up and thinking, but I’m looking forward to this as I find I continue to like working with young people. One of the stranger difficulties was finding STI/RH statistics for ages 15-24 in the aimag – my counterpart and I went to the health department to talk to the statistician (doctor; everyone’s a doctor) and he pretty much said he didn’t have them and go talk to the adolescent health center. The thing is, their numbers focus more on their internal intake and testing results, not the whole aimag, and I was curious to see how much of an impact the center has, if any, on those overall numbers, so it wasn’t quite what I was looking for – and they were all on vacation besides. This also reinforced for me the idea that mystery shopper-style assessments for accessibility will be a good tool for checking things out.

Anyway, after then walking to the regional hospital, talking to random people (though technically I didn’t talk; my counterpart did most of the talking based), and looking for the RH one-point service center people (also on vacation), we went back to the office, somewhat bewildered. My counterpart saved the day though by calling different people on vacation (eh, well) until we found someone who actually had the information – and we’re going to go by Monday to pick it up. Yay!

Today has been calm – I’m working on this Yogurt French Bread recipe (which seems more like a sourdough) that needed me to make starter to sit for at least 12 hours. I forgot to add the yogurt after I had made the dough and had to squish back in a cup of yogurt (which was messy by hand; got yogurt all over myself), then had to go to the store to buy more flour. Bleh. Regardless, it’s rising now and I hope to punch it down and bake in an hour or so. It better be damn tasty for all this effort.

As a side note for bread, I think here especially I need to be a little more patient with rising – instead of waiting to it to get to being doubled, I tend to focus on the actual time it says it’ll take and go along. But the brioche I made a bit back was really spectacular because I gave it time…so I’m going to work on being better about that. Of course, when it’s wintertime and the special challenges of attempting to make dough rise in a 40-degree apartment starts, all bets are off.

Oh! and it looks like I will indeed be going to Thailand next year. My 50k frequent flyer miles are enough for a free RT inter-asia ticket, and I’m going to play that up, as it seems like Delta’s mile usage in the US is getting pretty crappy (up to 60k for just a domestic RT?? bah!).

The 1001 nights LaTeX conversion is going well, and I actually found a full-color scan of the original that I’m going to use to make sure I have similar layout. I also found a neat site that covers historical illustrations of the book, including quite a few works that are by now in the public domain, so I’m going to add some illustrations to it too. The only big deviation, I believe, will be the use of margin notes versus footnotes – but that’s easily changed. I’m excited even though it only Volume 1 and who knows if I’ll get to Volumes 2-9.

Finally: Biden? Hmm. I’m curious to see how this pans out – wish I could see/hear the Democratic convention…

Tags: books, bread, mongolia, work

The past couple of weeks have been surreal from a variety of standpoints, so apologies to those who are wondering if I am still alive. I was sick for about a week and a half, enough so that I didn’t go to work for almost a week. So, for me, that means *really* feeling shitty. I had a bad cough which was really hard to stop and thus very distracting. I think it was probably compounded by the general coldness and dryness here which is why it took so long to finally subside (this past Friday or so was the first night in a week that I fell asleep not coughing and woke up not coughing, and on the dot 9pm I would start coughing for the night). I pretty much stuck my head in my hot water pot/heater as often as I could bear and slept during the day, and when I was tired of that, I tried to boil water at my place to increase the humidity. It really sucked.

But! Now I am better. I kind of felt bad because this week was the week my boss was gone, and I was hoping to do all sorts of productive/interesting things at work both alone and with my counterpart and I didn’t get to do so. And I had to decline or curtail many of the Tsagaan Sar-leading-up events, like helping my counterpart make a zillion dumplings and what not. So I started off distinctly off-balance holiday-wise.

Tsagaan Sar here is a 3-7 day celebration of the lunar new year. I’ve heard someone else call it a “Thanksgiving Pub Crawl” but to me it’s more of a Halloween Prom Night Thanksgiving. You dress up in your best clothes, go from house to house greeting people for the new year, get stuffed silly with buuz (dumplings) and the accessories, then receive a small gift, most often candy, though some people got bras and long underwear for some reason. At least, that’s the kind of trivial way of viewing it. I think more formally it’s a way to honor elders for the new year and start it off right by being generous and catching up with family, which is very important here. The first day or two tends to be family-visiting days, along with a visit to your big boss (departmental director, governor, or whomever). The following days are friends and close coworkers. On the third day typically you go to work and along with your coworkers go to all your partners/collaborators and greet them. This day is pretty brief – maybe 15 min per partner – and you take a piece of candy. Oh, and at all these visits snuff is an important component. You exchange snuff bottles, politely sniff at it (or take a bit if you want) then hand it back. This is how it was out here, but I hear it’s more compressed/exclusive in UB, and drawn out in the countryside.

The first thing you do when visiting is go to the oldest person (typically oldest male, but oldest female if there’s a grandma around) and greet them with a special sort of arm clasping, then you continue to greet going by descending age. The snuff gets passed around and the woman of the household serves you enormous quantities of food and puts the buuz on to steam. All told you spend at least an hour at each house between the greeting, the eating, and the buuz making then eating. It’s polite to bring a gift or money, and I’ve been handing out chocolate bars here. You can get away with eating only 3 buuz at each place, but you have to be firm, like with alcohol. Since I didn’t go to too many houses, I ate closer to 15 at each place, especially as they were spread out over the 3 days so I wouldn’t explode. Others weren’t so lucky and had to go to up to 5 families in a day. I know one guy who ate 100 buuz on the first day, but I think he was just being a boy. My counterpart’s parents in law bought 20kg of meat to make dumplings, and she herself bought 10kg, so we’re talking thousands of buuz made leading up to this event. You just put em outside and they freeze until you’re ready to serve, too. This to me is part of the Thanksgiving feeling too – the buuz are the turkey equivalent as you eat them *forever* after the event.

This event, I think, is probably also the most expensive holiday of the year for families; I suspect there is some stressful times going on in the background, trying to get all the things you need to properly host, not to mention the labor. It’s customary to give overflowing amounts of food and to display it in that way too, as generosity’s a big part of the hosting/holiday tradition here, so you way overpurchase to make that impression. I think some of us volunteers next year will band into a àéë (family) to host together, but the first thing my coworker said was that it’s a good idea because then you can share the cost. Sounds intimidating cost-wise…so we’d likely have to save.

While I was sick though I hosted a fun morning of politics and food. I’m the only one with a TV, and my cable has Al Jazeera news, which has been fascinating and frustrating (as in, it’s great, and why the hell doesn’t the US have a station with these kinds of programs?? It’s half PBS and (the good) half CNN). We watched their primary coverage on Super Tuesday from about 8am to 1pm that day…Jen, Dayla, and Andy came over to help make breakfast, and I literally woke up when they came, so I was all bleary and congested-y. We had buttermilk biscuits, “sausage” (chopped up mutton) cream gravy and tasty cake donuts with optional chocolate flavored condensed milk. It was totally exciting for us here to be able to watch it, rather like a sports game

About that time too we had a flat food-themed party of sorts…M16 Suzie, who I worked with before coming out to Khovd, sent us an awesome package that included a pound of pecans, coffee, and dried blueberries for a pancake breakfast. So we had build-your-own pancakes, pizza, and focaccia night. I was a bit bummed because by the end I was coughing so much I couldn’t eat and that day I completely had no sense of smell, but I ate the pizza the next morning and it was really good.

Finally, my breadmaking has been improving greatly. The bread book I brought back from Bonnie’s place is really good and after following their high altitude adjustments I’ve made excellent french bread and my own braided challah! So I’m going to work through those recipes – bread’s one of the easier things to make here as the ingredients for most recipes are basic and available here.

Speaking of Bonnie, she ran a 10k in LA this (current? past?) Sunday through Chinatown called the Firecracker 10k. Super cool! I hope to speak to her soon to see how it went, as I heard there were some tough hills.

I guess the new generations really are of the facebook-communication variety. For some reason I hear from my sister far more often through its messaging system than through email. But it sounds like she’s doing well and is back in school and balancing work.

So, that’s been me for the past couple weeks or so – I’ll try to post more often and in shorter chunks so that things make sense from a chronological standpoint…

Tags: bread, buuz, sick, too many things to recall, tsagaan sar, well

It’s been quite a week – sort of. As mentioned previously, my Khovd flight was delayed, but I was very kindly treated – so I think I’ll bring a poundcake or some such back to their office on my way in next time. I’m still recovering from the massive walking-about and general lack of time (and money) that is UB, not to mention Francine the puppy being her puppyish self. Today my supervisor helped administer vaccines – I bought them in UB and was going to do it myself, but why when there are dozens of experienced injectors at my office location? She was very good and only whined a little bit. 2 more in the next 6 weeks, and also I need to figure out how this deworming medicine works – oral or injection? The power has been out lately due to apparent nonpayment of bills aimag-wide or some such. The times they’re off are random to me, though, so perhaps it’s something else, like repairs. Needless to say it’s helped to add more uncertainty in my life. The internet has also been bad out here, and Bonnie hasn’t been able to really call in several days, so it’s a bit rough going cold turkey…hopefully things’ll be better during the weekend.

My bread has been bad lately – not as bad as in the US, but more dense than I would like. As I’m feeling rather short on money at the moment, I may make some more tonight. Also Suzie passed on to me various lamb recipes from her parents, one of which is…korma? That middle eastern ground meat thing? As I have both yogurt and and mutton, I thought it’d be a good time to try it. Too bad I won’t have some super tasty pilaf to go with it…lately I’ve been grazing, so it will be nice to really eat something. UB’s Indian and Chinese food spoiled me. I’m also testing out a concoction to prevent Francine from chewing on, say, my insulated inner door. I boiled some hot dried peppers and orange peel and daub the liquid on things. I think it works, but I don’t know how long it remains potent once it dries out. Adding oil to it may help, but then Francine thinks it’s a snack. Booo….

Think I’ll read some research articles or something for the remainder of work. I’m tired and prolly would make mistakes doing anything else…

Tags: bread, electricity, francine?, khovd