Ploofle

Happy festivities to all and welcome to the year of my return!!!! bwahahahaha

With that, there are various (additional) random photos in my picasa thingy that illustrate the deep emotions and incredible personal expansion I’ve been having over the, oh, past two weeks.  These events include cooking, standing on a frozen lake on and off for about 6 hours, and small children.  It’ll change your life too!

I did win half of my snow sumo matches on the lake, though.  And I didn’t completely freeze my hands and feet.

One of my sitemates did have a firework explode in her hand, but only bruised herself.  Yay poor-quality fireworks! Boo inability to read the chinese instructions!

New year’s day cooking extravaganza included, among other things, baklava, horse meat fajitas, pineapple-upside-down cake, pancakes, kahlua (making, not really drinking), and the final day of corning beef.  Subsequent days were of eating glorious, glorious corned beef hash and some semi-ghetto reubens.

The new year’s old man (similar in appearance to Santa Claus if he were a Mongolian man wearing a cotton beard and blue tinsel-edged robe-deel) terrified a few of my coworkers children and handed out candy, then took off his beard, which helped matters.  Around New Year’s in three days I ate cake approximately 5 times and drank champagne or harder stuff perhaps 4 times.  I still have some cake in my fridge I need to throw out.  Oh, and loads of candy from the Governor and the Health Department.  Pleasant.

Internal apartment temperature is approximately 47F in the mornings, which is unacceptable.  Unfortunately, out of my four electrical plugs, only one will not trip/smoke/melt with a heater plugged into it and it’s the one that I use for cooking.  So I am often faced with the choice of heating up to a more tolerable 52F (tolerable in that I can type without my hands being stiff and I’m wearing two shirts and pairs of pants and my deel and sometimes a hat) or having a fridge.  Fridge tends to lose.  Perhaps I overexaggerate, though.  Well, actually, I’m not, but it sounds worse than it is, really. Though I wish I could heat up the room I sleep in rather than the kitchen, but once I’m in bed it’s not bad.

We’re in the coldest part of the winter, so my personal goal is to just get through January and it’ll be ok.  My choice of waiting until March to vacation is seeming increasingly silly…

Thesis notes are finally sorted and categorized, so I hope to push out a general proposal/overview tomorrow.  By god, I will.  Ugh.  Otherwise things are calm outside of watering office plants and various lurking work tasks.  I’ve noticed when I have something big, like this thesis thing, hanging over my head I suddenly come up with all sorts of other more interesting projects and thoughts.  I suppose I should write them down for later, but typically I’d do them.  But I’m trying to not procrastinate any further, so I just ignore them and hope they’ll go away.

My officemates have discovered YouTube, and it has destroyed any semblance of me having an internet connection at work.  Perhaps I will sneakily go onto the computer, edit the hosts file, and make it redirect to localhost…hmm…

Tags: cold, food, mongolia, stupid internet

New Year’s day was pretty low-key – just a day full of cooking with one of my sitemates.  It’s apparently an enabling environment, as by the end of the day we had a liter and a half of kahlua, baklava, cream cheese-apricot strudel, pineapple upside-down cake, buttermilk pancakes, and an entire mexican dinner (horse-meat fajitas with homemade tortillas and from-America salsa and refried beans).  In other words, it was *excellent* although almost sickness-inducing quantities of food.  I still have most of the desserts here as well as 9/10 of the kahlua.

Yesterday I finally pulled out the pickling-in-process beef and made what I assume to be relatively authentic corned beef.  As I’m typing I’m cooking up hash now and plan to have some nice fried eggs on top of it…yum…for dinner.

Today was the mandatory fun NGO/work event.  For me, preparations involved getting to the meeting place at the agreed-up 10am, waiting for about two hours, then finally going when everyone else actually showed up.  We went to the lake, and this apparently meant “drive on the lake and find a nice spot where we normally couldn’t have a picnic as we’d be waist-deep in water”.  AND there was a Schedule of Events.  Five hours later and after several bouts of woman Snow Sumo, group tug-of-war, random eating and drinkening, frost-defrost cycles, and way too many group photos I’m now back at home.  Overall, I enjoyed myself more than I thought I would, which is often the case with group events.  Needless to say, from both the cooking extravaganza and this group event, there are a variety of awesome pictures, some of which will be posted in the subsequent blog update.

Oh, and during the process of baking and experimenting with puff pastry (see random baklava above), I found out that I bought not 10kg of normal flour but 10kg of semolina flour.  Ugh.  So now I have to look for lots and lots of recipes that use this kind of flour, as it normally takes me about 2 months to get through 10kg if I make bread, and I doubt I can make that much bread with this stuff.

Hope everyone had a good new year – last lap here for me – I’m actually leaving this year!

Tags: food, mandatory fun, semolina sadness

From this article from the NYTimes of cost-saving items…let’s see how it fares here:

1. Oats: Expensive where I’m at, though not necessarily in UB.  That typical cylinder-type thing here? About $3.
2. Eggs: Cost about twice as much here as what’s cited in the article – around 30 cents apiece.

3. Kale: Hahaha…I wish.

4. Potatoes: Cheap for sure, at about 30 cents a kg

5. Apples: Kind of expensive (about $1.75 a kg here) but worth it.

6. Nuts: Um, nope.  A can of peanuts here is about $2, and other nuts go up in price astronomically – there’s a 1-lb bag of pecans randomly here, and it’s like $20.

7. Bananas: Nope.  Rarely here and expensive – I don’t even know how much they cost.

8. Garbanzo Beans: Not here.  You can get some dried pintos in UB of dubious quality, and recently I’ve seen cans of kidney beans here for about $1.25.  Mysteriously, the newly-arrived cans of white beans are about double that price for the same amount.

9. Broccoli: Nope.  Never even seen it here.

10. Watermelon: Uh, this is seasonal unless you live in America…

11. Wild Rice: I wish we had this.  We do have millet and barley, though. And (yuck) buckwheat.

12. Beets: Yuck!

13. Butternut Squash: I think not – though maybe I’ve seen one once in the past year and a half – an accident, I’m sure.

14. Whole Grain Pasta: I don’t think so, but it’s all in Russian.  Haven’t seen anything that would match color-wise though.
15. Sardines: Now sardines we have – albeit generally in tomato sauce.  Maybe I’ll experiment with these they’re less than a dollar a can.

16. Spinach: Ha!

17. Tofu: Dried tofu, along with the Supreme Master(tm), has come to Khovd.  I don’t know why, but I’ll not complain…

18. Milk: Local milk is a bit farm-y, and you have to pasteurize/boil it yourself before using, but it’s good.  Box UHT milk, while less tasty, is more convenient and what I tend to use.

19. Pumpkin Seeds: Both yuck and ha!

20. Coffee: Well, this is just generally too effort-ful.  So I’m good.

So, reasonably, the only really easy item on this list for me are…potatoes.

Tags: food

I’m tired, but damn, was it tasty…that’s all I’ve eaten for the past 2 days – I’m kind of hoping there are still some leftovers to eat tomorrow too!

The local chicken, after all was said and done, was closer to a cornish game hen size, while the chicken that was brought from UB was a normal-sized monstrosity of a bird.  Bayan-Ulgii (a province further north) folks came in and one of em is an excellent cook and put together three amazing casseroles – corn, broccoli, and green bean.  We then had a huge bowl of stuffing, two large bowls of mashed potates, homemade applesauce and pseudo-cranberry sauce, glazed carrots, biscuits, and corn bread.  There were 5 pies of 4 different kinds – lemon meringue, pecan, pumpkin (2), and apple.  All of the crusts turned out great this time and the meringue was amazingly easy due to a pinch cream of tartar from a package Bonnie sent me. I’m going to need to make more lemon meringue here – I have all the ingredients and it’s only 3 eggs – it was the first pie to go too.

After the main food, about half of the group of 12 was either laying on the ground or groaning about how they may be sick. Or both.  So I consider that to be the sound of success.  A couple hours later, after eating pies (we had about 1/2 pie baked for every person there), many laid down/groaned again.  Today when we came back over to eat leftovers, same thing.  This makes me pretty happy

Still, we’re only making slow progress through the food – I may reacquire the cranberry sauce from Jen if there’s not a likelihood it’ll get finished – I made 3 good-sized jars’ worth and I don’t know if we even got through one yet.

I leave for UB this Tuesday but still haven’t finished everything I wanted to do – like laundry, cleaning, actual work…so…time to turn in so as to do it tomorrow…

Tags: food, work

So, I believe the baby-in-progress count for people I know pretty well is at 3.  Including people I don’t know as well the count doubles.  Ugh.  What’s with the babies!?  Am I missing out on something?

Jen’s cat is behind my computer and poking his head around the corner of the screen comically…

Oh, and work – I’m doing in-service training for the 19s and that means content creation.  How one “teaches” peer education in a 45-minute slot and “research methods” in 1-1/2 hours I dunno, but it’ll get done somehow.  I’m pretty excited about this stuff, though, as I’ll get to interact with youth and business dev people in addition to health volunteers – plus all their counterparts.

The side effect of this is that there are several things “I must do” at work before I am “allowed” to go to UB.  And they’re all time-consuming.  Fund Peace Corps project is taking up a goodly amount of time, I’m reinforcing new contacts my program staff introduced me to while they were here, and thesis is again getting pushed to the end of the queue due to this stuff.  Plus we need to kill a chicken or two sometime this week for Thanksgiving, so Fri night/Sat are definitely booked.  I’m supposed to fly out this Tues, the 2nd…ugh.  How will I get all of this done?  And I’ve heard that the airline flight schedule will change on the 1st, so it’s possible that I’m not leaving the 2nd.

Ah, Mongolia.  And life.  Thank you all

And I’m hungry.

Tags: babies, don't eat babies, food, work