8/366

I’ve spent way too much time thinking about winter footwear in this country.  Pictured above are the fifth and (half of) the fourth pairs of boots I’ve bought since moving to Mongolia.  It will be a miracle if these guys last the rest of the winter.  The fake leather is starting to flake off in ways I can no longer disguise with shoe polish. The Shoe Repair Guy, who is a chilly, inaccessible iceberg of a man, has seen me so often lately that he actually twisted up his mouth into a semblance of a smile the other day and begrudgingly asked, “So…what do you do?”

I mean, I guess it’s nice that I’m making friends with Shoe Repair Guy but THESE GODDAMNED BOOTS.

I’m going to stop myself before I write a treatise on overpriced crap Chinese-made boots, so if there are any incoming PC/Mongolia lady volunteers reading this, hear my cry: Consider bringing a pair or two of nice, high-quality, knee-high leather boots with you.  They will save you a lot of grief, and a lot of tugriks.

9/366

Ryan came home from work on Monday and asked, “How was your real birthday?”  I said, “It was okay.  I took a nice picture of myself.”  He said, “Well…I guess you deserve it.”

(I also bought myself a bottle of fish sauce)

10/366

This is what the courtyard looks like late at night, when you’ve just realized that you haven’t taken your daily photo yet.

11/366

This is what the refrigerator looks like late at night, when you’ve just realized you haven’t taken your daily photo yet, and you’ve already taken a picture of the courtyard.

12/366

This is us, having a moment of weakness on Thursday.  Ryan was out at our weekly English Movie Night with the other volunteers; I was home, being sick.  At around 8, he burst in the door with an insane gleam in his eyes.  “What’s going on?” I asked.  “There’s a puppy in the stairwell,” he said.  “And I took a video of it!”

So we watched the video, and wrung our hands for a little bit, and had our usual conversation (“Can we bring it inside?  We can’t bring it inside.  That’s a bad idea.  Maybe just for a little bit?  No, we can’t”), except this time, we did not make the mature decision.  Look how cute she is!

She did us the favor of acting like a total shithead right away, gnawing on our heels and tearing at our rug and barking at us.  “Oh right!” we said.  “We just remembered: You can’t stay here.”

So we made her a plate of rice and milk and took her outside.  “So long, Shithead,” we said.  Ten minutes later, she somehow made her way back inside the stairwell and showed up at our door.  So Ryan took her outside again.  And we haven’t seen her since.  Good luck out there, Shithead!

13/366

The sun comes up at about 8:40 these days.  Which makes it easier to sleep in on the weekends, at least.

14/366

Here: Evidence that I went outside.  I think I should limit myself to one “livestock in the city” shot per week.  Please hold me to this.

15/366

I’m going to try some sneaky shooting from the hip this year.  Mostly because I still can’t get up the courage to ask the really cool-looking old timers for a photo.

Me neither!  Now then, let me tell you about my Peace Corps Brochure Weekend.

6/366

Friday night:  The teachers and staff  at my school all took part in a multi-sport tournament: Basketball, volleyball, ping pong, billiards, and chess. Once again, I was compelled to play on the Foreign Language Department’s basketball team; once again, we won our first game but got knocked out of the tournament when we lost our second; once again, my instincts for self-preservation meant I mostly avoided the ball.

Unlike last year, though, I kind of found myself wanting to win.  We even went to the Teachers’ Room and practiced setting picks before that ill-fated second game.  I also let myself get a little angry and I yelled (in English)(specifically: “JESUS CHRIST LADY”) at an elementary school teacher who was doing some serious over-the-back fouling. On me.  She deserved it. She needed to get up outta my space.  The math teachers razzed me later about it, though (“Oooo guys, Katie is angry“).

Afterwards, I met some other PCVs at a bar and we were really loud and American, so I guess I wasn’t on my very best Integrated Volunteer behavior that night, but whatevs, close enough.

Saturday morning: On Saturday morning the volunteers all went out to the orphanage and baked cookies.

On our walk there, we were laughing about how stereotypical our morning was going to be: Baking cookies!  With orphans!  This is what everybody thinks we do all the time.

(We do actually go to the orphanage every Saturday morning; this was our first cookie decorating party, though, thanks to a care package from my mom.  Good idea, Mom!)

Even though we accidentally burned the first batch (and even though Bayartsetseg, my star English student and the de facto orphanage den mother, told us we were a bunch of idiots for doing so), we thought the morning went swimmingly.  The older kids basically ran the show, while the younger ones dumped sugar all over everything.

There were a couple of new kids there that morning, and we’ve noticed that the new transfers (or, god, the newly orphaned) tend to hang back from the crowd.  Ryan had the following exchange with a guy who was just kind of standing against the wall, watching the action:

RYAN
Would you like to decorate the cookies?

KID
…I can’t.

RYAN
Of course you can!  Come here.

That’s him in the photo above, being very serious about his sprinkles.

7/366

Ryan’s Flip camera was also a big hit, as you can see.  Coming soon: Thirty+ minutes of kid-directed, cookie decorating footage!

Saturday night:  A couple months ago, I promised my teachers I’d teach them how to make pizza.  As with a lot of things around here, people expressed enthusiasm for the concept of a pizza party, but scheduling the danged thing was a living nightmare.  Finally, I took the bull by the horns and announced at our staff meeting that Pizza Night would be at my place, that Saturday.  There was a brief silence while everybody considered this; before anybody could say anything, I blurted, “Andyouhavetocomebecauseit’smybirthdayparty.“

So, here you can see Bayaraa being the only one to respond to my bossy photo-prompt (‘You’re loving this pizza!  It’s the best pizza in the world!’):

And here is everybody singing me happy birthday (around a table piled with the cakes and beer they brought):

And here’s Enkhmaa, helping me put on my new earrings:

And then a little later, I got a visit from the Birthday Hot Dog:

It was all so nice, you guys.  I’m going to throw myself a birthday party every week!

So I don’t mind telling you that the food situation in our household has been exquisite lately.  Behold!  Months of hoarding and vigilance has resulted in this perfect storm of ingredients:

From left to right: A jar of tom yum paste that showed up, mysteriously and by itself, at one of our grocery stores eight months ago; a bag of dried lemongrass, chilies, galangal and kaffir lime peel that a pal brought back from her Southeast Asia trip this summer; coconut milk, which our fancy American store just started carrying last week.

Add some lime juice, vegetables and tofu and oh hey, check it out:

This shit tastes so much like Thailand, it makes me want to weep.

Wait, what?  Thailand?  As in Southeast Asia?  Oh, you mean, like, the place we’re going for about four months starting in July?  Yeah, great, hold that thought for just a second, I need to search the entire internet for Laos travel blogs.

Just kidding.  I’ve already found all those blogs.

Here is one strange thing about being deep in your second year of service: Realizing that there are people in the newer class of volunteers who are preparing for upcoming international vacations, while you, dullard that you are, have yet to leave the country, or even travel very extensively inside it.

Another strange moment: You are stalking another (non-Mongolia, long-finished) PCV’s blog.  You are actually reading the whole thing, every last entry.  This person takes amazing, exquisitely lit photos; this person is a very fine, observant writer; this person seems to have had a genuine, meaningful, small-town experience (deep connections; neighborliness; a sense of family and belonging), the kind of experience that makes people want to join the Peace Corps in the first place, the kind of experience that sometimes, when you’re being brutal in your assessment of your service and your relationships, you feel you have not quite had.  This person Really Did It.  And their photos are way better than yours.

Then you come up for air.  You realize something.  You browse through the posts again and see that yes, it’s true –  this person, in their two years, took at least five vacations out of the country, including two visits home to the states.  For whatever reason, this fact reminds you of the central truth of Blogging and Facebooking and Peace Corps (as well as anything else that’s similarly romanticized): People are full, to the brim, of their own smelly crap.*

Woah!  Let’s rein this in a little.  I guess I just want to make the following two points:

1.  I don’t mean to be a jerk about people’s experiences and their representations of those experiences.  Maybe that blogger’s service really was that pure and heartfelt; maybe it really was better than mine in some ways.  Point is, I’ve been trying to not b.s. you (or myself) on this blog.  Things are awkward with my host family and they always will be; I get annoyed when I feel that somebody in my community is trying to nakedly use me for their own benefit; we don’t have a lot of money and sometimes that makes me grumpy.  Et cetera.  And it’s because I’m trying to avoid b.s. that I feel comfortable telling the internet that

2. Hooooooooly cow I need to stop thinking about vacations and traveling.  I have been all up in Lonely Planet and Wikitravel and Time Out Asia as of late.  When I have a free moment, I Google stuff like “Myanmar Bagan guesthouse price.”  I am actually on the precipice of making a list of outfits I want to take with me on our trip (even typing that sentence makes me quiver with anticipation).  I mean, I think I’m finally starting to come out of my third quarter blues — I had an actual pang, like a wistful pre-nostalgic pang, at work today — but jesus, I need to keep my head in the game.  Seven more months!  Only seven more months in this beautiful place that has been so good to us.  Only seven more months with my teachers, who are friendly and hardworking and fun-loving and beer-drinking and basically everything I could have wanted in a group of colleagues and friends.  Those things are not b.s., and I only have seven more months to enjoy them.

And so I’m doing that thing where you take a picture every day for a year.

It’ll be a good way to keep me here, in the present, I think.  Anyway.  To 2012!  To appreciating things!

* One day this past summer, I was in the van with a fellow trainer, on our way back to Darkhan after a session with the new volunteers.  He’s a young Mongolian guy who’s worked for Peace Corps five summers straight; he possesses a surfer dude accent and does Elvis impersonations and is beloved by all. We started talking about misconceptions, and I asked him what his misconceptions had been of Americans before he started working with them.  His answer was hilarious (“I thought you guys were clean and dressed nice all the time”).  Then he asked me what people’s misconceptions were of the Peace Corps, and I tried to explain the vision most people seem to have in their heads of a volunteer’s day to day life: That we all live in tiny little villages where we know everybody, and we do lots of good, meaningful work all the time with enthusiastic coworkers, and everybody loves us and we love everybody.  And then he paused and said, “But that’s…not real life.”

Amen, brother.

We had a traditional Erdenet Christmas, with a little bit of this:

And then some of this:

And finally a dash of this:

As Christ himself intended.

So what is the title of this post, you ask?  ‘Tis a rough translation of the first line of the song I had to sing at my school’s Shin Jil party (the rest of my verse went something like, “The snow is cold; nevertheless, it has melted, honey”).  I was the fourth singer in the foreign language department’s multi-song medley.  Four minutes of a hastily rehearsed, mistake-ridden winter song mashup, with a mid-medley interlude of rapping and awkward group dancing.  The microphones, they screeched with feedback; our singers, they fell behind the beat (or, in my case, mispronounced things). I asked my training manager to take a video of the whole thing and now the file sits on our camera, waiting for me to watch it and share it with you people.  One day, I will have the balls to do this.  But today is not that day.

Afterwards, we retired to our table and did the only thing you can do after embarrassing yourself in front of the whole school: Drink and take a million pictures of yourself.

The photos started out classy:

Got a little bit sassier:

And then, finally, people stopped paying attention to the camera:

Until Batja (the saucy lady being whispered to, above) seized the camera from me and spent the next two hours being the Erdenet Complex School Shin Jil Event Photographer.  The next day, my lens was smeared with gunk, the camera body had been glitterbombed, and I had roughly 500 extra photos on my card (that the whole school will be wanting on their flash drives come Monday).

But it’s cool, because she took some good shots of me!  Me, baby, me:

Speaking of glitter, check out Khishgee’s ‘do:

She don’t mess around.

Here is a photo of Erdenebayar and me (I don’t know why I’m so worried about that apple):

And here are Erdenebayar’s quotes from the evening:

• “Katie.  Is my hair stupid?”
• “Katie.  We did not drink beer together this month.”
• “Katie.  This is your last Shin Jil.”

Girl, don’t remind me.

Happy 2012, everybody.

A bowl of oatmeal: It is my jam.

Savory oatmeal, that is!  All day every day.  Drizzle some soy sauce and some sesame oil on that bad boy.  Add some canned tuna.  Sprinkle on some green onions.  Take away the mushrooms if you’re going to be a big baby about it, I mean, that’s fine, listen, I don’t care what exactly you do to it as long as you FUCKING EAT IT.

I tried this for the first time recently, and I’ve been going crazy on it ever since.  I had it for dinner two nights ago.  I had it for breakfast yesterday.  I had it for breakfast today.  At noonish I rolled myself off the couch and mumbled, “more oatmeal.”   “You can’t seriously be eating that again,” Ryan said.  Ha!  That’s rich! This from the man who has toast with jam for breakfast roughly 349 days out of the year!  Ugh, god, savory oatmeal; I can’t wait to go to bed so I can wake up tomorrow and eat it again.

I realize I sound insane; it’s just so rare for me to find something I can make here that a) I intensely enjoy, b) is not time-consuming to prepare, and c) requires only ingredients that are cheap and readily available at any old shop (as opposed to ingredients that are only available at the pricey supermarkets in the Russian district, or at that Shangri-La of produce and cheese and sauces, Mercury Market in UB).  Speaking of availability, I love how the epicurious blog post I linked to up there has a cheery list of “other oatmeal variations to try,” all of which are useless to me:

* Chopped ham (no) and shredded cheddar  (no)

* Wilted arugula (hahaha) and extra virgin olive oil (okay)

* Marinara sauce (yes) and grated Parmigiano Reggiano (actually, yes!  But for a price)

* Sauteed mushrooms (yes) and Gruyere cheese (what)

* Sauteed sausage (not the kind you’re thinking of, sister) and onions  (yes)

* Shredded roast chicken  (sure) and roasted or sauteed leeks (pfft)

* Diced avocado (please don’t) and salsa verde (I said stop)

* Diced tomatoes (sure!) and feta (see Parmesan comment)

Am I whining again? Sorry.

It’s weird that I’ve never blogged about this, because I think about it all the time: I am, in fact, grateful for the way Mongolia has curbed certain appetites that were just making me fatter and fatter back home.

I lost 20 pounds my first summer here, see, and through some miracle it’s stayed off.  And while I have a lot of theories about the initial, mysterious weight loss (stress; a couple bouts of Chinggis’ Revenge; the abandonment of my  stupid hunger-inducing exercise routine; my host family’s food, which was fine in the grand scheme of things, but still, I never wanted to eat any more than the absolute minimum required to make Eej happy; and let’s be real I was kinda tubby to begin with), I’m pretty sure the maintenance of the weight loss comes down to two things: Cheese and beer. I used to consume these things daily.  Now I can’t afford to.  And so I don’t.  The end.

Hahahaha that’s hilarious, like it was that simple, just kidding.  It’s late now and I don’t really have time to go into this anymore, which is too bad.  Because I love — I love — talking and reading about willpower, and how we have a finite amount of it, and how even just making decisions makes us tired. But all is not lost!  Because our willpower is like a muscle, and if we exercise it we can build up our capacity to resist temptation over time.  Fascinating, right, just go ahead and forward me any article you ever come across about self-control research, thank you.

So, basically, my willpower muscle was atrophied and flabby when we got here.  And Mongolia has forced me to use it.  And there were times, O, there were times of pain and struggle.  Lo, I spent many nights gnashing my teeth and rending my garments and howling “I JUST WANT TO HAVE A GODDAMNED BEER AFTER WORK” with Ryan replying “Well, we can’t afford it, so why don’t you just stop thinking about it,” which was never annoying at all.  God it’s so hard sometimes, being the child in this relationship.

For some reason, kicking my daily cheese habit was not such a mental struggle (“some reason” = the fact that cheese doesn’t have alcohol in it?). A while back I came across this hilarious early 90s anti-cheese rant by Courtney Love  (“Orientals”!), and on the rare occasion that I have a leftover hunk of cheese in the fridge these days, I find myself kind of agreeing with her.  Living in Mongolia, you get up close and personal with the whole range of possibilities on the Dairy Product Spectrum, and not all of it is pretty. I don’t know.  I’ve seen cheese’s cousins.  Cheese is…kind of gross?  Now?  To me?

So, there we are.  It has taken me a year and a half to build up this tiny willpower muscle, but build it up I have, and this is my reward: All I want at the end of the day is a bowl of oatmeal and a mug of green tea.  And my fiber supplements, and my reruns of Matlock, and my memories of youth.

But seriously try the oatmeal.

So I was reading about those virtual astronauts a while ago (hey remember how I used to cover [wait for it] space health issues for that weird newspaper a few years ago?).  Were these guys newsworthy back home? The five men who spent a year and a half locked away in a fake space capsule to simulate a trip to Mars?  My coworkers knew all about it.  Maybe because the mission was Russian.  Or maybe because it’s just a bonkers news story — did you see how, after 257 days, they got to “land” and do a “Mars walk” in a giant sandbox?  O!  My heart!

The fake Mars trip came up again recently, when a fellow volunteer told me about the “third quarter phenomenon:” Apparently, people in extreme isolation (astronauts, Antarctic researchers, dudes on submarines [submarine...rs?]) tend to have the most emotional, social and psychological problems in the third quarter of the mission.  Tonight, I fell down an internet rabbit hole for an hour or so and now I have a folder on my desktop full of articles called things like “Psychosocial issues in space: Results from shuttle/MIR” and “Factors affecting human performance in the isolated confined environment of Biosphere 2,” so, just let me know if you want any pdfs emailed to you I guess.

And now I want to tell you something, honestly, person to person: My ass is dragging.

I get really tired at school, really quickly.  There’s this one person at work who irritates the crap out of me, and I’ve been taking evil pleasure in saying snide, dismissive things to this person.  People ask me for favors that I think they have no business asking for, and I am blunt in my refusals.  Weekends don’t recharge me.  Winter extends in every direction around me.  Perhaps most alarmingly, I bought myself a new dress last week and it didn’t help.

This is all despite the fact that work is fine, my teachers are delightful, and my sitemates are awesome.*

I’ve been acknowledging my attitude problem to people left and right (American people, I mean.  Neither my coworkers nor I have the foreign language skills to navigate the cultural minefield that would be this discussion; plus, they get worried when I’m outside after dusk, so), but just knowing the third quarter phenomenon is upon you is not enough to actually get rid of it, it seems?

Fortunately, my calculations indicate that we will enter our fourth quarter of service sometime in January, so that means only one more month of this living nightmare!  I will be merry again in time for Ryan’s 30th birthday, which is good, because I think it would be best if we all kept our spirits up around him as he enters his dotage.

{Editor’s note: After writing this I remembered how I haven’t exercised in a month and so I did some push-ups and I think it kind of helped.  Let this be a lesson for us (me) all}

* I haven’t ever sung the praises of my Greater Erdenet Metropolitan Area sitemates on my blog, and that is wrong.  We have a solid crew here, which is something to be deeply, profoundly thankful for, for reals, especially when it comes to one’s mental health.

Look how much fun we have!  We climb big signs we have no business climbing!

We make and consume donuts!

We stand out on the porch and chop vegetables!

We put on seminars for English teachers!

Basically, Erdenet owns.  Sorry, all other PC/Mongolia cities.

Hey look, I went to the desert:

Down there you can see a bunch of teachers and staff from my school, listening to a tour guide talk about a 19th-century monk and his meditation caves and whatever.  I can’t be too sure what exactly it was about because right after I took this picture, I ran back to the microbus and spent the next 20 minutes massaging my frozen toes and shoveling cold trail mix into my maw.  The English teachers were huddling, penguin-like, in the van, too.  They were like “Katie, do you want to go down there and see the…things?” And I was like “Why, do you” and they were all “NO, WE’RE COLD.  Give us your peanuts.”

The trip was put on by the school, and it started the first day of fall break: a 12-hour train to UB, then a 12-hour train to Sainshand, then 24 hours in Sainshand exploring Khamariin Khiid, then a 12-hour train back to UB, and finally a 6-hour bus back to Erdenet.

I found out about the trip in the teachers’ room after eavesdropping on some conversations.  I immediately made somebody explain what they were talking about (“Gobi?  You’re going to the Gobi?  Why?  Am I going too?”) and then I spent a couple days harassing my supervisor about it: When was the trip?  How much would it cost?  When should I give her my money?  Did she ask the director yet if it was okay for me to go? When would we buy the train tickets?  This makes it sound like my teachers were excluding me from plans, and they were, but not deliberately.  It’s weird.  Last year, another volunteer and I discovered a shared phenomenon at our schools: There’s this thing when you’re in the teachers’ room with all the English teachers, and everybody is chatting and getting work done.  You feel all warm and cozy and integrated, sitting there with your pals, lesson planning and shooting the shit.  But then, suddenly, everybody gets up and leaves without saying anything to you.  You think “huh, whatever” and you keep doing whatever you’re doing.  After a while you get hungry, and you head to the cafeteria to find some food, and lo, there are all your teachers eating lunch without you. Because they hate you.

Just kidding!  It’s because you’re a foreigner and basically invisible, get over yourself.

I bring this up — the way I had to burrow my way, hookworm-like, into the trip — because my god, did you read the itinerary I typed out up there?  I mean, when I found out about this, the idea of staying home was unimaginable.  Going on a weekend jaunt to one of the holiest places in the country with your host country pals is, basically, the reason everybody joins the Peace Corps.  But the closer the trip got, the more the idea of going seemed unimaginable: Forty-two hours of travel.  Sixty-eight hours in a row with my coworkers.  Two sleepless nights on overheated trains packed with drunken teachers.  Jesus.

But it was too late, I’d spent a week lobbying for my inclusion and I was going, damn it (and I was also bringing my camera with me, under the directive of the training manager).

So I survived!  And I had fun.  Here are my notes from the bus:

• Food: Strange vacillation between fasting and gorging.  We’ll go 12, 13, 14 hours without a meal (there is never a plan for breakfast, why doesn’t anybody ever have a plan for breakfast) and then boom: Bag of hushuur, bag of horse meat, candy, coffee, juice, aruul, vodka, wine, more hushuur, strawberry cordial (?)

• I think, after two nights on the train, I understand what it’s like to be a parent hosting a child’s sleepover party.  The teachers and staff are the children, except with vodka and wine instead of Coke and cheetos; I am the parent, lying blearily in bed as they thunder and gallop around me, baffled by how little sleep they seem to need.  Except I’m not allowed to shush them, and also they have access to me in my bunk and can (and do) grab my feet at 3 am and yell “HI KATIE HI HI HI HAHAHAHA HA”

• Not one fucking camel!  Can’t believe this shit.
• This is what you do at Khamariin Khiid:  Get there at sunrise and greet the sun.  Walk three times around a couple of stones, flinging milk and rice.  Drive to a big bell and ring it three times.  Drive out to the old monastery and clear your mind.  Write a wish on a piece of paper and burn it.  Throw more rice, pour some water, lie down on some rocks and absorb their energy.  Hold a blue scarf while you sing a song.

• The most interesting thing was the tour guide, who went from rock to bell to monastery with us, explaining to everybody the order of things:  What to say when the sun comes up, where to pour the water, how to clear your mind, which song to sing.  Is there anything like this in the Western world?  It was kind of like visiting a cathedral as a devout Catholic, but having a tour guide lead you through the Mass.

• My first encounter with a mountain that’s off-limits to ladies!  Bummer.  I didn’t know about the lady-restriction beforehand, and had this exchange in English with my teacher at the last plateau we were allowed to stand on:

TEACHER
Okay, let’s go down now.

KATIE
Okay!  Cool!  I’m just going to run up there and take a picture real quick!

TEACHER
You…will not.

• Time for another episode of Katie’s Lame Mongolian Jokes: Enablers Edition!

TUUL, GESTURING TO DUDE
Katie, this is my husband.

KATIE
I know.  We met last year.

TUUL, WAGGLING EYEBROWS
Oh really?  How?

OTHER TEACHERS, THINKING
Oh man Tuul’s setting her up so good but can she do it???

KATIE
Uhhhh…It’s a secret!

TUUL AND OTHER TEACHERS
OOOOO YES VERY GOOD!  Hahahaha!

DUDE
(uncomfortable look)

Ryan, I’m sorry you had to find out this way.

Okay gotta pack up and go to UB now.  Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Have you been chopping carrots with a dull knife, like some kind of moron?  Did the knife slip and almost SLICE THE TIP OF YOUR GODDAMNED FINGER OFF?  Are you standing in your kitchen right now, in Erdenet, Mongolia, with a filthy dishrag wrapped around the wound, wondering how to walk out into the living room and break the news to your spouse and house guest, who are currently watching the 2005 Disney film Sky High starring Kurt Russell?

I know exactly what you should do.

1.  Inform your spouse and guest, very casually, of your possible need for medical attention: “Hey um Iiiiiiii cut my finger and it’s kind of…bad?”

2.  Retreat into kitchen.  Your spouse will follow you and demand to look at your finger.  Resist him: If you don’t show it to anybody else, it might go away.

3.  Show him your finger.  Sit at the kitchen table while he calls people, or whatever.  Think about that time in 5th grade when you were at your friend’s house and your fingernail caught on a rusty swingset chain and ripped right off, and it made you so queasy that when you went inside to their fancy guest bathroom, you sat down on the toilet seat and passed out.  Really lean into this memory!  Did you bleed all over your best friend’s mom’s fancy guest towels and soaps, with your dripping exposed nail bed?  You probably did.  What a terrible child you were.  When your spouse gives you a cup of antibacterial stuff to dip your finger into, do it, and then whine about how it stings.

4.  Look at your finger.  WAVE OF NAUSEA AUGH don’t look at it again.

5.  It’s time to go to the taxi stand!  That dishrag is nasty, you can’t let people see you like that — put some gauze on your finger like a real grownup.  Put on your sweater.  Put on your coat.  Try to put on your boots by yourself; fail.  Notice, with some alarm, that the fresh gauze is already oozing blood.  Get trusty ‘ol dishrag back on there.

6.  Get into the taxi with your spouse.  When he says “hospital” to the driver and the driver turns around to look at you, stare at your lap while your face burns…with shame.

7.  When you get to the hospital, you and your spouse will revert to your basest, truest selves, your This Is How I Am In An Emergency selves.  This means your spouse will march around 15 meters in front of you at all times, huffing and puffing, tugging on locked doors, muttering “Where the fuck is everybody, what kind of hospital is this, jesus christ” (the hospital will indeed be creepy and post-apocalyptic, all long, dark hallways and unmanned check-in counters, no people besides you, no sound besides your own footsteps echoing off the concrete).  You, on the other hand, will shuffle along like a dumb animal, clutching the offending part, not helping in any way.

8.  (Have a weird, invasive thought about how this whole situation is probably a dry run for that future time when you will be pregnant and going into labor.  Shudder uncontrollably)

9.  Finally find the nurse you’re looking for, the one who has been briefed about your arrival by Peace Corps.  Obey her when she tells you to go buy a skein of gauze from the hospital pharmacy.  Follow her into a room, where she will silently clean your finger with more stingy stuff and bandage it with the gauze.  Watch her pause quizzically at the sight of the red, angry welt on your hand from when you poured boiling water all over yourself last week.  She thinks you’re a moron!  You are.

11. Relish the thought that you will soon have another house guest — a nurse house guest!  She, too, will help with your booboo.

10.  Give the nurse 3,000 tugriks.  Buy some cheez balls for yourself on the way home.

1. Getting my shit tailor made

Like some kind of rich person, or French person, or person on What Not To Wear.

I started fretting over my lack of Mongolian clothing a while ago, maybe around April.  I had a jacket that my host mom and host sister picked out for me last summer in Ulaanbaatar, but it was off-the-rack, unlined, and kinda ill-fitting.  Gaze upon it, and the dread Boob Gapping:

Man, that day trip to UB with Eej and Otgoo. It was at the very end of training, and it was the first time anybody in my family had taken me out of the house to go anywhere, ever.  I had very strong suspicions about why Eej was finally going on a field trip with her American (we’d had our community picnic a few days before, and some of the other host families had spent the afternoon one-upping each other by publicly showering their trainees with gifts of Mongolian clothes), but I got some pizza and a shirt out of the deal, so I don’t know why I’m being such a B about things.  It was a nice Girls’ Day Out.  I fondly remember Eej tugging an endless series of too-small jackets across my bustline, and it was kind of cute when Otgoo and Eej had a “Ugh, Mom, why red?  Red is ugly,”  “Well I think it’s nice” kind of spat in the middle of the market.

So, back to this year.  I wanted to have something made for myself, and I wanted to have it finished in time to wear it to the various Peace Corps training ceremonies this summer, and I wanted it to be something that I could possibly pull off back home.

I achieved the first two of these goals?

Please enjoy this photo of me, my fellow trainer Khaliunaa, and my Mongol From The Future jacket.  It sure fits me real nice!  And once I wear it for next year’s Tsagaan Sar, it will hang in my closet until:

a) the end of time, or

b) I grow a serious pair of personal style balls, or

c) I become one of those ex-expats who wear their foreign garb because they need everybody around them to know they lived abroad, or

d) “Asian-y Space Age” becomes a thing, like a fashion thing?

Whichever comes first.

2.  Not adopting any fucking animals no matter how much the universe wants us to

Here is an interesting fact: The doormat outside our neighbor’s apartment is magical.  Every six months, it sprouts a baby animal.  I mean we all remember this guy, don’t we, who showed up back in March?

And then last month, lo, this guy:

I can’t wait to see what shows up next spring!  Fingers crossed for a baby yak.

3.  Carrying some g.d. candy in my purse

This makes me more of a grown up grandma than a grown up lady, but I’m including it anyway.

My mom, the Captain of Care Packages, always sticks in a bag of Starbursts or Hershey’s Kisses or whatever along with the essentials (New Yorkers, moisturizer, turkey jerky).  We used to just parcel the candy out, slowly, into our candy bowl at home (i.e. eat it ourselves), and sometimes I would take it to school and put it in the bowl in my office (i.e. eat it myself, with the cleaning lady).

But I’ve abandoned my office this year.  I used to meet with my teachers there, do my own lesson planning and materials creation there, have “office hours” there (HA and HA and HA AGAIN)(that didn’t work out).  This year I’m never there, unless I’m having some Me Time, which usually entails locking myself in for 15 minutes so I can shove takeout vegetarian dumplings into my mouth while reading stuff on my iPhone (and here I feel it would be appropriate to insert one of those “Peace Corps: How Far Will You Go?” posters…

…ah yes very nice).

So I’ve moved my operations upstairs to the Teachers’ Room, which is a much more fun and lively and enjoyable place, especially now that people have mostly stopped bugging me about tutoring their children.  And I keep a shitload of candy in my purse, so as to slowly curry favor with the staff, chocolate by chocolate.

It’s really weird that I didn’t spend more time in the Teachers’ Room last year.  Or, I mean, I did, but I had to build myself up to it, and it drained me pretty fast, sitting there at the table and feeling awkward and not understanding anything.  I don’t quite know why it’s easier to sit in there all day long this year — obviously it’s a combination of slightly better language, slightly better relationships, and candy.  But I also think something about myself has changed.   The farther I get from last year, the more I realize how anxious and nervy I used to be at work last fall.  Everything was a trial, you know?  Everything taxed my mental reserves.  I was so busy maintaining the crazy-person Everything’s Fine And I Am Just Happy To Be Here Smile that I never even cracked a joke, or goofed around, or talked even the tiniest bit of shit, or gave anybody a piece of g.d. candy.

AND PHOOEY TO THAT!

We will end here with a picture of Ryan in the park on a lovely fall day, eating a hot dog:

He thought it tasted fine, but that thing set off my Mutton-Dar, and how.

Gosh it’s been a long time since we had ourselves a nice food blog.  I considered sharing our We Sure Have Spent All Our Money Potato Soup with you, but it wasn’t that exciting.  Butter, potatoes, carrots, onion, garlic, bouillon cube, water, cream, dill.  Mash it, hot sauce it, eat it.  Do you have zero dollars and a sack of free root vegetables courtesy of your sitemates?  Will you shamelessly eat what is essentially a bowl of mashed potatoes for your dinner?  For a week?  Then I heartily recommend it.

What I do want to share with you, however, is this exciting new addition to the Erdenet produce scene:

Look at it.  Magnificent!  So colorful, so round, so novel.  I’ve never been interested in pumpkins before (I actually kind of hate all forms of squash, in much the same way that I hate all forms of melon), but there’s something about A New Thing At The Market that makes Peace Corps volunteers go a little loopy.  Even pampered ones like us (see: the bunch of fresh cilantro in the bowl).

As a for instance: One day last spring, I stopped by my trusty Vegetable Lady on the way home from school and found bunches and bunches of fresh celery.  My god!  Beautiful little baby stalks of celery, in Erdenet, Mongolia!  In March!  I snatched some up like a crazed rodent and then scurried home, chattering wildly to myself.  I chopped up the whole mess of it and used the last of my precious lentils to make a soup.  We ate it for dinner that night, and it really wasn’t until the first spoonful that I remembered: Celery Is Disgusting And I Hate It.

Ugh, wasted lentils.  Why.

But Mr. Pumpkin hasn’t let me down.  I think I don’t actually hate all kinds of squash.  It’s just that I don’t like the flavors that usually go with them: Cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar.  Bleh.  GIVE ME SODIUM.

And so I recommend these things to you: Pumpkin congee and beans ‘n’ rice with roasted pumpkin. These two dishes are excellent examples of the type of meal I most like to make, which is Stuff Piled On Top Of Other Stuff.

Also I would like you to note how I am poaching eggs and making my own tortillas these days, just like a real adult person.

Thank you.

*