Apartment Pictures

I've mostly stayed in this weekend, trying to kick a cold and getting fully unpacked. My apartment is a rather spacious two bedroom, though the second bed is currently acting as the living room's couch. I am enjoying having an "office" right now though, nice to have a dedicated working space.

First up, here's the living room. It has an enclosed balcony, but unfortunately I haven't gotten a good shot of it yet. The kitchen is basically just the right side of the living room, but it's a nice space.

The kitchen is a little lacking in counter space and cabinets, but it makes up for that with the appliances. I'm sensing some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies in my future (yes, I brought collapsible measuring cups with me and a baking pan).

Next up is the office, which is basically a desk, desk chair, wardrobe, and a rug...not super exciting....

....Except there is a random Christmas tree hidden in the wardrobe. There are also two christmasy candles hidden in the kitchen...guess a previous tenant was feeling the holiday cheer.


Last up, quick shots of the bedroom and bathroom. The washing machine is between the shower and the bedroom wall, and I'll be testing that tomorrow, wish me luck! There is also then a rack to hang clothes up to dry, in traditional Mongolian fashion.

And that's it for now. Sometime soon I'll try to do a food post.
Later!

Things that made me happy today...

Warning: tone is overall very silly

Going outside and seeing grade school children laughing and doing dance moves. A few of them waved at me and said "Hi!", to which I responded "Sain baina uu"...excellent cross-cultural communication, but still :)

Talking with two excellent friends from Bloomington and the possibility of a care package involving flip flops! My apartment (soon to be pictured) has wooden floors and few carpets, so it's both dusty and super noisy if I wear the house clogs provided.

Getting a supportive email from a professor about my research and her vision for my future career outside academia

Learning that the comedy central website allows international viewers, so I can watch all the crazy pre-election shenanigans via Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and keep up with that crazy American pop culture

Scheduling meetings for next week...I am here to dissertate

Anticipating a dinner of left-over tsuivan, reheated in my microwave! (You guys have no idea how crazy it is that my kitchen has a stove top AND an oven AND a microwave. For there to be a rice cooker as well is just ridiculous. Appliances are super useful to have, I'm just sayin')

The fact that this exists:

It combines Star Wars AND Grilled Cheese AND Nerd Puns!!! If there is a stuffed penguin on the dashboard, I could not even handle it. I don't know where Fayetteville, Arkansas is, but I sense a quest...



On a similar note,

Yes, you're welcome


My fancy new cell phone that cost me a grand total of 20 bucks. It...it might be fancier than my U.S. cell phone. I just hope the buttons hold out on me for ten months...we'll see :) Also, if I do take pictures with it I'm not sure how I'll get them off the phone...




And....that was today! Lots of unpacking and cleaning to do, but that is much less entertaining.
Hope all you lovely readers are well :)

Soyol Urlagiin Ikh Surguul, we meet at last

Today was a much more successful day, thank goodness. After a leisurely wake-up (minus the hour from 5 to 6 I spent awake due to a combination of jet lag and a noisy new construction machine for the new apartment building nearby) and bandaging my sore feet from yesterday, I headed out and successfully found the Mongolian University of Culture and Arts, more properly known as Soyol Urlagiin Ikh Surguul or SUIS. After fifteen tense minutes, my friend Bulgaa arrived to meet me. After a period of cooling our heels and practicing my conversational Mongolian, I met with the international relations team at SUIS. Guyenbat, who never answered any of my emails, turns out to be a very nice guy in person. His colleague was also really friendly and stressed that if I had any problems, I was to let them know.

Bulgaa and I then headed out to the Immigration Ministry to make sure I was official with the Mongolian government before my one-week of lee-way was up. It's a forty minute to an hour long bus ride, so I was really glad Bulgaa was with me. The Immigration Ministry process overall went fairly smoothly, though they were quite firm with Bulgaa that I need to come back for my long-term residency permit ASAP. But I don't have to worry about that process until Monday, thank goodness. Bulgaa then made sure I got on the right bus and headed off to visit her sister, who lives in the gers on the outskirts of town. I met her sister and her two children the summer of 2011, when Bulgaa was my language TA. They are very sweet ladies.

The bus ride back was...interesting. Understandably, a guy on the bus figured out I was American...guess my blonde hair and North Face jacket are fairly obvious. We spent some time talking about the troubles of learning a language and the popularity of various American singers. There were also a few moments where it seemed like he was going to try to ask for me at SUIS, though he insisted he didn't want my number. He got off a few stops before me though, so overall it was a nice, if a bit weird, conversation and made the bus ride back a little quicker.

Flush with the victory of registering with Immigration and my comfortable tennis shoes, I stopped at the Stupa Cafe, which is part of a Buddhist Cultural Centre. They gave me a big plate of vegetarian tsuivan, which consists of strips of bell peppers, carrots, and cabbage mixed in with long flour noodles, for about 3 USD. The wait staff has always been very nice in my experience, and I like that part of my meal goes toward helping the restoration of Buddhism in Mongolia. I have a feeling that I'll eat there a lot, especially seeing their tasty-sounding menu this year. There's a short write-up on lonely planet here if you are curious.

Now I'm back at my apartment, relaxing for the evening. I think I'll spend tomorrow resolving my phone dilemmas and working on translating my research questions...the dissertation, it begins!

First Full Day in UB

I arrived at my apartment around midnight and met my landlord briefly before being left to my own devices. I gave up trying to remember where I had packed pajamas and settled for brushing my teeth before heading to bed. I did wake up every two hours as my American body clock tried to reassert the notion that during the day only naps are appropriate, but I managed to get about 6 or 7 hours.

This morning I set to the task of unpacking and trying to figure out where things will be placed long-term. I have the unexpected luxury/dilemma that the second bedroom is an office...the desk is a nice plus, but I had hoped to get a roommate for at least part of my time here. I suppose I could always drag the couch in there, but that seems a bit iffy.

So after a bit of orientating myself with the apartment, Amgalan from ACMS (the American Center for Mongolian Studies) arrived to help me set up the internet. After she dropped me back home, I discovered that the internet did not, in fact, work. After a confusing meeting with a IT guy, internet connection was achieved (hence this blog post). It was now almost two o'clock, and I was supposed to meet my friend and university sponsor at 3. I had purchased a new SIM card, but my cell phone refuses to turn on. I'm not sure if it needs to recharge fully after you take out the battery to put in a new SIM card, or if its successful turn-on yesterday was merely a taunt as it died. I figured a 1998 Nokia 3210 wasn't likely to last me the whole ten months, but I had hoped for a few weeks in the beginning here.

So, picture a tragic figure heading off into the distance...cell-phone deprived, running a little later than she had planned, and on her way to a location that googlemaps Ulaanbaatar had seemed pretty sure of. One hour later, the few people I'd struck up the nerve to ask gave me rather unhelpful wavings of "not the way you're going, but that other way." I stopped back at the ACMS to write Bulgaa a quick note of apology, and when I started looking around more on googlemaps I discovered something troubling. The Mongolian University of Arts and Culture in Mongolian is written as Соёл Урлагын Их Сургууль. Googlemaps had two veeeeery different locations for the English translation compared to the Mongolian language name. The English one lists the correct address (according to the official website), but the Mongolian one actually looks like it's on the right street. This is all further confused by the fact that Baga Toiruu Street makes a big U-turn, so it's hard to say exactly where 26 Baga Toiruu Street is supposed to be.

As I'm writing this, Bulgaa wrote back to me that the Mongolian named location on googlemaps is the correct one. So I walked all around the Chinese embassy, blistered my feet, and bled through one precious sock in the completely wrong area with a broken cell phone.


For many reasons besides my general incompetence though, Mongolia humbles me. I am sitting in a beautiful apartment, safe and warm, with a fridge full of eggs for omelettes and an internet connection which I will use shortly to skype with my parents. Coming home, tired and footsore and embarrassed, I carried my new shiny bag of groceries past a pair of Mongolians collecting empty bottles which they will recycle to earn some cash. If they're lucky, they'll have someplace inside to sleep tonight. I've arrived just as the weather turns chilly, and it rained off and on today which hasn't improved on it.

I definitely in comparison am incredibly privileged. Even on a graduate student's income, I've received enough support from my universities, the federal government and my family enough to live a cozy life in pursuit of my work on the protection of cultural heritage. I know the large degree of unemployment is just one of many factors that requires cultural heritage organizations to seek outside funding in order to better preserve Mongolian language and culture, but it does make it hard to prioritize new museum exhibits when every day I've seen people struggling to eat. Mongolia and Mongolians face a lot of challenges, and the big buzz around new money from mining may not make any of them easier. I've just got to do my best to learn and share their experiences. But that's tomorrow's challenge.

Sitting in Seoul

If you have to take a thirteen hour flight, Korean Airlines is the way to go. Of course, it is ideal to spend some of that time sleeping, but I do love the diverse movie/music choices you have to while away the hours. The Lion King, Back to the Future, My Fair Lady...there is an eclectic mix. I skewed Disney this time...nice to fall asleep to.
Another one of the reasons I prefer traveling through Seoul is I have a friend who lives nearby. Unfortunately we couldn't meet up this time, since she's working and my layover is only a little over four hours, but considering how tired I feel right now it is probably for the best.
Incheon Airport has free wireless, so I've been writing a few emails/facebooking/very briefly minecrafting, but I'm debating taking a quick cat nap...only two and a half more hours til I can board my final flight. Thanks to the largesse of KE, I have several snacks squirreled away just in case, but considering I've eaten four meals in the last fifteen hours I'm not expecting that to be a problem :) Since my flight from Seoul to UB is three and a half hours, they might feed me again even! Oy.

Random find for the day, a posting about Mongolia on the indigenous issues blog. Maybe I'll bore you, dear reader, some other day about whether Mongolians could be considered an indigenous group or not. For now, you're safe :)

Hugs and love,
T

ETD: Imminent

Sain baina uu!

I leave Monday morning for UB, so I'm in the final stages of packing and planning. There are, of course, two more sets of threateningly official paperwork to do once I arrive in UB but that's next week's problem.

I know the area around my apartment fairly well and know some details about the furnishings of said apartment, thanks to a friend who lived there last summer. This does not, however, fully prepare me for how to best pack for the cold.

I found the following website, which presents a neat (but intimidating) overview of average temperatures and daylight for UB. If you're curious, check it out:
http://weatherspark.com/averages/34116/Ulan-Bator-Ulaanbaatar-Mongolia

I am a bit of home-body anyways, but I have the feeling I'll be in my apartment by 5 sharp every day and spend my evenings writing up field notes and then playing minecraft or reading on my kindle. The wonders of technology :) It really will be very different and in some ways a lot easier than my first trip in the summer of 2007.

For now, I'm off to a special Thanksgiving dinner :)

Love and hugs,
T

Countdown to Departure

Sain baina uu naiz min!

Plane tickets are purchased, visa has been successfully obtained, and I've negotiated my apartment lease and paid some rent already! Now to just pack...and 6 million other things (small and not so small).

But for now, a geospatial orientation.

First off, where is Mongolia?
Located between China and Russia, Mongolia is the 19th largest country in the world (in terms of landmass...population not so much)



Where will I be?
I will be located (90% of the time) in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. The best place to orient oneself when looking at a map of Ulaanbaatar is to look for Sukhbaatar Square. I've taken a googlemap capture that shows three keys locations, all just to the west of Sukhbaatar Square (about a ten minute walk or so).
The red circle is my apartment building, the green shows the building the Arts Council of Mongolia (the non-profit I'll be volunteering with as one of six data collection methods) is located in, and the yellow is the new location of the American Center for Mongolian Studies (a nice hub for fellow American Mongolists and a superbly helpful support staff).

(please click to make the image bigger)


That's all for now!