The next stops on our world tour were Wisconsin and Ohio (required in any world tour, of course). Picking up a rental car at the Columbus Ohio airport, we drove to my Dad and his partner Libby’s house. We feasted, got a tour of their new barn, gave the cats and Rusty lots of love, and slept like logs. Constantly moving, especially on vacation, is exhausting!

Rustoliam the super pooch

Blurry but handsome Dad

The next day we drove to Madison, Wisconsin and arrived at my cousins’ in the evening. They have a new house and it was great to finally see where they were living. During our two day stay we saw our awesome friend Anne, went to lunch with Ruth (one of my idols), spent lots of great time with my cousins, and experienced a 16 inch snow and ice blizzard. The only disappointment was not getting to see the rest of our friends due to the bad weather.

Ruth

After the storm damage was cleaned up we headed back to Ohio picking up my brother in Chicago on the way. We spent another night with my Dad where we opened presents and dined at a local Chinese/Thai restaurant. Oxford is in a very picturesque part of Ohio, and it was very peaceful walking around their yard.

The boys modeling their handmade mittens from Libby

Our last stop in Ohio was at my mom’s house. We went to a big band Christmas concert at the local OSU branch, decorated the Christmas tree, got to visit with more cousins and friends, and laid around like slugs. It was nice to not do anything for a few days. On Christmas my grandma joined us for gifts and lunch, and in the evening Frank came down. As always our time together was too short.

Mom showing off the art quilt we gave her.

Grandma opening the quilt mom made her.

When we first arrived in America we spent 5 days in Los Angeles with Brian’s dad Phil and his wife Yvonne. I had never really been to LA before, and we were treated to the royal tourist tour. We drove to an outlook to see the Hollywood sign,

visited Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and went star spotting.

We visited the Griffith Observatory where we got to see how much we weighed on each of the planets in the solar system. We appreciated fine art at the Getty Art Center, and we saw the new James Bond movie which we are both dying to see again.

Another day was spent at Universal Studios where we went on a studio tour and got to meet Jaws up close and personal.

Our next to last morning in LA was spent at the beautiful Santa Monica Pier soaking up the sun and ocean views.

My favorite place, though, was the Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits. It was fascinating to learn about the history of the site as well as to see thousands (of the millions) of the bones that have been dug up. I highly recommend the Tar Pits to anyone visiting LA.

Perhaps the best part of our visit was getting to spend so much time with Phil and Yvonne and eating at all their favorite restaurants. We got to have seafood, Mexican, French, Japanese, and more Mexican food. It was a glorious change from freezing cold weather and our basic fare in Mongolia. We can’t wait to go back.

In December we went on vacation to Ulaanbaatar, California, Ohio, Wisconsin and South Korea for just under a month. It was a much needed change of pace, and we got to see many friends and family members, visit all sorts of great places, and eat some amazing food.

On our way to America we had a 7 hour layover in Korea which allowed us enough time to stuff ourselves with onigiri and Dunkin Donuts, shop at duty free, and go on a free 2 hour layover tour. We had gone on a layover tour in Seoul before, and I highly recommend them to anyone with a few hours to spare.

This time we went to Heungryunsa Temple which is located halfway up Cheongryangsan Mountain about 30km from the airport above the Incheon Grand Bridge. They had just had a snow storm, and the whole area was very picturesque. The temple was originally built around 1400 but destroyed in 1592 by a Japanese invasion. The current buildings were built in 1977.

Brian in front of the main temple building and a few inside shots.

Back at the airport we were treated to an opera concert. Layovers in Korea are fun.

Back in December we were interviewed by a reporter with the local newspaper, The Mongol Gobi. We gave the interview in Mongolian and the reporter was nice enough to clean it up a bit for the readers. It may not have been the New York Times, but we can proudly say we have been front page news.

Today was the 47th annual celebration of Teachers Day in Mongolia. Being a teacher in Mongolia is a highly respected occupation (as it should be everywhere) and students, parents, and the education system are good at honoring teachers for their work. While the holiday is officially the first Sunday in February (today) our school celebrated on Friday.

In the afternoon we had an awards ceremony at the culture center. While we waited almost an hour for the governor to show up we were treated to a slide show and made-for-television show about my school. They were both really well done and I will try to get a copy of the video to post here.

At last the program began and Bold, the school director, and Baigal, the kindergarten director, spoke a few words of welcome. They are pictured here with Darkhuu (in purple) and Battsetseg the school manager (in white).

Several teachers and school workers received medals and plaques for their work and achievements, and I was very honored to receive the “Creative Teacher” award from my coworkers. Here I am excitedly receiving my award.

The biggest surprise though was when Brian and I were presented with a very lovely painting by the culture center staff. It was done by a former art teacher from my school, and it is not only very well done but appropriately enough features, in addition to traditional gers and animals, several coal trucks driving across the desert in the background. I can’t wait until we have a flat wall to hang it on.

That evening we gathered at the community center again for a light meal and karaoke.  Non-slobs like myself dressed up for the occasion with my friend Enkhtsetseg looking especially lovely.

We were divided up into teams for the competition-pictured below is my hardcore team, us making a toast with milk (watch out competition-we mean business), and one of the other teams (obviously filled with our singing enemies).

The competition was fierce but fun, and between each round there was some dancing. I don’t know who won because Darkhuu and I are wimps and went home early, but it was a lovely day of feeling special with my wonderful coworkers.

The harsh realities of life tend to be more visible in Mongolia than in America. For example, every year millions of cats and dogs are euthanized in America, but unless you volunteer at a shelter or are passionate about animals, this is just a sad, but fairly abstract fact. You didn’t know any of those animals and it doesn’t really affect you. But here street dogs are quite common, and it is not unusual to walk past tiny puppies, injured pooches, or even dead dogs on the street. Last Friday there was a cull of all ownerless dogs in Hanhongor. While the problem was not as bad as in Ulaanbaatar where there is a group of city employees who shoot approximately 300 dogs a night, there was a fairly sizable number of dogs running around. As someone who loves animals enough to not eat them, it makes me very sad to walk to work now and not see, as Brian and I named them, Pink Feather, Farkus, Bendy Legs, Clown Pooch, and many others.  The only dogs left in town are those owned by people and two very lucky/wiley puppies in my neighborhood. Animal control in Mongolia, aside from shooting them, doesn’t really exist. We have gone out of our way to have Santi, Monster, and Lulu fixed, but that was an expensive and fairly laborious thing to do. There are no vets outside of Ulaanbaatar who fix cats and dogs and the price, while cheap compared to America, is well beyond what most people would pay. My heart breaks for all the sad homeless pooches, but we just can’t fit any more of them in our ger. Where is my magic sterilization wand when I need it?

Spring cleaning in Mongolia is serious business. While some people go to the extreme of taking apart their entire house for cleaning, we only went as far as moving and washing all our furniture, scrubbing our ceiling and floor, and taking down our wall curtains and washing them. Brian even went outside and beat our rug with amazing results.

Let’s look at that dust explosion a little more closely.

Just so you know we don’t wear shoes in our house. It is just a fact of life that if you live in a glorified tent that everything gets really really dirty.

On Friday night a co-worker and lovely woman who I have know for over 10 years took her own life. She left behind a husband, 3 children ages twelve, four, and one, a large number of siblings, including the town governor and one of our neighbors, and an absolutely broken-hearted father. She was also the woman who so lovingly made dozens of personalized felt camels and gers for my friends and family members when I was a volunteer. I don’t know if anyone in her family knows what her reasons were, but it is deeply saddening to see so many people hurt by her untimely departure.  I hope she is resting peacefully.

Otgoo and I in 2004

Life continues on here with long days and fast weeks. It is hard to believe that it is already mid-November and that we have been here almost a year and a half. Never a dull moment for sure.

• In October the other English teacher at school went to Ulaanbaatar for 2.5 weeks for training. There is no substitute teacher system here like in America, so other teachers are expected to take up as much slack as possible. In other words, while he was gone I taught 5th, 7th, and 8th grade in addition to my regular classes. I enjoyed getting to meet kids whom I otherwise don’t interact with, but it was exhausting work. I did partly console myself with the thought that he would come back with exciting new teaching skills, but it turns out he wasn’t even at a teaching training. For reasons I cannot fathom he was at human resources management training. Maybe he fancies himself our school’s next director…
• We have a 4th grade neighbor named Bilguun who likes to come over and play Angry birds, get Santiago all riled up, and watch Brian work on the computer. He also likes to help me cook (and then consume his weight in whatever “weird” foods we are having that night) and to show us his art projects. We don’t think he gets a lot of encouragement at home based on how excited he always seems to be to show us his work. Here he is proudly with a snow boat he built.

• Two weeks ago Lulu came home after we had gone to bed. That in itself was not unusual as she is our adventure kitty, but what was abnormal was that when I reached down to pet her I found myself petting a very crusty and foul smelling cat. Suspecting the worst I got out of bed, turned on the light, and found myself holding a cat whose tail and entire underbelly were covered in human feces. We will never know what happened, but we suspect that she fell into an outhouse whilst out exploring. Fortunately for us, Lulu is the most docile cat in the world and barely voiced a protest as we scrubbed her in a bucket of cold water at 1:30 in the morning. She was probably just glad she didn’t have to clean it all off with her tongue.
• A few weeks ago when we were in the aimag (provincial capital) we bought some artichoke juice on the slim hope it would taste like one of my all time favorite vegetables. Fail. Imagine a bottle of green bitter bubble gum juice and you are pretty close. I can’t imagine drinking it even if it is the health miracle the bottle claimed. Blah.

• Heating is always a big issue in Mongolia considering it is one of the coldest countries in the world and heating systems here tend to be less than great. Hanhongor’s town heating plant has always struggled to actually heat the public buildings in town which includes the school, kindergarten, dormitory, and hospital. This made the installation of a new furnace this year a great improvement, except for one thing-they didn’t get around to doing it until the end of October. This meant that in a land where it is routinely below freezing by the end of September that we didn’t have heat until the beginning of November. My classroom got down below 50 before the heat finally kicked in. I have no idea what planning actually went into the replacement but you do really wonder why it was not done in the summer.
• Behind our ger is a dirt road that curves in and out between the houses in our neighborhood. As more people have gotten cars here that has translated into more idiot drivers going way too fast through narrow ally ways where children play. More than once as we lay in bed we had morbid thoughts about drunks not making the turn and driving straight into our ger.  Fortunately, when we expressed these concerns to our neighbors, we found that they were all in agreement that something had to be done. After a long wait for some metal sheeting, our street is no longer a street, and I think we can all sleep a little more soundly. Our ger is right behind the two blue sheds on the left. The new wall has an opening for pedestrians and super slow motorcycles but not cars.

• Recently my father sent my school a donation of two boxes filled with scissors, glue, pipe cleaners, glitter, clay, and stickers, stickers, stickers. I have spread much of the goodies around to the other teachers and have been using the rest in my regular classes, art class, and with the third grade. I have not managed to get pictures of all the projects, but I did make pencil worms with the third graders which was a lot of fun because they had never before made anything with googly eyes, pompoms, or pipe cleaners. Thanks Dad for all the fun stuff!

• We are excitedly planning our winter trip to America. We have bought all the plane tickets, and we have reserved rental cars and hotel rooms. We will be spending time in Southern California with Brian’s family, in Ohio with my family, in Wisconsin with friends and family, and a few days in South Korea with hopefully the biggest bowl of ba bim bap in the world.
• Last but not least Brian’s website The Mongolist, which I mentioned in my last post, is going gangbusters. I encourage you to check out his many insightful articles on politics, business, and society in Mongolia as well as my guest posts on education. Tell your friends and like it on Facebook!