First week
Trip Start
Feb 15, 2008
1
3
13
Trip End
Ongoing
UlaanBaatar,
Mongolia
Saturday, February 23, 2008
It's the end of my first week in Mongolia so I thought I'd write a quick note to let you all know how I am getting on. In a word - good! I am living in a very warm flat in the centre of UlaanBaatar (UB) with other newly arrived VSO volunteers. At the moment we are undergoing a months training and language lessons to prepare us for our year working in Mongolia. I know its what you are all wanting to know - how cold is it? The daytime temperature here usually rises to the heady heights of 5OC, and at night time drops to around -15 to -20. When I walk to the bus stop in the morning it is about -10. Its not as bad as it sounds because it is a very dry kind of cold with no wind or snow so far. And its always sunny. If you wear enough layers its no problem.
We have language lessons every morning from 9am-12.30pm and they are quite hard core! Mongolian uses a cyrillic alphabet so our first few lessons were spent learning the sounds of the letters. But at the end of the week we can now say hello and how do you do, and ask the basic questions: what is your name, what is your job, how old are you and how many brothers and sisters do you have. Our language teachers have an effective but slightly old-fashioned teaching method. If you can't pronounce a phrase correctly you are sent to stand in the corner and say it to yourself until you get it right, then you can rejoin the class! I have tried my new Mongolian phrases on some of the shopkeepers in UB, however they all know a little bit of English, so it usually ends up with me talking to them in bad Mongolian, and them replying to me in bad English!
During the afternoons we are given training sessions on health, finance, safety and other issues in Mongolia.
Our apartment
One of the major safety concerns in UB are the uncovered manholes. There is a system of hot water pipes that runs round the city providing heating to all the apartments. There are service access shafts to these hot water pipes which are entered from manholes in the street. There are a few hundred homeless street kids in UB who live in these access shafts, as it is the only way they can survive the -20 night time temperatures. The kids often leave the lids off the access pipes so they don't get locked in or out, making it very easy to fall into them especially in the dark.Our routine of "language in the morning, training in the afternoon" was broken for me on Thursday and Friday when I travelled about 90km outside of UB to a conference for volunteers working in the "secure livelihoods" sector. The conference was held at a hotel in the Terelj National Park which was really beautiful with frozen lakes, mountain passes and nomadic herders with their livestock. It's a very popular destination for tourists in the summer and people from UB on weekends because its only 90 minutes away from the city on fairly decent roads. In mid-week and winter it was lovely and quiet.
Today (Saturday) was a day off from working and training, so a group of us were taken out to the countryside for lunch in a ger. The bus that drove us out unfortunately had no functional heating, so we were all pretty cold after the hour long bus ride at subzero temperatures. Luckily the ger was really warm and cosy. The stove had been lit and lunch (a traditional Mongolian stew) was ready and waiting for us, it was fabulous! There are some traditions associated with gers - the door always faces south, and you must enter promptly, not hang about in the doorway, then move around the ger in a clockwise manner.
Waiting for the bus
On a cold day, I can highly recommend stoking up the stove and sitting around drinking tea in a ger!I am coping well with the Mongolian diet. It consists mainly of meat and potatoes, which is fine by me! Potatoes, onions, turnips and carrots are the most common Mongolian-grown vegetables so I forsee a year of eating lots of stews! I have a bread machine to make my gluten-free bread, and there is cheese available in the shops. I tried some Mongolian milk curds last night but didn't fancy them. It was rather like eating sour milk.
Our apartment is luckily just opposite the State Department Store which is kind of like a John Lewis or Myers and very easy to spend money in! The money here is very different from pounds and pence. The currency of Mongolia is the tugrik. Its about 2400tugriks to the pound. There are no coins, only notes which range from the 10tugrik to the 20000tugrik. I'm not quick enough at recognising the different notes yet so I have a huge bundle of them in my wallet at the moment.
The coming week involves more language lessons, more training, and hopefully I'll have time to do some exploring of the city. I have a new mobile number 9586 0810 (the country code for Mongolia is 976) and my postal address is VSO Programme Office, PO Box 678, UlaanBaatar 13, Mongolia (just in case you see some gluten-free delicacies on special in Sainsburies or Woolies and think of me. UB is a gluten-free-free zone!). And my email address remains the same as when I was in Edinburgh.
