Things get mixed up a little

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Trip Start Jul 17, 2008 Previous
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  Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Tuesday, July 22, 2008

One of the problems with day 1 was logistics.  Managing 4 sites was consuming a fair bit of time and made some of the logistics a little more difficult.  For the second day there would only be 2 sites with groups of 10.  The other 2 sites would be visited later in the week or the following week.

My team works at a different site than we started with.  This house is a little bit behind where our house was but 10 of us jump into the fray and continued to build the house.

We do take time out to play frisbee or soccer with the boy (about 13).  We even make some friends.  The neighbour's young girl (13 maybe) develops a crush on Ashik.  We give her Canada pins as a present.

After work we stop in at an orphanage, the Lotus Children's Centre.  There we play with two groups of children.  The first were very young - less than 6 months.  They were very tired having just woken up from naps.  We meet an adorable boy with wild hair aptly named Tarzan.  But I can escape an uncomfortable feeling.  I guess I'm just not comfortable with 20 of us in a room with 6 or 7 children.  It just seems overwhelming and voyeuristic.  I jump at the chance to go to the second group.  There we encounter older children maybe 7 or 8.  Brook dives right in and starts chasing them around and tickling them.  Within 10 seconds she has the entire room of children laughing, screaming and running around.  A few of us just stand by and watch her at work.  It was very inspiring.  I get into the act by doing the same and picking them up and whirling them around in the air.  This quickly drains because the children were playing 'hard to get'.  They were only pretending to not want to be picked up but would force the issue if you tried to disengage!  Stickers, paper and pencils and stuffed animals were handed out and we left with everyone in smiles.

Ulaanbaatar seems to have a lot of central services.  Most homes do not have plumbing so they have access to well water in each community.  There is no individual garbage pickup, instead there are public garbage bins where people can leave their trash.  We have one of these outside our hotel, around the corner.  When we come back this bin is on fire.  Perhaps a mixture of garbage didn't sit well?  An employee from our hotel brings a hose and puts the fire out.

I see an eagle from the hotel window and take a great shot of it in flight!

Dinner is at a vegetarian Mongolia restaurant.  I was surprised that vegetarian would even translate into Mongolian.  But it turns out that traditionally Mongolians would avoid meat for 7 or 8 months a year.  This is a tradition long forgotten.  A nice gentleman interrupts converstaions our tables and asks to speak to us.  I assume that he's the owner.  No.  He's from BBC radio and they're taping a segment and wondered if we could quiet down.

Dinner is very good.  I order the chef salad which is delicious.  After a few days of mostly meat and basic vegetables, eating fresh, clean lettuce is a real treat!  I also order traditional vegetarian dumplings which are good though I'm dumplinged out.  No more for me if I can avoid it!

After dinner we have a group meeting at Sukhbaatar Square.  This is the square in front of the Mongolian government building.  A funny drunk Mongolian joins our meeting providing amusement.  At one point we go around the group getting comments about the day.  Lynn says to skip over the creepy, drunk Mongolian.  We all laugh.  So does he.  We laugh more.  So does he.

On the way back to the hotel we stop at Dave's Place, an English pub.  There we can order beer in liter glasses.  Not great beer, but at least there's a lot of it.

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