First week in Mongolia

All right, we made it! I’m sitting in the post office/Internet cafe in my Pre-Service Training city in Tuv aimag (province).

Here’s a recap of week 1:

We arrived in Mongolia on Saturday, June 5 after spending a day in San Francisco. There were buses waiting to take us to our in-country orientation site, a town of about 15,000, and we spent five nights in a dormitory there. Katie and I roomed with another married couple. We ate breakfast at the dorm each day before going to the school next door for orientation sessions on culture, language, health, and so on.

This Khaan guy seems to pop up everywhere.

Our first full day here (Sunday) was great. The weather was beautiful — you could walk outside the dorm and immediately see a gorgeous landscape of rolling hills and a vibrant blue sky. (I can’t upload pictures right now, so you’ll have to use your imagination.) Nobody in our group of about 75 trainees speaks much Mongolian yet, but when some local kids were curious and approached us, we were able to communicate using the universal language of frisbee. It was quite surreal tossing the disc around with little Mongolian girls while a guy herded his cattle in the background.

And that brings me to my favorite thing about Mongolia thus far: you never know where you’ll see livestock. Cows will hang out and graze out in the pasture, but they also come closer to town. You can walk around a corner and see one right next to a building or in the middle of the road. I was playing basketball the other day and one sauntered over to scratch its chin on the fence around the court (again, picture forthcoming). I love it.

Most of our meals have consisted of rice/noodle dishes with beef or mutton, potatoes, and carrots. We got to try buuz (‘boats’), which are dumplings with meat and onions inside. It’s all been pretty tasty, especially after steeling myself for the possibility of having to eat a goat head. Tea is the standard drink with every meal. It’s typically been the same stuff we’re used to at home, hot water with a tea bag added. I’ve also tasted the Mongolian milk tea, one of the many milk products people consume here. It’s not bad.

We moved out of the dorm Thursday afternoon and the group of 75 trainees split up to go to our various Pre-Service Training sites and move in with host families. My group of business volunteers stayed in the same town, while most of the others, including Katie, went elsewhere. We’ll get to visit each other a few times over the next 10 weeks before we are reunited for our permanent placement.

My host family is great, and I’ll tell you all about them later. I’m due back for lunch with them soon. Bayartai! (Goodbye!)