You might be in Mongolia if...

1. You have a picture of Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan) on your wall.
2. You slip up and call your cell phone a “hand phone” when speaking in English.
3. You guard your peanut butter with your life.
4. It got dark today before 5pm.
5. You’ve seen a camel cart on the street in the last two days.
6. You consider 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) to be warm for this time of year.
7. You think that pink, blue, or green walls and orange floors are normal.
8. The appearance of or lack of hot water determines when you bathe.
9. You have a collection of graph-paper notebooks, used for a wide range of things, that sport covers ranging from Harry Potter to Korean stars to cars to wildlife.
10. You are disappointed at the warm winter weather because it means you can’t use your balcony as a walk-in freezer.

Thankful for food...

There are some areas in which I’ve become a stickler for tradition—one of them is Thanksgiving food. Thanksgiving, in my mind, is embodied by family and food; I can’t have the family since the Pacific Ocean and a lot of land separate us, so I better have the food! Since Thanksgiving is this week I thought I'd tell you about our menu--which we'll be enjoying Saturday since Thursday is a normal work day in this part of the world...

Chicken Legs: It would be near impossible to find a turkey here so we settle for the nearly equally rare chicken legs. This is my first year to have to cook them; I’m a bit nervous!

Cranberry Sauce: Sent across the Pacific by special request, it helps complete the holiday.

Fruit Salad: When I was a kid we always had a fruit salad that included coconut and baby marshmallows; over the past few years here I’ve stumbled upon a canned fruit mix that, when mixed with yogurt, marshmallows, and coconut (the latter two being from the States) makes quite a good substitute for the salad of my childhood.

Green Bean Casserole: For some bizarre reason, the past few years we’ve been able to buy canned green beans in one of the stores here in town. Cream of mushroom “whatever you happen to have on hand” soup is really easy to make from scratch, and my parents have been so kind as to send the necessary fried onions for the top. Yum! This year, although we’ve already got the onions, we haven’t yet been able to find green beans. There is one other place in town I can check—otherwise we’ll have to fill the casserole with something else!

Green Salad: This one is a bit less normal—the only green leafy thing here is cabbage, so sometimes we settle for a tray of veggies (cucumber, bell peppers—if they are being sold at the market, carrots)

Jello Salad: A nod to the mid-westerners in our crew; it’s a tasty mix of jello and fruit.

Mashed potatoes: not a problem since potatoes are so abundant here.

Rolls: Of course they have to be made from scratch here, but when you live in a place like Mongolia, you learn how to do things like that…

Stuffing: It could be made from scratch but the lovely mix my parents sent tastes so good!

And for dessert we’ll have Pumpkin and Apple pies. Yum!

So you see, we manage to be fairly traditional even out in the middle of Mongolia.

P.S. You'll all be relieved, I'm sure, to hear that the trial run for cooking chicken went smoothly and was delicious! (Okay, so it really was just another excuse to eat valuable chicken...but it was still good!) AND, drum roll please, on my hundredth lap around town I finally found green beans; so we get to have our lovely casserole tomorrow after all.

More on music

So I learned the other week that a music group I like broke up several months ago. Here in Mongolia, you get exposed to a very strange mix of music. Sadly enough, one of the things Mongolia has done is introduce me to the international pop and hip-hop music scene…Yes, in all honesty, I actually like some of that fluffy music now. Smash!, this group I like, was a Russian duo that sang in English, but also had one French song. They were a relatively new group, and had been around about two years, I think. A few weeks ago I noticed that only one of the guys was appearing in a live performance that happened to be on TV; this set me wondering what had happened to the other guy. Let me tell you, trying to find information in English about a Russian group is near impossible! They had a website that had info in English but that hasn’t been updated since December 2004. The little other news you can find in English is quite sketchy and not fit to be read. Finally I found something that said they’d broken up. Why, I don’t know. It seems that one guy has kept the name Smash! and the other guy is now singing under his own name. It’s sad, because they always looked like they were having fun singing together. Another one bites the dust…

Public Notice

This is the time of year when I disappear under a big pile of homework and teaching. I will emerge in a couple weeks, hopefully unscathed for the most part, at which point in time I'll have more stories for your education and entertainment. Thanks for your patience--all five of you.

Concerning an Outhouse and a Pig

I went to the countryside a couple weeks ago. As always, it provided some near-death interesting experiences, one of which involved a pig—which in and of itself is worthy of note in Mongolia. I haven’t always gotten along well with pigs. I had a particularly scaring experience at the county fair when I was little, in which a large mama pig decided that she should have the french fries I was nibbling on. Granted, she was in a pen, and I was outside the pen, but you don’t really think about that when you are two years-old and something 10X your size lunges at you! Oh, right, the countryside… when you are in the countryside there are generally only two places to relieve yourself—either in the great wide open, or in the very occasional outhouse. The area we were driving through was amazingly flat so I ignored my bladder until we stopped at a home possessing an “outhouse”; it was “out” alright, but there was no “house” about it! It was quite the sight to behold; a roofless, doorless, and nearly floorless outhouse being held upright by two wires, attached to opposite corners, that were staked into the ground. It must be quite exciting to use at night since not only were there very large gaps between the floorboards, but there was there a hole in front of it and one behind it! As I was using this “outhouse” I heard snuffling and snorting that was getting closer and closer. At the same time, my coworker was beginning to sound panicked, “A pig, a pig! Oh! Oh! It’s coming closer, Oh! The pig is coming!” We had seen the pig on our way to the outhouse, but it had been a ways away. I was quite uneager to meet the pig at eyelevel while balancing on planks in a rather unstable structure. I exited just as the pig’s snout poked around the side. I’m sure that my coworker has never seen someone leap out of an outhouse with quite so much speed or momentum! The pig, having done its work by unsettling the foreigner, ambled back to the patch of grass it had been rooting around in before.