Pectopah

Living with P being R and H being N.

Learning a new alphabet is not as hard as I had expected. But then again, the cyrillic alphabet is about as close to the roman alphabet as it gets. The letters that are most confusing are those that are in our alphabet yet represent a different letter. P is R, H is N and C is always in its soft form, making PECTOPAH a restaurant. I'm enjoying the Mongolian lessons even though it's not the easiest language to learn. Mongolian words are formed by adding suffixes to a root. For example, “ger” means “home”, “gert” means “in home” while “gereecee” means “from my home”. I find it interesting except that it makes for long words. My interest doesn't mean I'll be fluent faster...

Our apartment is feeling like home now. We bought a shower curtain and it's brightening up our bathroom. We spend very little time at home and when we're there, we're either studying or sleeping.

We got a phone! It's the cheapest new cellphone we could find in town, 35,000 tugrugs (roughly, drop the zeros for Canadian dollars). If you want our phone number you'll have to email us.

Hot, hot.

We ate at a Chinese restaurant last weekend and the waitress brought us a bowl of rice. To indicate that it was hot, she said the word for hot, then touched her fingers to her ears. Our Mongolian teacher told us later that touching your ears signifies hot in Mongolia.

Mongolian outdoor gyms

Just outside our apartment block we have a playground and what looks like a playground but is actually an outdoor gym. There is an elliptical trainer-type machine, others that look like ab and core body machines and some arm ones. They're all very simple in brightly coloured tube steel. I don't think you can adjust weight or anything else on them. A few women use them in the morning then for the rest of the day they're used by the neighbourhood kids to play on. They look relatively new and well-kept from my perch on our third-floor. Most neighbourhoods around town have them so there might have been a government campaign to install them.

mc

Mongolia! We finally made it to the other side of the world. We've only been here for six days and it feels like forever.

The flight from Vancouver to London to Moscow to Ulaanbaatar took a while and totally wrecked havoc with our sleeping patterns. When we arrived on the Saturday, it was morning and we were exhausted. The morning seemed to have dragged on forever. There are 16 volunteers altogether, counting myself and another partner, that have arrived at the same time. They've kept us busy since our first day here with a visit to the countryside, language training and various other orientation and workshop activities.

Aaron and I are already in our apartment, a tiny little bachelor that shows its age. We have hot water some of the time and it's like winning the lottery if we wake up in the morning and the hot water pipes are hot.

We will be in training for five weeks with one week almost over. We have language training in the morning and workshops and various activities in the afternoon. When we get home in the evening, we are totally exhausted and we still have to study. Mongolian is an interesting language to learn. There's a lot of sounds that aren't used in English and weird grammatical rules. "I ate bread yesterday" becomes "I yesterday bread ate". So far, we've learned the alphabet (cyrillic), how to introduce ourselves, what our professions are, numbers and a little bit about how to describe families. Namag Marie-Claude gedigk. Bi zohlioch. Bi Kanataas irsen. My name is Marie-Claude. I'm a writer. I come from Canada.

It's been pretty hot here during the day but the nights are cold.

First impressions:

-At first glance, Mongolia didn't look like what I thought a developing country should look like. Things just didn't seem to be in a total state of disarray. But then, you start looking around and some things are a bit amiss like unmarked open manholes, odd construction practices and the lack of street lights at night. We've talked to a few people and the nice things in town, like the nicely paved Seoul street, came from foreign aid (in the case of Seoul street, you've guessed it, from South Korea).

-The Mongolians I've met are really friendly. The people who work for VSO have been really helpful and have made our first few days here much easier.

-Mongolians are good-looking people. Women wear heels despite the state of the sidewalks and I've been told, despite the weather. They apparently use their stiletto heels as ice picks.

-Oh the traffic! Cars don't stop for pedestrians, they honk. You may have the green pedestrian light but you still need to look around to make sure it's safe. The traffic lights are more a suggestion than absolute rule. Ulaanbaatar has relatively few streets. There's the main streets then back alley streets. People give directions by landmarks. The main streets have names but they're not really used.

-Laser birds. They may look like crows but they sound like lasers.

mc