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