I wonder about the people that I meet or walk by or attempt to talk to in the course of a day. The edges of their lives just barely touching mine. People that I remember and think about but don t really know. The woman who checks me out at the grocery store, the man I pass on the street walking home, or the man I see living in the steam pipes across the street. Who are they? What is their story? Even when we talk I don ' t always know and the connection doesn't always last. For example, my [View Full Entry]

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I am in a new apartment this year. This is cause for celebration. Actually I moved at the end of last school year. It is much nicer than my old apartment and close enough to the school that I can walk which is great because that means that I don’t have to deal with Mongolian traffic five days a week. It takes about ten minutes to walk school even though it looks as if they are right next to each other. I will probably be sad about this in the winter when it is nasty cold but I keep telling myself [View Full Entry]

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The theme of Peru was long drives and dead people. We drove south along the Pacific coast. On the right was the ocean with spectacular surf and a somewhat forbidding aura. The large amounts of sharp rocks jutting out of and into the water might have had something to do with the aura thing. The sand of the beaches when we stopped was fine, and powdery and somewhat soothing to the touch. On the left of the bus was the desert. The Atacama was unlike anything that I had ever seen before. We drove for hours and there hasn’t without seeing [View Full Entry]

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This blog is belated. You can tell that it is belated because the last one that I wrote was in April. Seriously April?! What is wrong with me? Okay, new goal for this school year. One blog a week. It may not actually happen but I am setting this as my goal anyway. Let me assure you that in the time that I wasn’t writing thing were actually happening. Not all of them were interesting but still… Anyhow… on to Peru! As you can probably tell from the title of this blog my Spanish (while pretty darn bad) is much much [View Full Entry]

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Javsung, my housekeeper is very worried about me and has been since I went to her home for Tsaggan Sar. Why is she so worried? Well, I was born in the year of the Rooster and Tsaggan Sar marks the beginning of the year of the Bull. According to her this is bad, bad, bad and needs to be fixed. Fixing my year (that is how she put it- although she isn’t very fluent in English so I could probably use my own phrase) involved going to one of the many Buddhist temples in Ulaanbaatar in order to have a lama [View Full Entry]

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Just a reminder I am still in Malaysia. Borneo to be exact. It is the third largest island in the world. Parts of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the tiny country of Brunei in its entirely occupy this slice of tropical paradise which sits almost exactly on the equator between the South China Sea, Sulu Sea, the Celebes Sea and the Makassar Strait! Today I learned that orangutans are ticklish. One of the major attractions of Borneo are the Orangutans. I am sure you can see them in the wild here in Malaysia but they are endangered and I wouldn't know where to [View Full Entry]

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I am in Malaysia! There have been commercials on Star World (my English channel) for Malaysia all year. So it is a good thing that I was able to come here because those commercials would have driven me crazy otherwise. The tourism company promoting Malaysia really did its job well! None of this, of course, tells you anything about Kota Kinabalu. Borneo. Just saying the name makes me happy. I had all of these images in my head of what Borneo should be like: thick jungle teeming with wildlife; orang-utans swinging through forest canopy; mountains, warm weather and enough flowers to [View Full Entry]

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Hey! It Tsagaan Sar and I am so excited! And not just because I get a five day weekend! My housekeeper invited me to her house for Tsagaan Sar. I am pretty sure that it is the equivalent of me inviting this newly immigrated Vietnamese family to Thanksgiving when I was in high school. Tsagaan Sar, meaning white moon or white month, is the Mongolian lunar New Year festival. There is a ton of debate about when to actually celebrate it. Some people celebrate it at the same time as Chinese New Year, but apparently it is culturally more related to [View Full Entry]

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I was invited to a hair cutting ceremony today. You may ask how did that come about? I honestly couldnt tell you. There was an invitation that was sent to Trudi , that included me , from a woman who might work in our building with Trudi ' s housekeeper. I think I was referred to as the " little one " . It was one of those things that you just can ' t miss. The ceremony was held in a ger that is right behind my building. I hadnt actually been in a ger that people live in all [View Full Entry]

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I have no money. Well, I have money, I just can ' t get any of the money that I have. This has been the week of banking difficulties. It didnt start out that way. I just got paid (into a Mongolian account) and I needed to transfer money to my U S account. Why? Because I NEEDED to! Anyhow, the whole internet banking thing has worked great for me since I got here (after of course the initial learning curve wherein I discovered you had to bank online during business hours). This time however, smooth has nothing to do [View Full Entry]

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