It is international week here at ISU. You may be wondering why I bring this up. I will answer. 200 kids from 29 countries? What is more fun than that? And two, I was on the committee that organized it so feel the need to spread the love to all you people who have nothing better to do than to read about the minutia of my day. Oh, the power!... Wait don’t stop reading… I’ll be good. Anyhow, Tuesday was host country Day. This of course meant that it was Mongolian Day. Why we couldn’t just call it Mongolian Day I [View Full Entry]

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Shopping in Mongolia takes a whole lot of energy. A whole lot of energy. Finding anything means lots of walking, three or four taxi rides, 10 stores and the ability to compromise about what you want. I am still learning my way around and how to shop hear so I am hoping that eventually it won’t take me nine hours to get groceries! Of course it isn’t just that I have to go to at least five stores that is the problem. There is also the small matter that nothing is in English. I know that I have vowed not to [View Full Entry]

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Ni hao from Beijing! Okay, I am not in Beijing at the moment… but I was only there for a day and I was busy so get off my back! The point is that I was there and am going to share all my love for the capitol city of China with all of you. First of all the air pollution in Beijing must be mentioned. It is awful. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel was about 45 minutes and I didn’t see one building. Not because they weren’t there or because we were not very close but [View Full Entry]

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I love Hong Kong! Yes, I have returned from my amazing, intense and oh, so informative trip to Hong Kong! My head is stuffed full of knowledge (just enough to be dangerous!) and my stomach is stuffed full of food. They must think that teachers are ravenous beasts in Hong Kong because they fed us just about every two hours the entire time we are at the conference! Just getting there was a huge overly dramatic ordeal. I travelled with the head of the Primary school, who is a very nice Australian lady. It was great that I didn’t have to [View Full Entry]

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It is late Friday night and I have just gotten back from my first Mongolian party. The party was given by the deputy director of the school. Tuul, who basically holds the place together. It was quite an experience and since I want to remember everything I think that I will try to write about it before I go to bed. I went with a friend of mine. We first went across the street to the tiny store to get drinks as it was BYOB. There is no coke to be found in the city and as I am sick of [View Full Entry]

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I am going to rant. I am sorry but there is just no way around it… The traffic here sucks . Badly. And not in the mild in “we have to wait for a bit” way that you find that you find in North America. I think the problem might stem from the fact that no one in Asia seems to know how to queue (um… line up for all you Americans out there) and so when driving they try to push to the front in any way that they can. That doesn’t work all too well with cars. I suspect [View Full Entry]

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So… I have decided that constant writing about the trials of living in a country where you don’t speak the language will get old very quickly. On that note I have decided that this entry will not have the words “mime”, “Mongolian”, “English” or the phrase “My God, why don’t I speak the language already!” It is time to move on. Let’s see if I can do it! Have I mentioned that my classroom is in a slightly remodeled (they put in a window!) storage room? It is. About a third of it is still taken up with random things [View Full Entry]

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The main drama this week was applying for my VISA at the Chinese embassy. I am going to Hong Kong on September 12th for professional development. For those of you who are not familiar with “teacher speak,” that means a three-day conference to re-teach me how to be a teacher. The International School of Ulaanbaatar where I work uses a very specific international curriculum that I am not trained into so off I have to go. And to go I need a Chinese VISA. The Chinese are insane! Or at least their government is. First of all I had to [View Full Entry]

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So here I am in Mongolia. I have been here exactly four weeks and have decided that it is high time I share my adventures with the rest of the world. Or whatever population of the world is willing to read this blog. Either way I plan on oversharing… I was really nervous about coming. It is a really big deal and something that is totally going to change the course of my life. The closer to the end of summer it got the more the panic set in! However, actually getting here went very smoothly; all my stuff is here [View Full Entry]

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