Summary: I just finished my first week back in Mongolia from having solo-traveled over winter break! The spring semester at the university started off great, I've received some editing assignments from the think tank I joined last month, and I went to UB's ice festival this week.
Hey everyone, it's been a minute, but I've returned! After almost a whole month of traveling around East Asia for winter break, I couldn't wait to be back "home" in Mongolia. Obviously I don't have everything about Ulaanbaatar figured out, but after weeks of constant new experiences - like figuring out the payment system in China and navigating the subway stations in Japan - I longed for a sense of familiarity.
Above all, I anticipated coming back to my friends here. I loved my time solo-traveling - exploring things on my own according to my own time and wants - but I guess at the end of it, I realized that having friends around isn't half bad! I got to have dinner with some of my friends from my program at this Turkish restaurant. The whole gimmick was that the restaurant interior looks like a cave. I'm not sure what the connection between kebab and caves is, but it was an awesome place to catch up with my friends.
Spring Semester
This semester, I have 12 teaching hours per week instead of the 20 hours I had last semester. Obviously, it's been a very welcomed change to my schedule. However, the bigger change is that most of my classes are in the afternoon and evening now. Last semester, my classes started at 7:40am, but now my classes end at 7:40pm.
I guess I didn't overly bore or annoy my students last semester because most of them enrolled in my classes again. Yet among the familiar faces are several new faces, and they've all been very motivated.
Copy Editing
Last month, through just introducing myself to people involved in international affairs, I got connected to an English copy editor role at the think tank for Mongolia's National Security Council. Over my winter break till now, I received some copy editing assignments for a couple of their short essays. In the process of editing the articles, I’m learning quite a bit about the country like its relations with Vietnam and its One Billion Trees campaign. If you want to take a look, here is the site: https://en.iss.gov.mn/?p=1428. My main project now is to work on their upcoming Ulaanbaatar Dialogue, an international conference on Northeast Asia security, in June. I’ve been given an invitation to attend, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if it's something that someone like me should attend, but I'm excited about it.
Ice Festival
On Sunday, my friend and I went to UB's ice festival at the local ski resort. There were cool ice sculptures, ice slides, and people walking around with camels, reindeer, hunting dogs, falcons, and horses like a carnival. Even normally, I hate waiting in lines, but waiting in a line in -18°C to get on the ice slide was just misery. To be fair, I admit the slide was quite worth it, but once we arrived at the bottom of it, we hurried over indoors to thaw our toes. I also really wanted to take a picture with the dude wearing a polar bear costume (polar bears don't exist here), but he was charging 10,000 tugriks = 3 USD. I know that in American dollars, it's not a crazy amount, but I think I'm adapting to the local currency mindset because that sounded outrageous (like come on, my Burger King meal is 15,000 tugriks). The last year version of me would probably have paid the 10,000, but the "semi-seasoned" me just had my friend take a picture of me with the bear from far away.
That's it for this blog post! Hope you all have a great week, and I'll see you next time!
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