Hello to you all in internet land!
Things continue to go very well for me in Mongolia. I have been at my training site for exactly one week and have been in country for almost two weeks! Time goes by unbelievably fast some times and insanely slow at others. Every day continues to be a grab bag of emotions. Frustration, happiness, homesickness, exhileration etc....are all emotions that cross my mind nearly every day. Mongolia brings its fantastic ups and really low downs. Every day is a rollercoaster, that is for sure!
I am sure you all know that I am living in a ger with my host family. They live in a wooden house and I live in a ger just outside the house. This ger affords me a lot of privacy and space and I feel very fortunate to be there. I thought I would give you a time line of my daily activities.
I wake up every morning at 6am. Sometimes it is earlier because the sun comes up around 4:30 and if I don't put on my eye shades I am up to greet it, but most days I have on my eye shades. I do yoga from 6:00 until 6:45 and then take the time to tumpin (read: bucket) bathe. This is a fun procedure to bath in a plastic tub with only a half-gallon of water. I usually end up having to use more water and nine times out of ten there is water ALL over the floor! So, I am still learning the ins and outs of tumpin bathing.
Tumpin bathing takes about 20 minutes so I spend my free time until 8am studying Mongolian or listening to music. Something to get my mind going! At 8:00 I go in to the house for breakfast. Breakfast usually consists of two hard boiled eggs and bread with butter and sugar or just jam. Try butter and sugar on your bread! So good! I have to leave the house by 8:30am so I can complete the 20 minute walk in to town. I live in the ger district that is about one mile outside of the town and 8 out of the 12 trainees live in the ger district so we have similar walks. The other 4 live in apartments in the town.
School (Mongolian lessons) start at 9 and go until 1pm. We break for lunch until 2:30 which means another walk up and down the hill to the ger district and we reconvene at 2:30. Our class at 2:30 is either a Mongolian cultural lesson or TEFL training from the Peace Corps. This session usually ends around 5:30 and I get another walk up the hill. Mongolia keeps me fit!
Once I am home I spend my time studying more Mongolian or just chatting (attempting to anyway) with my host family. They are great and mime lots of words and help me with my pronunciation. Dinner is usually served around 8. Mongolian food consists of a lot of dairy products, meat and pasta or potatoes. Milk tea is very popular. It is just that....tea brewed with milk instead of water. They must add salt because it is VERY salty but I have come to enjoy it!
So that is a brief look in to the daily life of me. I very much enjoy having a routine and am finding that I am flourishing here. These two years might go by faster than I think!
I hope you are all flourishing where you are!
-C
It's kind of surprising to me how similar your PST daily routine is to what mine was! Good luck with the language and hang in there through the roller coaster moments. Enjoy every moment! It goes by SUPER fast! Miss you! :-)
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