Trip to the big city -- Yee haw

To fly from my site to the capital, it takes two hours by plane and about $200. By car, it takes an estimated 30 hours. So unlike other M-16 volunteers, most of whom live less than 5 hours away, my sitemates and I rarely make it to the big city. We have to make due with hearing about everyone else’s visits or thinking up medical reasons why PC should fly us in. Two of my sitemates, however, are on the volunteer council. Three times a year PC flies them in for meetings. A third volunteer did actually have a legitimate medical concern that warranted not only a trip to UB, but also the coveted Thailand trip. (If you have medical problems that PC Mongolia’s medical officers can’t handle, the regional clinic is in Thailand.) So after nearly three months stuck at site, my friend David and I were started to feel a little trapped. Especially since so many fellow volunteers had already made numerous trips into the capital and to Darkhan, despite a three-month restriction on vacation days for new volunteers.

This just happened to be the complaint of the week, when what to my wandering ears should I hear that my school was sending some teachers to UB. And one of my English teachers was making the journey. Luckily I had the perfect excuse to go with them. Just a month earlier a group of returned PC volunteers from Mongolia, called Friends of Mongolia, had sent boxes of books for volunteers to pick up and take to their schools. The idea was well accepted. But then the big question was whether I would be warm enough.

“It’s a very difficult trip, Jenny.”
“Do you have warm clothes?”
“Can you eat our food?”
“Can you be in UB by yourself?”

So began a process of preparing me for this 30-hour van ride. My del (traditional Mongolian robe-like outfit), which I had been waiting for for 2 months, was finally completed. My counterpart took me to buy some fancy Mongolian boots (which turned out to be the worst purchase I’ve made yet in Mongolia). I was told to buy my own food, since I told them I wouldn’t eat their meat. So I filled a bag with Snickers, cookies, crackers, and juice.
Everyone was making such a big deal of it, I started to get worried. But besides the length of the drive, it turned out to be a nice little trip.

A summary of the two-day travels:- 10 people total; 2 in front, 8 in the 6 seats in back (of course, I had the crack)
- Time was passed with Mongolian card game, hours of them singing Mongolian traditional songs, 2 minutes of me singing an English song, lots of sleeping.
- Despite the fact that the car was full of women, pee breaks were rare. Unlike American women, Mongolian women never pee. It’s amazing. When we did pee, it was squatting on the side of the road.
- The view would have been amazing, except the windows were frozen over for most of the trip.
- For dinner, we stopped at people’s homes along the road and ate. I ate cookies and bowls of rice.
- At one point, we stopped to have cookies and vodka with a trucker driving the opposite direction. Turns out, he was from our town and they both had known to look for the other. (2 quick explanations: The whole drive was mostly on a one-lane dirt road, and during the whole 30-hour excursion we may have passed 10 or 15 other cars. So spotting another traveler you may know was not difficult. Vodka is Mongolia’s national drink. They drink it for all celebrations or meetings or at anytime when they want to show some sort of respect or gratitude.)
- At night, we stopped at a small restaurant and 10 of us slept on a long, wooden bed.

My stay in UB was excellent. A nice change of pace. I stayed at another volunteer’s apartment. No fire building. Fresh coffee every morning. In one week I took more showers than I had in 3 months at my site. And the restaurants ... so good. I also had a chance to talk with quite a few other volunteers.

My work, with my counterpart, went well according to them. We watched classes taught at the university that is affiliated with our school. We got copies of their class curriculums. We bought some grammar books for our students. These three small accomplishments ended up being more productive than anyone else. Apparently, like me, most of the other teachers saw the trip as a vacation. So when we piled back into the car and crammed it with tons of junk bought in UB, very little of it was work related.

Interesting cultural difference of the week:
“Interesting” seems to be equivalent to frustrating. For this trip, it’s the difference in planning that was difficult for me to adjust to. What is the difference? Americans plan. Mongolians don’t. Or, as my counterpart explained, they may have plans but they don’t talk about them. It’s bad luck. So when PC asked that I give a complete rundown of my trip prior to leaving, I had nothing to give. I could only say when I thought we would leave, when I thought we might arrive, and how long I thought we might be staying. Throughout the whole trip, I ran into this same situation. Despite the fact that I had very few plans of my own, I couldn’t shake the habit of plotting my day out in my mind. So each day I would think about what I might do after work. But, inevitably, I would find my tentative plans impossible. And usually not for any productive or important reason. Usually, the lack of planning was the reason my plans didn’t pan out. Most of my trip was spent wandering around the city trying to decide what to do or trying to find where we were.