Bottom line is: Cows are pussies.

Okay, I'm a bad blogger. Sorry. I have been getting complaints so here is a new update for all my adoring fans {does that make me sound like a douche?} whatever. It has been typed and so there it remains. It has been nearly one month since I last posted and it is now April. Wait really? it's april? for real? I really can't believe that I have been here for over month. Wild. I can't believe that I can actually speak to people in Mongolian, even if I can just barely speak the language. It has been an interesting adventure so far. It has had it's ups and it's downs but overall it's been a blast. The highlight, so far, was the time I got to spend in northern Mongolia living with a nomadic family. I spent about 9ish days sharing their ger, eating meat [oh my god so much meat], drinking milk tea [surprisingly delicious, John Murphy would love this stuff], and kickin' it with the nomads. My family consisted of my father Damie, 35, my mother Zaya, 36, my little sister Anu, 4, and my brother knaack, 20. In addition to them there were several families living nearby that I hung out with on a regular basis. My first night with them was awkward to say the least. I was nervous, they were nervous {they had never hosted an american student before} and we pretty much just sat in silence staring at each other for the first 20 or so minutes of my stay. Then, my father pulled out his semi automatic rifle from underneath the bed and began to clean it across the room from me. Oh shit. I thought to myself. This is going to be interesting. However, the ice broke when I helped my family make meat dumplings a little later. They all laughed at my ineptitude and from here on out everything was smooth sailing. Man, I gotta say the Nomads have a nice lifestyle. Get up in the morning around nine, tend the cows, then hang out, ride your horse around, eat, take a nap, read, hang out with the neighbors, etc. It's a good time, although tending the cows in the morning did mean that I spent about two hours everyday loading shit into an ox cart to dump onto the poop pile down the way. Not really all that gross, but man shit can be really heavy when you have a whole lot of it in one place. During the day I would hang out with my little sister, explore the wilderness area behind our ger, drink tea, and on occasion party with the nomads.
Yes, I got to go to a few nomad parties. On my second day Damie took me to the ger next door and introduced me to some of his friends and neighbors. They were all hanging out, feasting on buuz, talking, exchanging snuff, and yes, drinking vodka. So I ate buuz, took snuff with some herder fellas {weird stuff, they called it a mongol cigarette}, and learned how to drink vodka the mongolian way. Basically, you have a vodka pourer, and they are in charge of giving out shots. The first one of which gets sacrificed to Chiingis Khan, duh. Anyways, only except vodka with your right arm, left hand supporting the elbow, then with your ring finger touch a drop to your forehead and flick another drop into the air. Damie also told me that vodka is good, but getting really really drunk is rather shameful. After this advice I was handed over to Ganhuu, a very cool older guy with long hair who spoke a little english, his wife and another women for a vodka/buuz tour of the neighborhood. We drove around in a jeep, drank, and at somepoint I got kissed by an old man {that part was a little weird}. Eventually, I came home and watched the mongolian version of American Idol on a little black and white solar powered satelite tv in my ger.
Man I have lots of stories from this couple of weeks it will be nearly impossible for me to post them all. So I will go a quick bullet point summary and move onward.
-Made origami for my sister alot, we kicked it and I tickled her when she tried to tickle me
-got to ride a horse around mongolia, awesome.
- snuck into a mongolian elk type animal re-inroduction area with my host dad to see the bigass deer. awesome
-went to a mongol birthday part, drank vodka
-learned a mongolian card game- not easy since I couldn't understand the directions I was being given
-met lots of random herders
-ate part of a sheeps head
-ate a rediculous amount of meat
-saw a cow fight {crazy awesome}
- made secret friends with two cows, danielle the spotted lady cow, and a huge fat bull who will be delicious someday that I named biggiesmallswilliamhowardtaft {I named them in secret}
-Saw yaks
-hiked around in the mountains
-watched silly mongolian television
-met a really sketchy herder who told me was michael jordan, then osama bin laden, then he asked me if I thought my host mother had nice breasts. I did not answer this question.
Okay, That's the short version of the countryside.

The city has been interesting as well,
bullet points
-got punched by a drunk women at the black market after I caught her friend trying to pick pocket me. Found a booth selling eagles heads, bought a cheap sweat shirt.
-went to the circus, very silly/entertaining, many mongolians were eating meat.
-learned that mongolians clap in unison at performances.
-uh, class lots of class. Depressing lectures about politics and environmental issues.
-Watched lots of universe best songs with my host family.

okay i'm bored and I have to pack for my second nomadic homestay in bayankhongor province,

bye

To the Trembling You...

So, here I am. In mongolia, living in UB with a mongolian family. I have only been here for a little over a week and yet it feels like it has been much much longer. UB is a crazy place. There is no city like it in the US for sure. Everything in town basically runs off of peace avenue, the main drag in town and home of crazy crazy crazy traffic that never stops. I have to correct my last blog. Yes people drive on the right side of the road but not only do they use right side steering cars but also left. It is a veritable smorgasbord of russian, american, european, japanese, and whatever else kind of vehicles you can think of. The center of town is home to sukhbhaatar square and the parliament building which has a giant statue of Chiingis khan. It is badass, and apparently it stops the Mongolians from throwing food at the building that houses their corrupt government. It is surrounded by several museums, a pink opera house, and a big korean skyscraper that is incomplete that everyone calls the chopper because of its weird shape. The city is full of soviet era apartment buildings, night clubs, stray dogs, street kids selling gum, and all sorts of antique shops with badass mongolian stuff in them.

The references to american culture here crack me up. For example, I discovered a Kenny Rogers themed steak house downtown yesterday. Also, there are funny little english expressions and contradictions here and there that always prove entertaining, like the Gran Khan Irish Pub with it's celine dion cover band-actually there are quite a few mongolian irish pubs- or classic examples of engrish like the journal I found at the stationary store entitled, to the trembling you. Another one said, ugly women are nice, beautiful women are mean on it. Hilarious.

In addition, I have seen several cars towing broken cars via fraying old rope, a roadside used chainsaw salesperson, horse drawn carts carrying mounds of coal, and many other crazy things. Don't step on the manholes you might fall in. or upset one a street person living in the sewers.

Coal is the main fuel for the large ger districts that surround the town. The ger districts are basically the hood of mongolia, not someplace that you want to wander into late at night, or really anytime for that matter. However, aside from the ger districts and the many many talented pickpockets, mongolia is not a particularly dangerous place. Even though there is a solid chance I will get punched by some drunk guy while I am here. It seems like it happens to someone almost every semester. Especially if you are talking/flirting with any of the cute mongolian girls around here. The men don't take kindly to that, and if they are wasted and see you chatting with the ladies they will probably sock you in the face.

The kids in Mongolia are extremely cute. The little ones are so bundled up that they can barely move, and I saw one kid in a department store who kept hiding from me behind clothes mirrors etc. until eventually he grabbed a coat hanger and started pretend shooting me with it. I pretend died a little bit to entertain the little bugger.

School is good. My classmates are all very cool, most of them are highly experienced world travelers and many of them have been abroad for several months to a full semester already. Woah, I feel inexperienced. Every day we have our mongolian language intensive, and boy is it intense. This is not an easy language to learn. The pronunciation is extremely difficult and there are about four vowels that all sound exactly the same to me. Still I am learning enough to get by speaking to my aav and my eej, my duu and my egch. My duu -brother- speaks fluent english which is nice. He is a wrestler, and loves american pop music. I.E. beyonce, lady gaga, michael jackson, alicia keys etc. I am trying to turn him on to better american music via youtube. In general people here love american pop music and hip hop. Traditional mongolian stuff -which sounds awesome awesome awesome- is not considered cool. So I guess loving shitty pop music is a universal thing. Shame.
Anyways, my host family is great. My mom -eej- is a maternity doc. and my aav-dad- is an electrical engineer. They are very nice loving people who seem to be bent on feeding me to death. Seriously, i'm either going to pop or weigh 300 pounds when I get back to the states. My aav constantly is telling me -eat eat eat- eat buuz etc. He is a badass dude, a wolf hunter who drinks the wolf blood for health. My brother tells me that wolfs blood protects against the h1n1 virus.
good to know. too bad I spent all that money on a vaccine before I left.
We all live together in a small apartment building in a quite neighborhood by school. I get to walk to class while everyone else has to bus it or take a taxi. However, I am unfortunately far from stuff to do in town.
And what is there to do in town? Go dancing, eat buuz, go drink chiingis beer. I went out with some of my friends and their host siblings mongolian pals. There were cool. It was really fun hanging out with mongolians my own age. One of them is a mongolian rapper and he performed a song for us at the havana club. It was about how mongolians don't use drugs, guns, and such like, well in his words, niggers. Which leads me to my next thought, mongolians fucking hate the chinese. Hate em hate em hate em and everything from them except for the cheap clothes, food, and well that's it. They even hate bruce lee because he is a chinese guy. But they like jackie chan? I dunno. It is interesting to see the lack of political correctness in other countries and the outright acceptance of disliking other groups of human beings. Whatever, I guess alot of american hate the french? amongst others. Comparing mongolian with america is always interesting in either case. Oh, imporant note. The cavs are an extremely popular basketball team in mongolia. People love lebron james here and I am winning alot of points for being a cavs fan/from ohio.

Gosh, there is so much more I could say. So far it has been a challenging, hilarious, exciting, eye opening, experience, and it's only going to get more exciting as the semester progresses. On tuesday I get my deel -mongolian national costume/robe thing- and then I am off to the countryside for 8ish days to live with a nomadic family, ride horses, avoid ferocious dogs, not get lost in the wilderness, drink fermented mares milk, try to speak mongolian -my family speaks no, i repeat no english- and learn about mongolian customs like not putting your hat on the ground to protect your masculine spiritual energy.

oh and the black market is cool -more on that later-

alright enough for now.
see you when I get back from the countryside.

signing off,

sam

Could I possibly be any less in ohio?

So I have arrived. Finally after all the months of planning, working, filling out forms etc. etc. I have arrived in Mongolia. It is an interesting place. The landscape is like nothing I have ever seen really. There are almost no trees in this part of the country. Even as we descended into the Genghis Khan international airport way above the ground I could only see a smattering of wooded areas. Nonetheless the countryside is beautiful. Rolling hills, frozen and covered in snow as far as the eye can see with endlessly blue skies stretching constantly overhead. Watching the sun set over the steppe from my airplane window was quite a sight. Everything was bathed in blue and pink and orange. It was really something. I have already made two friends since I have been in the country. The first was my seat mate on the airplane. As the plane boarded I had really hoped that I would be sitting alone so I could move over to the window seat and check out the land as we flew in. No such luck. I was soon partnered with a middle aged Mongolian man who at first didn't talk much. In fact we didn't exchange any word until our airplane dinner was brought to us. As I got ready to tuck into my spicy pork my seat mate raised his tiny complimentary glass of wine to me and toasted me before the meal began. I have never been toasted by a stranger on an airplane before and the gesture took me by surprise. After that point we engaged in some sparse conversation. I told him I was a student studying abroad, etc. And I learned that he works as an engineer on the trans Siberian railroad. Somewhere during the conversation he must have taken a liking to me, or at least taken pity on me and my obvious outofplaceness. In either case I was very fortunate to have met him. After we deplaned he guided me through every step of entry process, and translated for me when I discovered that Korean Air left my bag in Korea. If it weren't for him It would have been difficult at best to figure out how to get my luggage back. Fortunately my bag is due to arrive tomorrow. He even offered me a ride to the hostel and waited for me until my ride did show up. In the end he even gave me his card and asked me to call him if I am ever in need of help while I am in Mongolia

The ride into Ulaanbaatar was even more interesting than the plane ride. Traffic laws here are loose, if even existent at all. There doesn't really seem to be a speed limit and there is alot of passing at strange times, honking, and general mayhem. The steering wheel on the cars here is on the right side. Yet, everyone still drives on the right side of the road. Confusing. We drove through several White and Gold arches, passed some smoky nasty coal plants, and drove past many night clubs, resteraunts, and shops with funny names. There was a diner called "Texas", El Latino, and my personal favorite, a hair and beauty parlor named "Destroy." When I got to my hostel it was arodn nine o'clock and I more or less immediately passed out in my comfy bed. It felt good to fall asleep lying down.

I am the only person staying at Zaya's Hostel right now. I pretty much have the place all to myself and I have spent the day reading, cautiously exploring the city, and talking to Zaya. Actually, most of my day has been spent chatting with my host. We had a three hour conversation over breakfast this morning about everything. I am only exaggerating a little bit. We discussed politics (american and mongolian), culture, spirtuality, Mongolia, ohio, nature, writing, and even buisness. Zaya has many journalists, researchers, scientists, and students coming through her place and she took some time to give me advice on making money as a writer. We were basically strangers a few hours ago and yet we had one of the most intense, in depth, philosophical discussions that I have had in a good long time. In the process I also learned quite a bit about the country I am staying in. Most everyone here throat sings, there are many pickpockets, and the spring time is very dusty.

Okay, I'm tired of blogging. More to come later on.

Bye.

gotta have seoul

Hello from Seoul!
I arrived in Korea at around 6:00 in the am today after a long twelve hour flight from LA. So far the trip has been uneventful, although I did help some guy whose dog was trying to run away in LAX. The flight was good. Korean Air is way better than delta. I was overwhelmed with the all of the juice, snacks, relaxing towels, free headphones, and the personal tv/movie player. I watched kungfu cyborg. It was sweet. Anywhoo, there isn't much more to relay except that I need a shower and my butt is tired from all of the sitting. I will arrive in Ulaanbaatar soon and I am very excited to get there.
K, I'll update again when I actually have something interesting to relate.

And here we go. finally.

Oh boy, my semester/adventure abroad is finally here. Well almost anyways. I don't fly out until Thursday morning. In either case, I am excited and ready to go. Living in Columbus has been fun but I'm ready to get on with things and begin my travels. My stuff is almost packed, I've got my documents and stuff, essentially, I am ready to go minus a few odds and ends. My life is going to get really interesting really soon, but at the moment it's pretty boring and uneventful. More to come when I get to UB.

byes.