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