Conquering the World: 'twas the season

Terribly sorry about the lateness of this. I kept putting it off because I figured that since I have a key to the magical room with the magical internet, I wasn’t really in a rush to type it up and post it. But then the social worker at the school asked to borrow my key, handed it off to someone else, I didn’t catch the name she said, and I’d feel like an idiot to ask again. Especially since the more important mission at this point is to hunt down my missing phone charger. I sincerely hope all of you are appreciative of your internet. Le sigh. Anyway, this was supposed to be two separate posts but since it’s so late, it turned into one giant one. Don’t worry, there are pictures towards the end to break up the monotony of words.

PART I: CHRISTMAS

For Christmas, all of us Bulgan and Orkhon residents (plus one Selenge-er) went into Erdenet. I took a grand total of zero pictures, so sorry I can’t help you out at all with visualizations. Suffice it to say we ate, drank, and were merry. But clearly that won’t suffice, after all dear reader(s)- you came to me and therefore have willingly submitted yourself to my holiday ramblings. My first order of business after arriving in Erdenet on the 24^th was to make my annoying presence known at a fellow PCV’s apartment where, you’ll never believe this: he has a MACHINE that DOES LAUNDRY. It’s quite a concept, really. First you put in water, then your clothes, then it swishes and stuff (technical terms), then your clothes are CLEAN. But the best part – just you wait – is that there’s an attached spin dryer. Why is this the best part? You try wringing your jeans dry by hand, and then we’ll talk. Washing all of my clothes took maybe an hour whereas when I did the same thing over fall break and it took 3-4 days. Christmas magic right there. Afterwards, we ladies went out to the ger district to have us some gossip, mulled wine, cheese and crackers (!!!), and a clothing exchange.

After this is when the real festivities began. All 12 of us went to a Korean restaurant for dinner where I proceeded to enjoy fantastically spicy food, the likes of which has been sorely missed in my diet. Our next stop was karaoke where we opened with Christmas songs, ended with a rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that Freddie Mercury would be jealous of, and sang a bunch of other songs in between. The evening ended with a sleepover where a bunch of us camped out in the living room of one of the apartments.

The next morning opened with a bunch of spectacular food including cinnamon rolls, coffee cake, scrambled eggs with cheese and vegetables, and bacon. There was a lot more, I just don’t remember. Next we each opened our stockings courtesy of another Volunteer’s mother, and on the off chance she reads this – thank you so much, they were wonderful! J We then moved on to our gift exchange which had two rounds: the first had silly gifts and the second real gifts. The first round gave me a face massager with the best Engrish packaging ever like “Please use it carefully if you are the skin hypersusceptibility or comedo patient and so on.” The packaging is the real gift there. In the real gift round, I got a nice, new warm hat from India (which I promptly forgot there) but I put up a good fight for the cheese (have you noticed a pattern yet?). Hopefully I’ll fetch the hat this weekend when I head back into the city to buy meat/innards for cat food. I feel like I’m forgetting something, but that’s the general gist of a pretty great first Christmas abroad. Side note: I am currently massaging my face. It’s a thing of wonder.

If you want to see pictures, I direct you to Katie here

PART II: NEW YEAR / ШИНЭ ЖИЛ / SHIN JIL

The FL decoration. Yes, I know the Spanish doesn’t actually say Happy New Year and that a ‘P’ is missing.

Oh yes, it keeps going. Don’t worry, I actually took pictures of this part. I’ll kill the suspense right now and tell you that I did nothing on the actual day other than read an entire book and watch fireworks for maybe 2 minutes with Koshka (she basically just gets called “Cat” in various languages, sorry kitty). But we’re not going to talk about that day because that will set me off on a tangent that I don’t want to go on. Instead we’ll talk about the school’s Shin Jil party which took place a few days before.

The day began with a wardrobe crisis because the original plan of all wearing new matching outfits (not a joke) fell through because the tailor either couldn’t finish in time or needed more information about styles for the jackets, I’m not sure. Luckily I wasn’t the only one having an “oh crap, what do I do now?” moment. The party supposedly started at 6, my CP told me probably 7, but things really didn’t get going until 9. Why? Because we had to make the food and set up the tables of course!

Once things finally got started, we kicked off the event with a speech by the director and vodka shots. Then we were able to really dig into the food, juice, wine, and candy. This was great because I hadn’t eaten since around 11 and the food was taunting me. Eventually people started dancing which always goes over well with me. When I had first walked into the room, an older man came over to introduce himself. He was really excited to meet me and it was cute, so of course I said I’d dance the first dance with him. But then one dance turned into every dance and all of the teachers were teasing me about my new boyfriend. He talked to me in Russian and told me repeatedly that I was his daughter, once he even dragged over the Russian teacher to tell me the same thing. He really was cute and I liked talking to him, but once he started interrupting other dances to ask me to dance, the Mongolian women took matters into their own hands and told him to grace other people with his dancing. I’m making that last part up, I don’t actually know what they told him, I just know that everyone was very nice and smiled at me for dancing with him and took him away. Don’t worry though, I’m sure I’ve found true love with my new 78 year old boyfriend. Actually, it’s more likely he’s forgotten me already. How tragic.

Other events of the evening included more drinking, more dancing, some singing by our boy band (no joke, the young male teachers are apparently in a band), a champagne bottle that wouldn’t open, CAKE, the director dancing like a cross between Frankenstein’s monster and a dinosaur, sparklers, and some games. I got dragged into one where the women had to direct blindfolded men to put a pen in a wine bottle. I tried to convince the man’s wife to play instead but she was unfortunately adamant that me and my pathetic language abilities play. Never did really learn that unit on directions. Eventually they all took pity on me and helped me out giving directions. I spent most of my time dancing with one of two men – either my new slightly senile boyfriend or the 22 year old who everyone is determined to marry me off to. What can I say, I’m a hit with Mongolian men of all ages. And now for your viewing pleasure, I leave you with pictures of the aforementioned activities.