Ulaanbaatar can be cold.  Sure, I have spent the last 15 years in Alaska so you might think that I am accustomed to cold weather.  But I was in coastal Alaska. Here the weather is more like Fairbanks. Summer can be quite warm.  But now?  We’re hitting into the 40s. 

Minus forties.

When we ask our regular driver what the temperature is he doesn’t even bother using the word “minus.”  It is kind of funny but it could be that this place practically spends more time in subzero temperatures than in the positive digits.  It is a matter of efficiency of speech to just skip the word.  Like you might skip saying the PM after the time in the afternoon or evening. 

In the morning our driver pulls up just fifteen feet from our apartment building entrance.  If he is not there we wait inside and marvel at the buildup of frost around the metal entry door.  The car is never warm but it is not cold like outside.  He drops us off a few hundred feet from the warmth of the school and sometimes we have to quickly shuffle to the doors.  We tend not to wear our winter hats over our perfectly groomed heads until after work.  If he can not pick us up it will be a colder commute home. 

Last week we were waiting at a corner trying to get a ride and noticed a frozen puppy in the icy snow.  Sad.  I wonder if the euphoria that some mountaineers and explorers have described happening during extreme hypothermia occurs to the little critters that can’t possibly survive the bitter winters here. 

I will have pulled on Patagonia winter long underwear under my pants before leaving the school.  I wear a hooded sweatshirt under a thick winter coat.  A knit hat, eight foot long scarf wrapped around my neck twice, and fleece lined wool mittens keep me fairly warm.  For the first few minutes.  Because I wear glasses I can not wear the scarf over my nose or the lenses fog up.  Fog quickly turns to ice.  So my face is usually cold.  My hat could probably be warmer but when it is windy I wear the hood of my jacket up. 

Fur is in here.  I regret not investing in some sea otter mittens or a hat.  They would blend in with things the locals buy.  I swear some women wear seal skin coats. 

Only a very hardy people could call this home for the last thousand years.  My hat goes off to these tough Mongolians.

I took a few pictures that show frost built up on the inside of our apartment building entrance.  The wind blows in here fairly strong.

Yeah… we were on a vacation to some nice warm places.  And now we are back to temperatures well below freezing.  So I have been seeking the silver lining.

1 – No biting insects.  No mosquitoes.  No flies landing on my ankles or to shoo off my food.  This really is a blessing.  You know those starving children they show on TV with the flies crawling over their faces?  I feel worse about the flies than the hunger.  Maybe because I have never been truly hungry.  But I have spent enough time stomping my feet while trying to eat my dinner to keep the flies off me.  And the bug bites we all had were so bad that Jordan actually carried cortizone around almost as much as his book.  Here the bugs have all been frozen solid.

2 – Speaking of frozen solid… the sidewalks here are collecting all sorts of vile substances.  People spit.  Not a light spattering of saliva though.  No they usually are a lung-butter projectile.  They spit in Thailand too.  And they get more rain and the occasional flood to rinse it away… but until then I had to slap my flip flops across their glossy sidewalks.  Here my thick boots skate across the frozen spit, phlegm, vomit, urine, animal waste, bird dropings and restaurant hose-down overflow with no risk of flip-flopping the waste onto my calves and ankles.

3 – Which reminds me of two words.  Ankle support.  We went to this really cool cascading waterfall hot spring and I bumped my ankle on a root because I had poor footwear for scrambling the 20 feet from the paved path to the warm water.  You know… maybe this one doesn’t quite stack up to the other reasons to be greatful.

4 – Pepper gave me a good one… with the colder weather I have to bundle up.  Outside you can barely see any of my skin.  Even at work I have to wear a sweatshirt and track pants.  It isn’t until I am home that I can walk around with just a T-shirt and boxer-briefs on while I do the dishes.  Which is what I was doing when I told her about my list of reasons to be glad that it is cold out.  Unlike on our trip when I wore my Speedo a few times – even getting a few laughs from the Thai people running our boat.  So now I can bundle up so that nobody has to… hey… that wasn’t a very nice suggestion Pepper!

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Jordan and I got haircuts today.  Mine cost 18,000 tugrik and I tipped 5,000. We usually don’t tip but I had to.  For under $14 I had my hair washed then a head, neck and shoulder massage.  Then a hair oil treatment with heat (the picture) and they served me coffee while I waited.  Then another hair wash and the most thorough haircut I have ever had.  He then trimmed my beard and clippered my face and neck.  Wrapped it all up with another hair washing, drying, and then hair wax and styling.  Wow.  I want to get a haircut every weekend.

The downtown Ulaanbaatar streets have ample advertisements of a vintage Coke motif featuring Santa.  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

1. We have a small bathroom.  I literally can rest my forehead on our clothes washer while on the toilet.  You have to move the shower curtain to be comfortable in front of the bathroom mirror.  The bathroom storage is all on shelves above the toilet – exposed bulk boxes of tampons, gallon bags of medication, nail trimmers, TP and spare towels.  It fell over twice in the middle of the night.  It is now securely zip-tied to exposed pipes.  The bathroom we had wasn’t huge – but two people could brush their teeth at the same time!

2. Clothes dryers.  We dry our clothes by draping them on a wire rack that is in our bedroom.  Dryers really help clothing shrink – sometimes that’s bad – but I don’t like my t-shirt collars to be stretched out or my boxer-briefs to be so baggy.  

3.  Seafood?  Really?  I miss seafood?  I do.  I had fish once here.  It was on a pizza.  It was really horrible.  I’m pretty sure it was a prank someone was pulling on me.  Some pizza shop here thinks that pizza means “dump crap on dough and bake.”  I’d like a piece of smoked salmon.  Or some halibut beer bits.  Even a few fresh shrimp!

4.  Courteous and decent drivers.  Drivers here are bad.  Not all are – but at least one person is.  And that one awful driver is always making traffic jams… They clog streets and intersections.  It is indescribable.  Yesterday it was almost an hour and a half to get the three miles home.  The bus we were on moved a few inches at a time.  I’m not kidding.  A few inches.  Stop.  A few inches.  Stop… Repeat.

5.  The hardware store.  I like to make stuff!  And I have no materials to work with and no tools.  Pepper tried to get me to bring some.  I should have.  We’ve started collecting materials and a few tools so there is hope.  I need to learn to knit.  Perhaps it isn’t so much the hardware store that I miss as much as the making of things.  After all, we just built my dream workshop and now it just sits there as a storage building.

6.  Friends.  We have a few here but because we work with them too we already see them regularly.  I’m talking about the friends we have that we used to see often and now feel so distant.  We miss you.

7.  Serene safety.  We know more than one person that has been randomly assaulted.  Sometimes when walking on the sidewalk past a group of young men or while riding the public bus I clench my fists partially in preparation and partially out of fear.  It sounds like it it is just a matter of time before one of us is attacked.  Sure it’s possible that it won’t ever happen.  But if we lived in Detroit or NYC we would have the same self-preservation instincts.  But after a long time in a small town I was able to just flex those instincts when I was away from home and able to return to my perceived safety.  Sure violence happened sometimes.  But it never seemed like a random attack!

8.  Burgers.  Sure there are burgers here – but often they are mutton burgers.  Or mutton and beef burgers trying to pass off as a burger.  I’m not kidding!

9.  Our double basin kitchen sink.  We have a decent enough kitchen.  But the sink isn’t much bigger than the bathroom sink.  You can’t let dishes from one meal pile up or else you can’t use the faucet to fill a cup.  

10.  Cats.  I have had at least one cat for almost 20 years straight.  I miss having animals around.

You know what confuses me? When I look at a calendar that has Mondays in the first column instead of Sundays. I’m just so used to having Sunday there and Saturday on the other side so the weekdays are sandwiched right between two cozy weekend days.

But I just realized I shouldn’t like it. What is the first day of the week? Yes, Monday. What are Saturday and Sunday? Yes, the weekEND. They should end the week not be the week start and end.

This weekend is our last before our winter break!

I really enjoy reading about other teachers that are working in international settings. But it isn’t easy to find them so I thought I would collect some here. It is noteworthy that these people don’t tend to write much about the schools – they write about life.

First there is mine. I’m a new physical education teacher in Mongolia. Of course, there is my wife’s blog too.

Although not technically international, my good friend Mike is teaching in Togiak, Alaska. He has similar circumstances with language barriers, isolation, being a minority, and many of the other pros and cons of international teaching.

Lisa Phu is an acquaintance from Alaska. She was working in the nearby town of Wrangell (although not teaching) and then was in Africa (teaching) and now is teaching in Bhutan. She’s a great writer and fun to follow.

My friend Liz also works in Mongolia. She’s Australian and has a second grade class at the school I work at.

A former teacher at my school also kept up a blog. She had a third grade class. It looks like she hasn’t updated in quite a while though.

Dan and Jillian have done a stint in the Peace Corps and now are teaching in Oman. Dan is currently very awesome because he has a great beard.

I know there are lots more out there so if you have a blog or read one post it in the comments and I’ll update my post to include them.

One of the hidden tasks I feel is embedded in the lessons I have to teach for health and physical education is that of self-esteem. For older students it will be blatant. But in the formative teen years I would like for theses kids to develop a good sense of self.

I remember sitting in my health class in the spring of 1992 and filling out a work book about self-esteem. One of the things in there was to list 50 life goals. The booklet is still around somewhere. I get a real kick out of looking at the list that I wrote as a high school senior. Some I have completed. Other goals were disregarded soon afterward. Some have come back onto the horizon. Some were huge dreams. And many attainable.

Learn to use a chainsaw. Check.

Move to Idaho. Never mind.

Visit Alaska. Check.

Marry (check, wait – un-check) and have two kids (never mind, wait – then again…)

Visit every continent. (North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe… getting there!)

You can see that they may be quirky or serious. So I assigned many of my classes to list 10 life goals. I didn’t grade them other than if they listed 10 and took the project at least half seriously.

Reading through well over a hundred individual’s goals was interesting. Most focused on college, income, cars, sports, lose or gain a few kilograms or centimeters and other largely tangible and measurable goals. Do you have a Ferrari? Yes or no. Goal accomplished or not completed. Simple.

And then I read the goals of a somewhat troubled student. Their grades are pretty poor. Their behavior is pretty marginal. And their first goal was “To make my parents proud.”

Wow. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything like that on my list. Their whole list was more esoteric and introspective than others. This kid is aware that they have shortcomings and when given the opportunity to vocalize what they would like to see in their future the first thought is to the pride they want their parents to feel.

I’ll be honest, there are plenty of times that teaching can be very discouraging. But hearing a kid like that express their inner feelings openly like that is incredibly encouraging. I’m going to give them every opportunity I can to help them make their parents proud.

Being a Physical Education teacher with no budget after 12 years as a recreation planner with a considerable budget I have managed two different fitness rooms. One was for an entire community and had a range of commercial exercise equipment. The school’s fitness room is more limited but still well equipped. We have a range from free weights like dumb bells and bar bells to cardio equipment like spinning bikes and treadmills. The treadmills are not commercial quality but they see a lot less use than the equipment in Petersburg.

But when you don’t have a gym to use that is loaded with equipment like Universals and walls covered in mirrors you still have lots of options for exercise. Some exercise tubing is a great substitute for free weights. I know. I bought some last year and got a little use of them at home. Checking out an exercise band with a door attachment or a strap with a plastic ball on it so that it won’t slip out from between the door and wall will give a huge range of options. One great thing is that you can throw those exercise bands in a suitcase and use them when you travel. Try doing that with a couple of pairs of dumb bells!