(Clearing out pictures from my phone.)  This shows the red cedar that I used for part of the siding on the front of the shed.  I figured out that the boards were originally from Northern Lights restaurant.  They were the wainscotting in the dining area and we salvaged them from the burn pile at the dump.  The vertical board shows how they were in the restaurant.  I simply flipped them over and put 1x boards over the seams because they were all less than 4 feet long.  Using these cleared out a substantial pile of stuff that had been in the carport for months.

Today was the first day of work. We met a number of new and veteran teachers during the day. In Petersburg there were some people I saw weekly for over a decade and I still had a hard time remembering their names… So I’m making a huge effort to get names right and remember them. So far, so okay.

We got word tonight that we can move into our apartment tomorrow. So Pepper was prancing around our temporary digs putting the few things wqe pulled out of bags back in place. We understand we’re on the 6th floor… and suddenly I’m glad that I wasn’t up to exercising tonight.

Our second day in town we hiked up Ziasan monument which is right next to the school. It is a Russian built monument to unknown heroes in a number of wars and is actually a fairly nice looking concrete monolith with a suspended halo illustrated with mosaic. we have watched the sun’s first rays hit it in the morning and the crowds of people taking photos of the sunset every evening. I may miss this view.

We also hiked into Bogd Khan national park, a fifteen minute walk from the school campus. The park was created in 1783 – the oldest national park in the world! (Almost 100 years before the first national park in the United States!) I ate red raspberries, saw lots of strawberry plants, and wished rose hips actually tasted good. It was quite forested and was a nice break from the hot sun we experienced all week.

My fifteen years in southeast Alaska helped me generate a list of things I missed from New York. Roadside fruit and vegetable stands, thunder and lightning, the smell of leaves in the fall, and dirt. I’m sure I’ll have a list of things I’ll miss – in fact I’m working on a list of ten for an upcoming blog post. So it has been nice to hear some thunder this week. I hope the spring has some powerful storms.

Pepper will have a 5th grade class and today she found out she’ll have one of Mongolia’s President’s kids in her class. That’s part of the attraction to this genus of teaching. I told a few people that thought it was so cool that I was going to a developing country to teach. This isn’t the Peace Corps. I’m not here on a mission to make the world a better place by helping those less fortunate. The more blunt assessment would be that I’m here to help westernize the next generation of Mongolians. The Mongolians that have found wealth since the release of communism at least.

There were rumors of a McDonald’s and Starbucks popping up here. I’ll be honest, I’m proud to be living and working in a country without American fast-food chain stores and homogenized coffee shops. I have lived without that “luxury” for 12 years and prefer to only experience it when I travel. So I’m here to help westernize the country a little bit.

All around the campus there are cranes. Not sandhill cranes. Cranes that occasionally spin and pass loads of brick, re-bar, boards and other building materials from the earth to workers a few stories in the air where they busily (and hopefully to some sort of seismic standards) build high end housing units. I think that from the school I could spot almost a dozen such sites. It is amazing to be in a place where the optimism can be seen by the construction projects even if it includes the investment planners schmoozing in the pubs. We’ve sometimes had a hart time sleeping because of the pulsating sound of rock being broken on the hillside above the school.

School enrollment is up. The school owners are planning constructing a new building to keep up with the demand. This is so refreshing to hear coming from a school district that seems to have only talked about attrition and declining enrollment. Sure, I wish I could have the basketballs that they throw away as too ratty in Petersburg at this moment. Complaints about the dead spots in the floor of the community gym would be silenced after one game on the court here. But the positiveness here is palpable. The “limited” resources we have access to eclipse the facilities and materials of the public schools here. Or so it sounds.

I feel my eyes growing heavy. I’m surprised how tiring a short and fairly easy day of work was – tomorrow will be exhausting with a half dozen trips to the sixth floor right after work.

We have some fun things on the schedule ahead including an overnight ger camp trip on Friday night so I’m sure to have lots more to post about soon!

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We have been meeting some of the other new teachers as well as some teachers that have been here prior over the past few days. Yesterday a bus from the school took us to the black market – one of the largest in Asia. I used to think of an underground shady scene where Russians buy and sell Levi’s for hundreds of dollars when I heard of a “black market” but this wasn’t like that. There was a big parking area and a 50t admission. (The current exchange is about 1,200t to one US dollar.) There were people selling clothing, rugs, hardware, antiques, boots… just about everything imaginable. We bought a cutting board for 5,000t and two power strip/extension cords as well as a Mongolian style winter hat for Pepper. We had two of the school staff along for the ride so we had someone that could help negotiate prices and translate.

Pepper also bought three pine cones with pine nuts inside. Apparently there was a very good crop of them this year. We have seen people driving card and eating from them, people working in department stores nibbling away, and lots of vendors selling them street-side. So for less than $1 we got to try it out. I always assumed that pine nuts came from a pine cone. But I never knew that the nuts were in a shell inside the cone. So you tear at the base of the cone and expose two or three nuts which you crack open with your teeth and discard the shell to eat the inner seed. Sort of like sunflower seeds but the shell is tougher and more round. The pine nuts were softer than those we buy husked and bagged in the US. I wonder how they extract the seeds commercially.

While at the black market I think I experienced my first close call with a bag slasher. For years I have heard of “razor blade artists” that ply bus stations, busy trains, shady markets and festivals. Anywhere that people bump into each other. A close relative of the pickpocket, bag slashers carry a razor blade and simply cut at a bag to get at the contents. Every place that I read about this black market warned of their presence. So when I felt someone push on the backpack I was wearing I quickly stepped forward and turned to face them. They passed me quickly and I looked in their hand and think I saw in his hand one of those razor knives that you break off the blade to get a new sharp blade. I pulled off my bag immediately and checked it but it wasn’t cut. Maybe he was just carrying a strange marker or pen.

We rode the public bus too. I’m remarkably reluctant to use buses when I travel. I often find the routes, schedule, and fees too difficult to comprehend. But there is a public bus stop close to the school and after touring the market we left the group to stomp around on our own. We caught lunch and then walked around a bit before seeking a bus to get back to the school. It was 400t for Pepper and I and only 200t for Jordan to ride.

We’ve been filling out paperwork this week too. We have to register with immigration since we’ll be living here all year which required forms filled out for all three of us. We had our photo taken by the school for the website and wall that shows the faculty. We had our school email accounts created. We signed a contract for a very brief rental agreement for the place we’re in temporarily. We hope to be moving into our apartment in the city tomorrow. Everyone assures us that our place is really nice and that it is in a great location with shopping, restaurants, and sights all quite close.

Finally I was given the somewhat honorary title of Athletic Director. It really just makes me the contact point for ACAMIS (the Association of China and Mongolia International Schools) for athletic competitions. That’s right, our school will be competing against schools in China. I thought it was strange for kids in southeast Alaska to have to get on a plane and miss a few days of school for a meet – imagine having to get a visa and deal with a team’s passports… It does come with a small bit of associated pay. I’m strangely excited to be able to keep my “Director” title too.

Here are some pictures of us cooling off… it has been kind of hot for us. It’s supposed to get up to 82 today!

We had Jerod and Melinda help us haul bags to the airport on Sunday morning. Since we sold our car earlier in the week, Rachel was carting us around and so we had an automatic going-away-party as well as extra bodies to help shuffle the 15 bags we checked. Apparently the scale we used wasn’t quite accurate and we had one to three pounds available in most of the bags. So Pepper pulled things from one of our carry-ons to bring them up to 50 pounds. And then when Mali went to check me in she noticed that I was listed as a child… and that Jordan was listed as an adult and his name was wrong on his ticket.

All of our names had been wrong in a way. Pepper and I had our tickets say “MCFARLAND, PEPPERMRS” and “MCFARLAND, RYANMR” which we figured wouldn’t be too big of a deal. Jordan’s original ticket had been issued for “JORDAN, ARCHERMCFARLANDMR” and we had the school notify the booking agency to have his name fixed but I didn’t notice that his first and last were in the wrong order. Mali spent at least a half an hour trying to fix our connection with Delta in Seattle. It cost $360 for the excess baggage we checked – not bad since we get up to $400 reimbursed ($200 for each of us working). We were at the airport at 9 when they opened because of the number of bags we were checking.

We flew to Juneau and had an hour layover so I went into the wilderness to forage for food (hiked to McDonald’s) while Pepper and Jordan sat with our collection of carry-ons and personal items. By one we were boarding our flight to Seattle. The flight was quick and uneventful. We were mighty happy that our bags had been checked through to Beijing so once we arrived in Seattle we just had to get ourselves to the next gate.

Once the gate agents were set up I set out to try and get us seats together. Because Jordan’s ticket had been re-booked he wasn’t seated with us. Well, it turns out that we all had to have our passports checked. When they saw we had one-way tickets to China and no valid Chinese visa they had to see proof that we had a connecting flight. Since I am used to not having to carry any print-outs I had to bring up the documents on my computer screen to show to them. Then they tried messing with Jordan’s ticket to fix his name and finally gave us seats together at a bulkhead.

While there we met Grant who is from Juneau and will be teaching 3rd grade at our school. He ended up seated just a row behind and to the side of us. The flight was on Delta so the aircraft wasn’t as accommodating as Asian airline companies tend to be. The food was okay and service fine but unlike the Asian carriers we didn’t have individual in-flight entertainment screens. Which I guess was good – it let me get a bit more sleep than I would have otherwise.

We landed in Beijing and I had to show our connection documents at immigration. We even had our passport stamped (you can get a one day entry approved right there without need to get a visa beforehand) although we were only making a connection. We had about three hours on the ground in Beijing. We headed to the baggage claim with Grant and harvested our crop of baggage. Grant checked four bags and we had five each so suddenly the pile we checked didn’t seem quite so bad. We couldn’t pile our bags onto three carts so one of us struggled with trying to manage two carts. We wandered around the terminal even going up an elevator (which took the poor elevator three trips) to try and find where we’d check in for our flight on Mongolian Airlines. Back down the elevator, across a street and loading onto a bus for a 10 minute ride two terminals away, locate and load carts again, up an elevator, up another elevator and just a few hundred feet away was the check-in area. Then we started having a real problem. They could not find Jordan’s reservation. They looked for JORDAN, ARCHER, JORDANMR, ARCHERMR, MCFARLAND… we were on the phone with people looking for the reservation. And we even got them to pull up a list of the people that had not yet checked in for the flight and let us look… sure enough, nothing that could have been Jordan’s reservation. So we had to go buy a ticket for Jordan and pay for the bags we were checking. Jordan’s ticket cost over $600 and the bags cost over $1,300. Ouch.

With 15 minutes before the scheduled departure we flung the last bags to be checked and started sprinting toward our gate. Down a slow escalator, 47 seconds before the next slow train, peek at the terminal map – sure enough gate 15 is furthest away, sprint off the train and get in line for immigration, run to go through security and by this time anyone within a hundred feet could hear Pepper announcing “Plane! Late!” so the security guy let us skip ahead of a few people (which still was a hassle with three computers along but at least we didn’t have to take off our shoes). And then they wanted to check Jordan’s basketball out. Pepper let them know they could keep it and so they tossed it back to Jordan. By the time I was through security Pepper and Jordan were loaded up on one of those carts that drive through the airport. I glanced behind me and saw no sign of Grant. Poor guy, waiting around for us to iron out Jordan’s ticket and now he might miss his flight! Our cart was full though so Pepper yelled in Chinese to the next cart driver “Mister! One more person! One more!” As she pointed to the security line. As we drove off Grant came out of security sprinting toward us with a “how could you leave me?” look on his face. Without hesitation the other driver pulled up and he didn’t have to stop as Grant climbed in. Dang those things move slow. But the terminal was empty and at the end at least we’d be less sweaty. On the way the driver pointed to show me there was a 10 yuan fee for the use so we scrounged out a few dollars and when the final gate came into sight there were still four or five people standing there – including the guy that had tried to help us through our problems. He held the plane for us.

Loaded, seated, just a few more hours of flying…

We landed in Ulaanbaatar at about 3:30 in the morning. Immigration was a breeze and then all of our bags arrived. We briefly had someone that wanted to see in our bags but when he asked where we were from he waved us on. Maybe Americans really are still okay here. We were quickly met by Chimgee and the driver and we pushed our caravan of bags to the van to load for the drive to the school. I had emailed ahead to warn of the size of our pile of luggage. We filled the van to capacity and drove the amazingly decrepit road toward the city. The apartment that we’ll be living in is not available until the 20th so we have to settle into the staff housing for a few days. By five in the morning the driver and security guard were sweating as much as I was from carrying bags from the van to the second floor for us or 4th for Grant. A sixth grade teacher across the hall helped drag bags to our room – Janine. And then for the next bit we stood in our room with rant and had our questions answered, fears put to rest, and excitement reinvigorated.

Move to Mongolia complete. Well, almost. In a few days we’ll be in our apartment which sounds like it is in a great part of the city.

Well, we’re on our way.  Pepper was in charge of packing most of our bags and since she has moved overseas before I am very glad she took it on.  When she moved to China she sold most of her belongings and only took a few bags with her.  This time we built a storage building for the things we left behind and we checked 15 large bags.  Fifteen!  But we won’t be scrambling to buy sheets, towels, or even things to entertain Jordan once we’re there.  It only cost $360 and we will be reimbursed up to $400.  We’ll probably have to pay again in China for our last flight though.

In Petersburg we were able to check the bags clear to Beijing which is a relief – we won’t have to deal with the bags during our few hours in Seattle.  

There are a few things that were not accomplished before we left but we’re hopefully not burdening too many people with the little messes and unfinished projects.  With the friends we have it is good to know things are in good hands.

Leaving was a bit saddening.  I saw Jordan tear up after saying goodbye to his cat.  I guess I am surprised that I am leaving – it still doesn’t quite feel real.  I have been so busy that I just have not allowed it to sink in fully.  It might take until we are unpacking stuff in an apartment.

Just over a week ago I had Mike here and Keith and Sarah came over to help Pepper and I with a day of work on the storage building and shop. I had a manlift and good weather. I started by working on the roof. Sarah cut pieces of metal as Mike controlled the lift to bring the pieces up to me. The galvanized metal roofing was originally for someone else’s project and had been damaged by the shipping company so I got a deal for it. Cutting off most of the crumpled part still gave enough material for me to be able to do a “shed roof” with the pitch dumping snow and rain toward the stream and away from doors and decks.

As I wrapped up the roofing, the others worked on sheeting the front of the building with plywood. By the time I was done they were nearly done with the front.

Some of the roofing I had planned to use I was then able to use for siding for the front of the building. I still have enough of the galvanized metal to use for siding on one of the short sides of the building but that may have to wait until next year.

Last week Pepper and I completed the plywood sheeting on the sides of the building, got most of the windows installed, put up the vapor barrier on the sides, and built stairs finally. Then yesterday we put the insulation in and today put up more vapor barrier to make sure the insulation stays in place. Today we started moving things into the building and Keith and Orin helped me carry the two large windows in so they are ready to be trimmed in place.

It looks like I might finish this up in time!

Last week Mike VanElzakker came up for a visit.  I was horribly sick for the first few days but still had to DJ at Kito’s over the weekend.  Mike was last here in 2006 and I was DJing at Kito’s then and recall taking a similar picture of us then.  

Sarah made this awesome woodblock print and gave a copy to Pepper for her birthday.  I’m biased about the awesomeness though.