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Thursday, July 28, 2005
my blog must be one of the most boring on the internet, but the last time i sat down to add an entry, the post office lost power twice. i gave up instead of chancing a third power outage. what do you expect though, i'm in mongolia.
my life has become much busier lately. i'm still in language class for three hours each morning and now have to teach a class each afternoon as well. teaching is pretty fun. i'm teaching my students a song off of the billy bragg and wilco album 'the mermaid avenue sessions'. i forgot the name so i call it 'the lonesome lover'. the teenage girls who fill my class seem to like it. we were finally getting so volume behind the singing today. i only have two more classes with them, but i want to teach them 'my little buttercup' from THE THREE AMIGOS.
my family slaughtered a sheep in my backyard today. i arrived to find animal parts all over the place. my mom served me seven hohsher before inviting me to feast with them in the backyard. she claimed that the hohsher was far too small a meal to fill me. the broth i drank tasted of organs and my hands still smell like i just left a biology disection. i ate some of the meat, but passed on the heart, blood-filled intestines, and other delicacies. i usually would have tried some, but i still had to teach my english class in a couple of hours and didn't want to be running out of the room sick.
it's weird to hear about things like the london bombings and the blast in egypt while over here. i got an old copy of NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL that gave me all of the details of london, but this is my first major event while separated from 24-hour news networks. i find that i don't care much about it here. my life has become so much more about where i am and what i'm doing.
i head to my permanent site on august 20. i won't find out where it is until the 15th. i am very excited to find out where i'll be headed. i had my heart set on erdenet because i could have worked with the national swim team there. yes, mongolia has a national swim team. alas, there are no placements for teacher trainers there this year. if i can get to ulaanbaatar in the spring, though, i may be able to compete in there national swim meet. one of my new friends here did just that this year.
they were happy to have a foreigner join the fun.
my family may have no running water, but my parents and grandfather have cell phones. it's often weird to see the ways in which mongolia is modernizing, while remaining antiquated in others. i have joined the cell phone crowd as well. this way, if i happen to get run over by a yak, i can contact my peace corps doctor fairly easily. otherwise i may have to set off to find the post office manager in the middle of the night so that i could make a call.
hopefully i'll have a few interesting pictures and some interesting tales to send before i head out to who-knows-where.
peace,
chris roecker, pct
my life has become much busier lately. i'm still in language class for three hours each morning and now have to teach a class each afternoon as well. teaching is pretty fun. i'm teaching my students a song off of the billy bragg and wilco album 'the mermaid avenue sessions'. i forgot the name so i call it 'the lonesome lover'. the teenage girls who fill my class seem to like it. we were finally getting so volume behind the singing today. i only have two more classes with them, but i want to teach them 'my little buttercup' from THE THREE AMIGOS.
my family slaughtered a sheep in my backyard today. i arrived to find animal parts all over the place. my mom served me seven hohsher before inviting me to feast with them in the backyard. she claimed that the hohsher was far too small a meal to fill me. the broth i drank tasted of organs and my hands still smell like i just left a biology disection. i ate some of the meat, but passed on the heart, blood-filled intestines, and other delicacies. i usually would have tried some, but i still had to teach my english class in a couple of hours and didn't want to be running out of the room sick.
it's weird to hear about things like the london bombings and the blast in egypt while over here. i got an old copy of NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL that gave me all of the details of london, but this is my first major event while separated from 24-hour news networks. i find that i don't care much about it here. my life has become so much more about where i am and what i'm doing.
i head to my permanent site on august 20. i won't find out where it is until the 15th. i am very excited to find out where i'll be headed. i had my heart set on erdenet because i could have worked with the national swim team there. yes, mongolia has a national swim team. alas, there are no placements for teacher trainers there this year. if i can get to ulaanbaatar in the spring, though, i may be able to compete in there national swim meet. one of my new friends here did just that this year.
they were happy to have a foreigner join the fun.
my family may have no running water, but my parents and grandfather have cell phones. it's often weird to see the ways in which mongolia is modernizing, while remaining antiquated in others. i have joined the cell phone crowd as well. this way, if i happen to get run over by a yak, i can contact my peace corps doctor fairly easily. otherwise i may have to set off to find the post office manager in the middle of the night so that i could make a call.
hopefully i'll have a few interesting pictures and some interesting tales to send before i head out to who-knows-where.
peace,
chris roecker, pct
Posted by: William Craft / 9:02 PM 
