Living and Learning in the Land of the Blue Sky
Mongolia and China are neighbors, so it’s natural to wonder if the recent Wuhan coronavirus (henceforth COVID-19) outbreak has spread north. Well, so far, there’s no evidence that COVID-19 has reached Mongolia at all. As soon as the outbreak began hitting news cycles, the Mongolian government shut down everything they could to keep the virus […]
Read More What about COVID-19?Caleb is an English teacher who I know of from mutual friends in UB. Recently, he’s moved to a small town in Bayan Khongor to teach English in a more rural setting. If you’re curious what life outside of UB looks like, I recommend checking out his YouTube channel! He’s only just begun making videos, […]
Read More Small Town LifeA couple of weekends ago, we headed west of UB with some colleagues from our school to spend the night in the countryside with a herding family. The connection to this family was that the patriarch was the brother of the husband of one of our school’s headmasters, which was great for a couple of […]
Read More Outhouse Wolves and Other StoriesI love finding these kinds of short videos online because I feel like they give our readers a better sense of Mongolia’s heritage. Yes, there are still traditional Mongolian nomads of different ethnic backgrounds (the family featured here is Kazakh from western Mongolia), although I would argue more of Mongolia’s population is urban than rural […]
Read More Inside the Rugged Lives of Mongolia’s NomadsIf you live in one of the ger districts or more on the outskirts of the city, you are more likely to live in an individual home, but by and large, housing in UB consists of apartments. New high rise apartment buildings go up all the time, to the extent that there are probably more […]
Read More Apartment Living in UB**HUGE apology for not updating the blog in seven months. SEVEN. Holy cow.** One of the best food-related reasons to love Mongolia is its delicious potatoes. I don’t know what it is about them that makes them so darn tasty, but they are the bomb. They are typically on the small side (at least per […]
Read More Niislel Salat, a.k.a. “Capital Salad”