Living and Learning in the Land of the Blue Sky
Time for a possible paradigm shift! A few weekends ago, the 9th and 10th grade classes from our school went to the *takes a deep breath* National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet of Mongolia (Улсын дуурь бүжгийн эрдмийн театр) to see a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (Хунт нуур). Eric knew that I would be […]
Read More Odette and Odile Take UlaanbaatarFor readers of this blog who do not know us in person, this may come as a shock to many of you, but we recently welcomed our second baby into the world. I had every intention of posting a pregnancy announcement on here around the same time as we announced on FB and other social […]
Read More New year, new baby**I feel like it would be easy to misinterpret the intention behind this post, so I want to clarify that this post isn’t meant as a complaint but as an illustration of a challenge and an adjustment for an American living abroad.** Because I grew up overseas in several developing nations, I was used to the […]
Read More I miss Safeway.Bloomberg posted an illuminating article yesterday that broke down the current pollution issues. Guess what? Beijing can move over. Ulaanbaatar’s pollution has it beat–five times over. Because it’s the Year of the Monkey, Mongolians have been predicting an extra cold, extra long winter. One of our coworkers said they are expecting four months of winter […]
Read More *cough cough*There have been a few adjustments to public transportation around UB since we first posted about how to ride the bus here. When we returned to Mongolia from the US at the end of the summer, we returned to a completely overhauled bus system–new payment method, new bus lines, and new bus numbers/routes. Just to […]
Read More A Foreigner’s Guide to Riding the Bus in UB, Pt. 2It’s September, the morning after the first snowfall of the season, and Otgontuuya already knows that winter will be brutal. She sits on a pink plastic chair in her living room, takes off her thick jacket and breast-feeds her crying toddler. She has just gotten home, having walked across the uneven dirt roads overlooking the […]
Read More Winter Air PollutionYes, it’s October, but believe it or not, we had two snows last month. The most recent one happened on the 30th. Since then, we’ve been dodging either lakes (a.k.a. “puddles”) or swamps (a.k.a. muddy places on the sidewalks) on our commute to and from work. There have been a few times when we’re walking […]
Read More September SnowEvery locale has a form of public transportation. NYC has the subway. Paris has the metro. Nairobi has matatus. San Francisco has the BART. Every transportation system has its quirks, and you can usually spot the local from the foreigner wherever you are. Learning how to use local public transportation is invaluable, yes? In UB, there […]
Read More A Foreigner’s Guide to Riding the Bus in UBMoving to a new country inevitably means change. When we moved here to Mongolia, we both anticipated change in many ways. We have more or less adjusted to those changes, which have ranged from new or available foods to different cultural values. Even if we haven’t fully embraced everything (Eric has yet to don a […]
Read More 10 Ways that being an In-Patient Changed MeOur school is on the way to the Zaisan area in UB, and when we get off the bus, I can see the Zaisan Memorial from the corner. Yesterday, I took a walk on my own to Zaisan and climbed the 612 steps that leads from the base of the hill to the memorial at […]
Read More Zaisan