Greetings from Ulaanbaatar!

Greetings, all! I write this blog post from an internet cafe just east of the central square in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The local time here is 5 pm on Sunday, which makes it 3 am in Austin and 1 am back on the west coast. The trip to Mongolia was loooooong and exhausting, but mostly without event. I left Seattle for LA at around 4 pm on Thursday. My layover in LA was long enough that I was able to leave the airport and grab dinner and drinks with Linda before hopping on my red-eye to Beijing. Following the 12-hour, 40-minute flight, I was deposited in the heart of the Beijing airport's brand-new, eye-poppingly extravagant terminal three, where I enjoyed a beef udon lunch at the seemingly incongruous local time of 6 am. When I arrived in UB, the Asia Foundation (TAF) had sent a couple of friendly staff out to meet me and drive me back to my dorm building. Turns out I'm staying a rather fancy apartment with its own bathroom. However, I haven't yet been able to get any hot water--nor has anyone else, as far as I'm aware--which means I'll likely spend the next ten weeks sponging myself with lukewarm sink water from a tub. (If you're interested in the details, ask me and I'll explain at greater length; I've already bought the tub, and I expect it will be a thrilling process).

Shortly after getting settled in, I met the first of my new summer associate partners, Mark. He and I ventured out in search of Mongolian food, which we successfully secured after wandering randomly for some time. It was a somewhat tricky process; not only do neither of us understand a lick of Mongolian, it is written using the Cyrillic script, which poses an additional obstacle to our understanding even the most basic of words. After returning to our building, we were both fairly tired, and decided to take a mid-afternoon nap. What began as an innocent snooze around 3 PM Saturday, however, became a 14-hour marathon sleep that finally ended at 5 AM this morning. Absurd.

As nothing in UB opens before 10 AM on Sundays, I had a lot of time to kill, which I spent variously studying Mongolian language basics, roaming the sparsely-populated streets, and starving. I met up with Mark later in the morning, and we took a trip to the state department store, where we did some grocery shopping for fundamentals (bread, shampoo, beer). As a side note, it really is remarkable that despite the unfamiliar nature of nearly everything on the streets here, from the people to the language to the crumbling Soviet infrastructure, a bottle of Pantene Pro-V is as readily available here as in any drug store in the States. In support of that point, the clerk here is currently playing a song featuring Mariah Carey and Nelly that I don't even recognize, probably because it is so new. Since when are people halfway across the world more in tune with American pop culture than an American? One final story: as Mark and I approached the department store today, we were accosted by a group of small children who insistently demanded that we relinquish our "Money! Money!!". When we declined, they saw fit to douse us repeatedly with their water bottles. We tried to escape, but they were persistent little bastards. We did get the last laugh, however; Mark managed to grab the bottle from one of the kids and douse him right back. It was awesome.

That's all for now. Fewer long-winded posts in the future. I promise! Hope all is well back home, or in whichever part of the world you're currently residing.