Quick post!

Hey all, it's been a while since my last post so I felt like I needed to get something new up. However, I don't have much time, as it is the end of a workday and I'm at the TAF office. Thus, I'll be brief. The weather here has been fairly insane over the past few days. Actually, the weather itself hasn't been the problem--the problem has been the lamentably poor capacity of the infrastructure in UB to withstand even a relatively minor change in weather. By all of this, of course, I mean that 1) it has been raining continuously for 3-4 days, 2) there is no adequate drainage in UB, and thus, 3) most streets have transformed into lakes filled with stagnant mud and sewage! Woo! Saturday the lakes were relatively small (back then they could still be classified as "puddles" and "pools"); by Sunday much of the city had flooded. Foolishly, I attempted to venture out into the madness Sunday--and was duly rebuked. I spent hours wandering around the city, turned away from one locked door after another (first the internet cafe was closed, then the coffee shop all the way across downtown was closed, then...), until I finally made my way to Baga Toiruu to discover that, mercifully, the German bakery remained open. I took refuge there from the madness for several hours, sipping coffee, studying a corporate finance textbook (WOO), and futilely wringing and re-wringing the endless rainwater from my socks. Frightful.

Since then the weather has calmed and the lakes receded somewhat. However, I feel sure that we haven't heard the last from the rain.

In other news, the past two days have been an endless blur of meetings, each one bleeding into the others. I have learned so much that my brain is bursting at the seams, but I think I had a breakthrough moment in my third meeting of the day today: my research topic is finally coming into focus. In a nutshell, there is a proposal in parliament (which is out of session at the moment in anticipation of the national elections on June 29) to take majority state ownership of mining deposits that are determined to be of "strategic importance." The definition of strategic deposits is somewhat hazy, but hazy or not, this has direct implications for a potentially world-class mining site called Oyu Tolgoi (OT) in Omnogobi aimag in southern Mongolia. Ivanhoe, a Canadian mining company that has spent the past 4-5 years exploring and developing the site, has yet to receive an official mining license for OT. The license is contigent upon parliamentary approval of an investment agreement that was drafted in early 2007 but has since stalled. The key question for Ivanhoe (and its investment partner, Rio Tinto) is whether proposed amendments to the Mining Law regarding state ownership will be passed--and what that will mean for Ivanhoe's stake in the OT project. The debate that unfolds over Mining Law amendments will be directly reflected in the fate of the OT project--which makes it a perfect case study for exploring the issue of state ownership of natural resources. Looks like I've got a plan.

The last bit of news is that I went to a dinner party on Saturday. Shelagh's husband barbecued roughly 100 pounds of meat, which (most of us) tore into voraciously. I myself enjoyed the better part of a whole chicken, plus about 40 oz. of beef. It was hearty--and lots of fun. Also that night I got the opportunity to play around with an iPhone, and noted that it gets excellent reception in UB. Apple is taking over the world.

The end!