A Little Sunshine goes a long way

Today was the first day that it started to get light out on our way to work. This was very exciting to us foreign teachers, as it seems like its always dark here, only light for a few hours a day. Maybe today was just less hazy or cloudy or something, but it cheered us up some, as though we might finally start to believe that winter won't last forever. :)

Today we also went to visit with a guy who works at Mercy Corps, located really close to our house. Looks like at least clayt and maybe me too will be doing some cool volunteer work for them. I'll let clayt tell you the details later. But it felt good to finally have a step in a positive direction, as we have been looking for volunteer opportunities since we got here.

Maybe we mentioned this before, but it just really struck me today how any and every car in this country is a taxi cab! We have only been in an actual taxi maybe 3 or 4 times since we got here, and we need a ride often. You just stick out your hand, and someone almost instantly pulls over and pops open their door for you. Sometimes its a nice car, sometimes its a junker, but they are always running on empty. So we get to try our little mongolian vocab on random locals. sometimes they speak a little english, sometimes they try and try to talk to us in mongolian. Which leads me to an interesting exchange we had with a driver the other day. I have been sick with a pretty bad cold for the past week, and as we were taking a ride home the other day I was coughing lots. He asked in English if I was sick, and then told me there is a great medicine in mongolia that would help me. He said it was "Ooo-reen." We said oh, where can we buy it? He said you can get it anywhere, everyone has it. We realized he was saying "Urine." He said yes, its very good when you are sick, and swore he drank his own every morning before breakfast. I did not take his advice.

Last thursday we decided to go to the grocery store to get some food for dinner. Just at the first floor (actually a little below the first floor) our elevator borke down. I mean, it got stuck and wouldn't open at all. The elevators here are tiny, and we were stuck in there with 2 young guys, and they were drunk. They thought the whole situation was hillarious. They were laughing and talking to people through the crack in the doors and smoking cigarettes. They spoke a tiny bit of English and thought we were pretty funny too. There were many attempts to force the doors open by clayt and the guys, and after each failed attempt the one guy would say in a really forlorn way "one two three, Noooooo." The landlady's daughter (who's like 9) was trying to do something with a wire coat hanger to free us. The boys inside broke some cables that made the inside doors lose their spring. Sometimes there was nobody outside the elevator at all, and it was really quiet. We were in there for almost exactly one hour before the landlady came and open the doors in about 30 seconds. Just another day in Mongolia.

Last little story for today. Tuesday we were on our way home from work and saw these two guys fighting on the side of the street. One was obviously not holding his alcohol as well as the other, and was getting beat pretty bad. Guy 1 fell down, and Guy 2 kicked Guy 1 right in the face, and then in the stomach. I was worried, as I thought he was going to kill him or something. They took a few more swings at each other once Guy 1 got back up. Then Guy 2 got Guy 1's hat off the ground, and put it on for him. He straightened out Guy 1's jacket. Then they sat down on the curb together, and stayed that way. With friends like that........ :)