The Start of Our Summer

First of all, Congratualtions to Paul and Tia on their wedding, June 9th!!!!! We are happy for you, sorry that we couldn't be there, and excited to see you soon...

in Thailand! Saturday we head to Thailand for a 2 week vacation shared with Paul and Tia. We are so excited to see some familiar faces after 6 and a half months of living on the other side of the world. We'll be sure to post lots of photos after the trip.

Last week and this week Clayt and I have been teaching English enrichment lessons for the Turkish and Mongolian teachers that teach in our sister school for 4 hours a day. Then clayt heads off to his internship and I tutor 2 women for another 2 hours for TOEFL prep. We're putting in more hours now than we did during the school year! But, it will be worth it, as we don't have to be back to work again until August.

A few weeks ago clayt and decided to walk through one of the ger districts and climb a small mountain behind it. Here is a photo of one of the ever-expanding ger districts.

Here it is up close from within. People's territory is fanced off, usually gated. Once inside, its like a labrynth. The path twists and turns and sometimes just stops. It was interesting to wander around.

Sadly, this is the most common this we saw. There was garbage everywhere. Sometimes there would just be a long ditch on the side of the path filled with garbage. And then there was garbage everywhere outside the ditch too. No trach pickup out here, they just burn it.

On our way through, a woman spied us and literally came running down a hill at us. She tried to communicate through a mongolian and russian mix, and we tried with an English and Mongolian mix to comprehend. She wanted us to come visit her home. Why not? In mongolia, especially outside the city, this is typical. We followed her to her home, which was a concrete structure and a ger in the yard. The seemed to be doing alright, for ger district standards. She gave us sweets and juice, and showed us their family photo albums. She had 4 children, plus her sister's children were there as well as her eldest daughter's baby, seen below. The woman happily just plopped the baby on Clayt's lap, and the baby didn't seem to mind. He was very good-natured, 9 months old and happy to smile and show his sole 2 teeth to strangers. We had a nice visit, and then went on our way, after promising to visit again sometime. However, after leaving Clayt pointed out that even if we wanted to visit again, we would never find it - we had taken a very random path to end up where we were.

Here I am at the top of the hill, on possibly the windiest day we have experienced here so far. We saw grocery bags swirling in the air way above our heads, and got lots of dirt and who knows what else in our teeth. At the top was a decent view of the city one way, and in the other direction, lots and lots of nothing.


On a totally different and random note -- would you clean your appendectomy wound with something that came bottled in an old beer bottle??? Thankfully I found some real hydrogen peroxide about a week after I got this and could throw this smelly stuff away.