twothousandten

*

happy last day of 2009!


and welcome another 365 days of total weirdness!


*

sounds like a bad christmas song...

this is quite possibly the loneliest christmas i've ever had.



boohoo.

англи хэл

last night while i baked cookies for 4 hours with my roommate - she asked me about returning to america (in march) and what i'm looking forward to the most.

that's always a difficult question for me to anwer because my response is always changing. sometimes i can't wait for convenience, sometimes i'd really love a clothes dryer, other times i'm excited for consistantly fresh air, most times i'm anxious to see my family, other times i long for easy communication.

this last one is a little tricky, though. for example, sometimes i really don't enjoy being able to understand other people's conversations in public places. most times, the english i overhear here just sounds...ugly. And the topics people tend to speak about drive me crazy. these instances delude my excitement.

maybe i've gotten used to either not understanding anything or understanding very little of the language around me that understanding everything in my own language is overwhelming. at any rate - the ability to overhear conversations has at least given me the opportunity to revise my own conversational verbage so i can avoid sounding more irritating than usual...

ps: english speakers, stop using the word "like" so much.

Ai Er Handkerchief

this is the plot description on the back of a copy of The Merchant of Venice DVD:

good intention Andong Buddhist nun (prominent rice Ai Langsi of liner) is for the sake of the wedding of good friend, and to harsh Xia Luoke Jewess (Ai Er handkerchief Xi Nuo) borrows money and does not still come out money and obtains cutting one pund of flesh before hte chest by Xia Luoke. Encircleeing Miss Xi Ya in case not being intelligent impersonates lawyer to get off one's hands to save from danger, Buddhist nun in Andong probably for a long time kick the bucket


and these are the credits below it:

narrated by Morgan Freeman
Recent presents a Diceburc LLC production of The Hunting of the President based on the book by Cene Lyons and Joe Conason


and it's rated PG-13 for "terror/violence, some sexual content and language"


yikes.

-6

that was today's high. can negative numbers actually be counted as 'highs'? that seems paradoxical.

anyway


I LOVE CHRISTMAS

dear coffee shops

why is your music always so annoying?







oh well.

friday

i spent 3/4 of the day sitting and calculating grades.



top 5 things i'd rather do with 3/4 of the day:

1. bake cookies
2. dance the cha cha - or rather learn the cha cha because i don't actually know it.
3. read a book
4. go to a museum
5. laugh. straight through, non-stop

music videos

one little treat i get every now and then is being able to watch mongolian music videos on the bus. several buses here in UB have little tvs affixed to the wall behind the 'driver cubby.' a few of them are functioning and generally have some kind of entertaining program running. sometimes it's european candid camera type stuff, or it's a long stream of weird ads, or it's mongolian music videos.

my favorites are music videos. this morning, the first one i caught was really quite happy. in it, a young mongolian man with bleached blonde hair was walking around a neighborhood singing very passionately while all the mongolians around him were smiling and high-fiving each other or kissing or hugging or holding hands. sometimes there would be quick shots of half naked little boys joyfully jumping into the river for a swim, or dudes hugging before one gets on a train, or a family happily walking together down the street, or an airline worker smooching a pair of plane tickets she got as a gift from her co-workers, or some lady running into the arms of her boyfriend, or a sweaty Olympic medalist and his coach cheering victoriously with the mongolian flag draped on their shoulders. then our blonde mongolian friend would reappear on screen in a new neighborhood, weaving in and out of his band mates as more mongolians behind him continued high-fiving, kissing, hugging, holding hands. occasionaly a young mongolian girl would pop up on screen lip-syncing to the singer's words.

most of the time i'm too distracted by the visual to really care about the audio so generally i have no idea what the singers are singing about. watching the music videos is sometimes like putting a puzzle together but finding out along the way that some of the pieces don't quite fit. often in the music videos there are strange surprises that don't seem to comply with the story being told. but you know to the insiders, all the images are connected by the often sporadic asthetic unique to mongolians.

in the next one, an older mongolian singer dressed very casually and wearing a khaki baseball cap was standing in the middle of CG football field. he was singing about a love story between two people who grew up together. the guy loves the girl when they're young, but the girl doesn't love him. so he ends up with a different girl (who is just awful) thinking that his childhood friend still doesn't love him - but by the time they're adults her feelings have changed. by the end of the video, the guy is in the middle of his wedding to the awful girl and when it's time to put the ring on her finger he snatches it and runs away leaving her at the altar. he's running back to his childhood girl, but i had to get off the bus before the video fully ended.

rudolph syndrom

nothing like closing the end of the semester with a cold.

i couldn't finish my last semester of teaching without a chapped, red nose.

how would i ever be able to enjoy it?


groooossss.

frozen stumps

this morning i went to naran tuul market (aka: the zakh or black market), a massive open air market place that sells pretty much everything known to humankind - from turtles to wood burning stoves, clothes hangers to raw meat, area rugs to antiques.

the thing about good old naran tuul is that it is one of the coldest places in one of the coldest capitols of the world. even in the middle of summer, you could classify it as "chilly." today, it was probably about -10 (F not C). i knew i had toes when we entered the market place, but about 10 minutes later they disappeared and frozen stumps replaced them. oh, it was cold.

the good news is that i got 1/3 of what i set out to buy at the zakh: fabric for pillows. and buying fabric is no easy task. there has to be about 50 or more stalls that sell a rediculous range of fabric and all the spools are squished and crammed together so tight you sometimes need the jaws of life to pry them free. once i had the fabric, i was just too cold to go in search of the other items on my list and thankfully my friends felt the same so we just went home.

now i'm sitting, propped up against the radiator in the living room. my toes have returned. and i'm pretty sure my pillows will look fabulous.

welcome december

happy 12/1! i celebrated the first day of my favorite month by...

-waking up early to work
-doing a dance workout to christmas music (curtesy of Twisted Sister)
-being 20 minutes late to my lesson (curtesy of crappy traffic)
-playing games with my students for an hour and half**
-hanging out with two great mongolian friends after school and listening to them talk about their boyfriends
-coming home to work

now i will fix some delish hot chocolate and get back to work. cheers.




**i don't do this regularly - this week is the last week of lessons.