A Night at the Movies

One of the most frequent questions we get asked about life in UB when not in UB is "What do you do there?"  It's a strange question to try to answer wherever you live, and it's also a question that I don't think our friends who live in Chicago or Hong Kong or Berlin or NYC or London have to deal with that often.  What I think that the question is really getting at is to just describe life in a spot that they've probably never heard of at all.   (For example, many people in Indonesia thought that Mongolia was in Africa.)

The reality though is that life in Ulaanbaatar can be as banal and inconsequential as life anywhere.  You do your thing.  You go to work.  You hang out at your local spots with your friends. You watch TV and DVDs at home.  You make a life.  The details of that life (the cold, the scrounging, the alternity of it all at times) are different of course, and it's in the margins of these difference that I've been writing about (however infrequently) on this blog.

In any case, if I had to put an answer to the question that I opened with, it would be "we go to the movies."  The cinema experience in UB is one of the true highlights of life here.  We go almost every Saturday and we watch everything that gets here, which are mostly middle grade, low brow action flicks.  The movie distribution system in Mongolia is a mystery, as it seems that the cinemas never seem to know the exact release dates of any forthcoming movies.  Instead, they play whatever they have until a new movie is delivered.  A hasty announcement that they're playing something new goes out on their website and then you go see the new Tom Cruise vehicle that bombed in markets that actually matter.

The thing that really sets the movie going experience here apart from elsewhere is the omnipresence of young kids in the theatre, whatever movie is playing and whatever the time.  Last Saturday night, we saw the terrible new Arnold Schwarzenegger film, The Last Stand.  Saturday was the eve of Tsagan Sar, which is the Mongolian version of Lunar New Year, so the cinema was empty aside from ourselves and perhaps 3 other couples, as well as 2 or 3 toddlers who spent most of the time running up and down the aisle, occasionally pausing to look at the screen as Arnie shoot a bad guy in the face or blow up a building or strike a heroic pose as he's doing either of those acts.  The kids act like kids so they make noise and talk loudly to each other and generally hold free reign over the theatre.

The thing is, once you accept their presence, the kids are actually an integral part of the Mongolian cinema experience, if not the experience of the country as a whole.  Children are everywhere: from the movies to the streets to restaurants.  In the movies though, whether they're running the aisles or getting into the Bond movie with their parents or transfixed by the latest Pixar movie, their presence isn't ever galling but instead just part of the local flavour of the things that we do.

Walking in the City

Without a bike or car and mistrusting public transit, walking is my primary way of getting around town, or at least the 4 km radius that I operate in.  Walking in UB is a peculiar experience.  On my way to school, for example, the quality of the path ranges from pristine (beside the parliament building) to tolerable if sometimes lacking (near the university) to nonexistent (near school).  And, by non existent, I mean just that: the pavement disappears, or it's been covered over by (take your pick) dirt, debris, broken bricks, garbage, ice and snow.  In the spring and fall, workers randomly excavate parts of footpaths for reasons unknown and then just move on or stop their explorations due to winter, so that walking in the city involves a lot of walking over crevices, open sewers filled with garbage and electrical wire and just plain old holes in the ground.

Recently, I've been considering whether UB is in ruins or if was never finished in the first place.  The number of odd, misplaced, useless, and absurd structures you come across in a brisk walk around town is striking and unmissable.  Last week, as I was leaving the supermarket/department store near school, I  spied a bridge across the river (see above) that, since it was more generally in the direction that I was going than my usual route home from that spot, I reasoned was going to be a bit of short cut and that it would surely link up with Peace Avenue, the main street in town.  As I approached the bridge, I noticed it had no railings of any kind, and the usual crumbling concrete that is endemic of Mongolian infrastructure.  When I reached the bridge, I found that to get on the bridge, involved climbing up an icy embankment to reach an improvised "staircase" (i.e. a couple bricks stacked up next to a short concrete wall of the bridge).  The bridge itself was wider than expected, much bigger than a pedestrian bridge, at perhaps 4 metres across.  When I reached the other side, I slid down an icy hill and followed the river to Peace Avenue, passing by a number of unfinished/ruined structures including one circular building with a tiled floor but only half of circle completed, although it had a staircase to its roof which featured a tangle of wires that could be mistaken for either (a) modern sculpture, (b) antennae or (c) a Hill's Hoist.

Back to the bridge though, what was this structure supposed to be?  Due to its width, was it actually meant for cars?  Or was it always a pedestrian bridge?  If either option, why was there a metre high drop off from the bridge itself to the land surrounding it?  If it was for cars, why aren't there any streets it could theoretically connect with?  Is this ruins or was it just never finished, a Soviet era project that languished after the fall of Communism and was repurposed by people who just needed a way to cross the river at that point?  Or did it once serve a purpose and has crumbled into its ruined yet still useful state?

In light of recent news, perhaps this is an apt metaphor for the country as a whole.

Teaching Mongolians About Mongolia

At its best, teaching is an essentially open source pursuit.  As a teacher, you should steal/borrow as many ideas as you can, mould them to your students' (and your own) strengths, and pass them along to anyone who asks.  It's many things but teaching is not an art, in which your individual creativity trumps your commitment to making everyone around you better.  Half of the struggle as a young teacher is learning enough activities that might work (and when to use them) in various classroom situations, so that your teaching is varied enough to keep the kids engaged in your lesson and on board with your goals.

I share, borrow and steal at will from any and everyone, whether from supervising teachers during my pre-service days or from friends at schools or from my teachers whose lessons or activities or even just their classroom persona have stuck with me for a long time afterwards.  I had a couple English teachers in Grades 11 and 12 who had a "Words of the Day" exercise.  One word would be a "serious" word that we might be able to use in essays and the other would be "silly" one, usually ridiculously long, complex or completely made up.  At Brimbank, I lifted the concept and added a "Words of the Day" wall to try to improve the concept by making the words literally part of our classroom landscape.  I'd refer to the words posted during lessons and implore the kids to use the serious ones when they were working on essays or questions or debates we'd do in class.

In Mongolia, though, I've been mostly teaching Geography (and one lone class of World History), which has meant that the bank of learning activities I'd been building up has been mostly useless.  One activity though that has carried over after a slight tweak are the Words of the Day, which has been recast as the "Country of the Week."  Basically, I choose a country and, for the first 10 minutes of class, we talk about its location, its size, its literacy rate, its population, its major products and 3 or 4 issues that it has to deal with.

The idea is to expand the kids' knowledge of the world, especially in regions like the Middle East or Africa or South America that they have have no direct experience in or have ever been taught.  So, even if they've struggled through say the concept of the linear model of rural settlement, they've taken on some cool facts about Argentina's massive production of soybeans and its detrimental effects on the country's environment.  When it works, the kids will be offering their guesses about the country's literacy rate or its major products, and I'll either confirm their guesses or, more usually, offer the real facts and tell some stories about the country.  Sometimes, I spin off activities off of it to connect with the concepts we're working on in class (mapping, population density, agriculture, tourism, etc.) and, other times, we move on and talk about something else.  I'm still refining what I do and what its exact purpose might be but my general idea is that the students are so deficient in world awareness and geographic skills that any activity that sticks with them is a plus.

During the last week of term, with a 3 week holiday approaching and midterms on during the mornings, I had a series of classes with all of my Geography classes which were generally useless for starting new topics.  Some of these classes took place before the Geography exams, so we did some revision for the test, which was, to be honest, half hearted since they were mentally exhausted after 4 or so hours of exams.  In the middle of the week, I decided to do a special Country of the Week instead of studying.  After considering something tiny like the Holy See or something famous like the United States, I decided on Mongolia since, basically since the start of the year, the kids had been calling out for it to be anointed as my CotW.  As soon as I announced the week's CotW, a cheer rose up from the class.

As we went through the usual facts and stories, what was most striking wasn't that the kids knew their own country but they had no idea about its facts, its challenges, its strengths, or its fuck-ups.  When I asked if anyone knew the number one product of the country, no one knew it was copper, or of the importance of copper at Oyu Tolgoi to the country's present and its future.  They didn't know about corruption or how widespread it is in Mongolia or why it might be even a problem to pay bribes from time to time.  When I asked about the country's problems, the answer I got back was universally China, which in some respects is completely true.  When I asked why China was a problem, they answered that the Chinese were inferior, weak, racist against Mongolians, and plotting to take over the country.  Their views, I have little doubt, are just parroted versions of what they hear from their parents, on TV, in the school yard and in the streets of UB.  Their personal experiences with Chinese (in Beijing, in UB) were, for the most part, "OK" in their own words.  The nationalism of youth is a purer form, untarnished by cynicism and buttressed by a type of unshakable confidence that we usually lose when we become adults or else become sociopaths with southern cross tattoos (or your own county's equivalent).

In the end of the activity, I led a discussion of what Mongolia needs to do to lead to the future that it desires.  We talked about the need to improve the relationship with China and that discrimination is a two way street and that both sides must improve their approaches to one another.  We talked about how they could be the ones who start that process, and that the ideas that we hold and the way we practise them will influence the future.  We talked about why corruption was a bad thing for the country as a whole. We talked about how Mongolia needs to diversify its industries, to move away from mining to avoid the dreaded resource curse that has befallen so many other nations (and a few previous Countries of the Week).  In this discussion, I found myself in a position that I never thought I was at all going to ever end up in: teaching Mongolians about Mongolia.

As the class ended, I asked if they had thought they had learnt anything about their country.  A quiet murmur ringed around the room as they thought about it.  And then a student put up her hand and said, simply, "Yes."

An Educational Essential

At the school I taught at in Australia, there was a vice principal named Jim, who was a thoroughly decent fellow.  A technocrat by comportment, one of Jim's major tasks was compiling the school's term calender.  On an almost weekly basis during the regular morning meetings, Jim would offer updates about minor changes to the existing calender ("The English meeting will now be in B205, not B210!"), as well as the ongoing progress of the next term or two ("We're working on it.  I'll have a draft copy in a few days.") or if he was going to send said draft out to the entire school ("Version 3 of Term 3 will be in your inboxes by 11 AM today").  Jim's calender status reports were unrelenting in their frequency and detail.  At times, as he spoke, I would zone out, or, if I was really a jerk, I'd check any number of social networks.

I now know that's Jim's task was absolutely essential to a normal, functioning school.  I should have been riveted by his speeches and thankful of all the hard work he put into it.  My current school has a calender but it's vague, poorly thought out and constantly changing.  There are no updates from our Jim.  (There is no Jim, come to think of it.)  There is no apparent process behind the changes that come through.  Some of the changes are unavoidable:  the Mongolian government declares a holiday in a week's time or to prolong winter break because of the cold or perhaps half the school comes down with self inflicted dysentery.  Other changes are due to the prioritisation of educationally deficient activities such as the talent show or a prom that cancelled an entire day's school for all grades although the prom was only for kids in grades 9 to 11.  Jim though did his thankless job and kept a chaotic school (in many ways) basically on track.

A few weeks ago, I took some time to take stock of how each class was going and whether my plans were on track, despite the constant days off for made up holidays and intramural competitive dance and singing competitions.  After that audit, I planned out the last few weeks of term, to try to force some shape (the reflection stage of the 5 step learning cycle) on the term.  Unlike first term's dysentery imposed hurried conclusion, I wanted to give some logic to the end of my sequence.  I set up some enquiry projects for the kids to do, and planned out some mandated monthly tests to wrap everything up neatly.

Unfortunately Christmas (I took 2 days off) and New Years (everyone got another 2 days off) tripped up many of the enquiry projects, which turned out to be more formulaic and teacher directed than I would have liked.  We're supposed to give tests every month (I do one every unit, which takes 8 to 10 weeks) which are more hassle than they're worth due to rampant cheating and low written skills in English.

In any case, last Thursday, I wrote 2 versions of the grade 6 test and I went to get them copied.  At our school, there's a person whose entire job is to make copies for teachers (and sometimes take payments for notebooks and stationary from students).  She's slow and inefficient in that Mongolian kind of way, which makes the process of getting a few photocopies into a laborious, frustrating and useless process to be only undertaken if absolutely necessary.  This time was even more of a endurance test: she asked me to get written permission from a person in the administration for these copies.

I said sure, but cursed under my breath and ran to the opposite side of the school to get approval, which was instantly given.  As I left the administration's office, the high school coordinator asked me if these were the midterms for Grade 6.  Midterms?  I hadn't heard of any midterm week.  It wasn't on the calender.  It hadn't been mentioned to any foreign teacher.  Bullshitting and thinking quickly, I told her that they were, and she then informed me that I also needed to write midterms for grades 7, 8, 9 and 10 geography, as well as grade 8 history.  And these tests needed to be done on Friday, i.e. tomorrow, a day in which I taught 6 straight lessons (from 10:30 to 3 basically) without a break, as well as had to go to the Chinese Embassy to apply for a visa.

I wrote the tests, I got the visa, I taught the classes, and then we had a dinner party that night.  It was an exhausting day but I got through it.  The real test has been this week, where the midterms have happened in the mornings and then a new, extremely random schedule was drawn up for grades 6 to 8 in the afternoon.  The schedule, naturally, didn't have any times attached to it and the bells were turned off so the transition between classes has been random guesswork.

In the past 3 days, I've marked about 250 or so exams and then written reports for each of these students.  Reports here doesn't mean the same thing as in Australia where typical reports are immensely detailed exercises, but instead an old school 1 or 2 line brief statement per kid, which is fine except when you have 20 kids named Munkh across all the classes, most of whom do not excel or fail enough to make themselves conspicuous.  I know most of the names and I know all the faces now, but it's hard to find enough to say about each kid, especially when I have so damn many to think about.

It's all done now and tomorrow, which is supposed to be a "normal" school day though I have nothing prepared because of all the grading and writing, I jump on a flight out of UB.  We're going to Indonesia for 2 weeks and, in typical Aussie fashion, we'll be making a side trip to Bali, and then back to Beijing for a week before we touch back down at the familiar, unfriendly confines of Chinggis Khan International Airport in early February.  I might not be able to write for a few weeks, but I'll try my best.  

Christmas in Absurdistan

Xmas in UB

Ulaanbaatar turns you into James Garner from The Great Escape.  You become a scrounger, regularly trawling through up to 9 or 10 places to do all your shopping.  Once you find something decent (like, say some hot sauce from Mexico) in the markets, it's imperative to buy up as much as you can carry and to never, ever tell any other expat about the exact location of your discovery.  (I made that mistake once and then, a few days later, an entire shelf of pickles from North Carolina disappeared from the State Department Store's supermarket.)

Supply chains to Mongolia are so thin that when something useful sells out at the supermarket, you might not see it for months, if ever.  This seems to be because most of the food seems to be put on a train in Germany and sent via the Trans Siberian Railway, with occasional random treats flown in from the States or Korea (depending on where you're shopping).  It's an absurd way to stock a country, especially when food giant China lies just to the south of you.  Although, with the ever flowing news of disgusting food handling procedures in China, perhaps this is a blessing.  

Expats and locals who are lucky enough to regularly leave the country stock up on essentials in other countries, so that flights into Chinggis Khan International Airport resemble food drops to impoverished nations.  The luggage conveyor belt (the only one at the airport) heaves with boxes full of dried food, fresh fruit, vegetables, cans and jars, sacks of legumes, random specialities of wherever you're coming from, tastes of home and tastes of abroad forever unavailable in Mongolia. 

Last week, we cooked Christmas lunch for 9 people.  Tess' family had made the trek up to UB from Beijing and Melbourne for the holidays and we invited a few of our friends over as well.  Scrounging the usual Xmas accoutrements for that many people becomes a necessarily organised, coordinated and determined process in UB.  

The main challenge was finding a turkey in a country that not had a regular, if any supply of the big bird for about a year.  We asked Our Dear Friend Will to head the Turkey Exploration Subcommittee and he immediately turned to Daniel, the chef, owner, barista, and impresario of Millie's, the local diner that serves as the gathering place for large swaths of the expat community in town.  Millie's is a close UB analogue to Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca, and Daniel is perhaps one of the most connected dudes in town as I'm sure he basically knows everyone and almost everything that's happening in town, because everything is discussed at Millie's.  

Daniel asked his usual suppliers and the answers were uniformly depressing: there had been no turkeys in Mongolia since last year when a bunch were trained up from China.  We explored other options (an English butcher, the markets) and they confirmed the news.  And then, a few days later, a breakthrough, some South Carolinian company, possibly via a Russian intermediary, had dumped a few frozen turkeys in Mongolia and we had one.  

We then had to find all the rest of the necessary elements of Christmas.  Tess brought up frozen cranberries sourced in the incredible Hong Kong expat supermarket CitySuper.  A ham was located in a market across the street from the American embassy in Beijing.  I baked many loaves of bread from German rye flour: one for stuffing and the others for general eating.  We scrounged our way around Mercury Market for all our fresh vegetable needs.  The supermarkets provided everything else we needed, although, sometimes in comically large quantities so that we, for example, had to buy a litre of corn syrup and a kilogram of pecans for a pecan pie that needed a tenth of that at most.  

Cooking a turkey for the first time is an event rich with deeper significance.  For a week, I researched online obsessively for the best tips.  Stuffed or unstuffed.  High heat or low heat.  To brine or to salt or to not brine.  Trussed or untrussed.  Some recipes were incredibly fiddly and fussy (I have to drape the breast in a butter and white wine soaked cheese cloth for 60% of the cooking time? Fuck that noise, Martha Stewart!).  Others were the handed down wisdom of American homemakers, calling for the best in mid 60s comfort seasoning mixes.  Deep fryers were sometimes called for.  Some chefs offered their best bullshit cheffified sure to be turkey disasters.

Apart from the logistics of cooking a small dinosaur sized bird, there's the whole thing about being the first of the next generation to host and cook a Christmas dinner.  This puts those of the previous generation in an odd spot, one which they had never experienced, but soon confronted after enthusiastically and adventurously putting their hands up for a Christmas in UB.  The turkey is a case in point, as Tess' family never has turkey for Christmas, but it was something that I had always had growing up and was my first priority in Christmas feasting (for the day and then for the turkey juk a.k.a. congee the day or week after).  For a while, Tess' mum seemed at first unconvinced of any changes to the Christmas celebrations, aside from location, and then in turn paranoid about how we were going to junk all the traditions of the family.  In the end, not much had changed aside from a turkey in place of chicken and fish, some different takes on vegetables, the Christmas music (I insisted on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special soundtrack) and the giant bowl of maple bourbon eggnog we made (but wasn't drunk much in the end).

The day proceeded much as previous years I had celebrated with Tess and her family.  There was singing and dancing around the Christmas tree, followed by presents, and then finally a breakfast of sweet rolls, fruit and muesli.  Our Dear Friend Will and our good friends Lena and Nick came by around 2.  We ate lunch, which seemed to take a few hours, and then we went for a walk before dessert and more singing, which were mercifully (for me) cut off after awhile.  Outside on the streets of UB, Christmas day passed like any other day, as it's not a holiday since this is nominally a Buddhist country (a meat eating, vodka swilling, drunken fighting nation at that).  In fact, I had to specially request the day off and then returned to teaching on the 27th.  

The juxtaposition of our celebrations and the normality of the day outside was, for lack of a better way of explaining it, another absurd moment in Absurdistan*.

*"Absurdistan" stolen or borrowed from Our Dear Friend Will.  

A final note: we've had a few visitors to UB since we came here but it's always interesting to see how China people are constantly surprised by the differences between the 2 countries.  Tess' parents are experienced Sinologists with 30 plus years of experience in and about China, so they, at times, shrugged off our advice about Mongolia (from the safety of public transit to the nonavailability of lentils in supermarkets) mostly to adverse though not disastrous results.  While they adapted to UB somewhat by the end of the week, it was clear that despite geographic proximity, this is a very different place, a divergence that becomes exremely apparent to me the more time I spend here.

The Talent Show

In September, I heard the first whispers about something called "the Talent Show," and how it was going to happen in December but I had no idea about what it would entail or its scope.  Details started to emerge a few weeks ago.  Basically, every class from grade 1 to 11 would participate and each class would present a song, a dance and a dramatic performance.  The Talent Show would take place over 2 6 hour days at a local theatre across the street from school.

It's supposed to be a fun venture (but is shockingly serious) and for two weeks before the show, the kids practised almost every day after school, and on the weekends.  All the windows of the classrooms' were covered over so other classes couldn't get a glimpse of the preparations going on in the rooms.  During this week, the final run up to the Show, all educational goals were shelved for the sake of the Show.  Out of the 12 double lessons I had scheduled this week, I taught 4 as the students were sequestered by their homeroom teacher to practise their routines.  I would show up for class, ready and willing to go, and, if the class was nice about it, one of them would make an appearance and "ask" for permission to practise.  Other times, I would go to my room and find it locked or full of another class.  Eventually, I just stopped going to class.  When I did have class, students were too tired to focus and were distracted to the point of being unable to do any work.  A student in a grade 8 class confessed that they'd been working on the talent show every day and then were at school all weekend!  Insanity.

(At this point, you might be like, "oh boo hoo, you didn't have to do any work this week."  That's basically correct but, as I've described previously, being at school with no teaching related work to do is damn boring, and a soul crushing waste of time.)  

I didn't get to see any of the primary school talent show (I'm told I didn't miss much) but I did watch a fair bit of the secondary Show today.  First, the sheer length of it (7+ hours today with one break) was impressive and oppressive.  The performances themselves were mostly short but seemingly never ending due to their profusion.  Despite the "one song, one dance, one play" format, it seemed like every class instead fit 3 or 4 songs and dances into their "set" so that it was difficult to tell when one ended and another performance began.  There were the somber songs about the necessity of water, the John Denver cover (!!!), the somber monologues in Mongolian, the en masse dancing to dubstep, the overly dramatic skits about life on the steppe/Chinggis Khan/both, the Adele cover (played by a bunch of grade 8s learning how to play their instruments), the songs on traditional instruments, the modern interpretative solo dance pieces, the bboy routines and so on and so forth.  (And that was just the kids in grades 6 to 8!)

In an Australian or a Canadian school, I think such a show would be a voluntary, extra curricular pursuit (if anything at all), instead of at the centre of the school's priorities.  In a way, and I have no evidence for this whatsoever, it seemed like a holdover from the days of Communism, with its emphasis on the collective performing completely irrelevant pursuits for the benefit of the whole (at the expense of the larger, more important goals).  I'm paraphrasing here (and leaving out some profanity), but one foreign teacher asked, "if that was it, that wasn't worth all the lost time."  He is, of course, dead right but perhaps there's more since the students who won were pretty happy.  The losing classes though were devastated.  I tried to say hello to one of my most boisterous students afterwards and he couldn't respond to me at all, utterly heartbroken at his class' failure.   Perhaps that's the lesson of the Talent Show (and much of Mongolia): there are winners and then, son, there are losers.

3 sights on the way to school today:

• I passed by a manhole that I know is home to a few dudes.  Those unfortunate souls without even ger space live in the sewers, huddled next to the heat bearing pipes for warmth.   Usually, it's closed but this morning, for some reason, it was open.  I peeked in and saw 2 fellows hunched together in the space of a phone booth, in a completely dark, dank and filthy sewer.  Running straight through their space, and serving as a divide between the two, was the heating pipe, spewing out steam and whatever else.  
• Further on, one of UB's ubiquitous feral dogs was hobbling along, shivering in the cold morning air, in the parking lot outside a hotel.  It spotted a dark , now frozen pool of (human) vomit.  Starving, cold and probably on its last legs, it stopped and ate the vomit.
• For a Buddhist country, there sure are a lot of Christmas related decorations around.  Every major building has a massive fake tree outside of it now (the biggest is in Sukhbaatar Square outside the parliament, naturally).  But, the one display that got my attention is above.  Central Tower has gone above and beyond by setting up a giant, Coke sponsored Santa Claus, which somewhat oddly is glancing ominously towards a statue of Marco Polo, as if to say, "what the fuck are we doing here?"

The Cold, The Cold

Portrait of the Bloggeur as a Cold Man

I grew up in Edmonton, so I grew up in the cold.  The changing of the seasons there was brutal and unrelentingly regular.  After 2 months of OK summer and 2 months of ever more depressing fall, winter and snow arrived by Halloween and then you lurched into Spring in late March.  With winter comes the tools of survival and the usual travails.  You froze your ass off.  You hauled out your winter gear (parkas, long johns, snow pants, gloves, mittens for when it was too cold for gloves, toques, scarves of various lengths, and whatever else might be useful).  You spent your time after school toboganning down ridiculous steep slopes on your trusty blue Krazy Karpet.  You had your heart broken by the Oilers.  It was winter: these things just always happened.

I left Edmonton when I was 18 and since then I have never really experienced a true, damn cold winter.    Vancouver's winter features pounding rain and general, grey dreariness.  Toronto has its cold moments (especially when the wind comes off the lake) but, in my one winter there, it was generally mild and tolerable.  Melbourne's winters seem much colder than they actually are, especially if you are blessed with a cold house without any central heating (pretty much guaranteed if you want to live anywhere decent).

I have now found myself in a real winter for the first time since 2000.  (I've been holding off on writing about the cold for awhile until UB had well and truly sunken into its deep Siberian chill.)  It's now about minus 35 in the mornings climbing perhaps 15 or so degrees on a great day or 4 or 5 on a lacking one.  And there's another 10 to 15 degrees to drop before we hit the bottom and the yak's heart freezes.  I leave the apartment at sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 each morning, and head into the darkness and cold bundled up in all the winter essentials.  The time just before sunrise seems to be one of the coldest times of the day.  By the time I've walked to school in 20 minutes (see: above portrait), my beard is frosted over and logged with icicles, my thighs ache with cold (especially if I forgot the longjohns), my feet tingle with cold (probably because I wore my Fred Perry sneaks instead of my boots) and my will to power is nearly sapped.

It's funny what's comes back to you, as long repressed knowledge of living and walking in the cold flood your consciousness.  What to wear.  How to find the warmest routes.  Your ingrained knowledge of when you're damn cold but ok and when you're damn cold and fucked.  I've found it's all about knowing your limits and experiencing what's ok with your body and what's not in extreme climates.  I often (over)hear Australians in town complaining about the amount of layers and clothes you have to wear and the time it take sto get ready to face the elements.  But, then, I was a whinging mess of a man during my first few, sweat logged summers in Australia.  Eventually, you learn what you can do and what you can't and you get on with your life.

UB's cold though is more extreme than Edmonton's for a couple reasons.  First, the depth of Edmonton's winter doesn't compare.  You get your minus 40 days here and there, but it doesn't stay down there for months on end.  And, second, Edmonton doesn't have Ulaanbaatar's smoke problem, that makes it the second most polluted city in the world.  One of UB's most striking features are its extensive ger (yurt) districts that comprise about half of the city's population (perhaps 500 to 600 thousand people).  Each ger has its own stove for cooking and heating, but to make it warm enough to be livable, the gers are forced to burn all sorts of shit ... from dirty, lower than low grade coal to bricks to tires.  The city's geography, nestled in a long valley ringed by high hills, means that the smoke doesn't have a chance to blow away, leaving an ever present haze of cough enducing coal smoke.  It's interesting teaching the kids about urban development in IGCSE Geography because, reading the tests and homework, you'd think that ger produced smoke is the biggest issue facing the world right now.  But, to these kids and anyone who lives in UB, the smoke is something that you experience everyday: it's ultra visible and damaging.

In a cosmic joke, the heating of Ulaanbaatar is worthy of an absurdist novel, designed and built as it was by the Soviets.  Basically, almost every permanent building (excluding ger districts and some new developments) is heated centrally via a network of over and underground prehistoric looking pipes that carry steam and heat from various plants directly to your apartment  (much heat is lost from origin to destination).  For most people, you have no control over it.  It's turned on in September and it's turned off in May.  The intensity depends on the building with some receiving a paltry amount and others enduring furnace like heat.  My building, probably due to how it was the apartment of the secret police, is definitely in the latter.  The heat, especially in the bedroom, is so overbearing that we often need to open windows to regulate the heat (and let a lot of smoke in), sometimes for hours upon hours in the night. The only salvation from the heat comes from the smoke laden, minus 35 winter air.