Silence (6/10)

At eight in the morning opened the inner door of the school and stood the entryway. I checked each pocket: keys, wallet, cellphone, and camera were all there as I had placed them.

I took a final breath then opened the door, stepping out into the bright sunshine of another sub-zero winter day. Crossing the road, I caught a taxi and told the driver to head for the Peace Bridge, a bridge built by the Russians as a symbol of friendship between Russia and Mongolia. The driver looked at me in the rear view mirror, seemingly confused about something.

"Are you Russian?" he asked in Mongolian.
"No, American" I said.
The driver stared at me for a few more seconds, contemplating the idea of an American wandering around alone on a sunny winter morning for no apparent reason.
I absolutely love being mistaken for something other than what I am. Not that being an American is bad, it's just cool to know you could just as easily be something else.

He drove me to the Peace Bridge, and from there I directed him to the bridge crossing the Toll river (fittingly, the Peace Bridge goes from nowhere to nowhere without crossing much of anything). When we got there he told me I wanted to go to Tsai San, the peace monument near the River that is a popular place to walk around taking pictures.

"Nope, river" I said in my limited Mongolian.

I walked down to the frozen river and put on my skates. The ice was covered with a thin layer of snow, and there wasn't a sound to be heard save the cawing of the crows and magpies. There were paths in the snow from countless people going to draw water from holes in the ice, but there were no people drawing water now.

I skated for two hours, completely alone.

Then my cellphone rang. Igtil, the front desk worker at the school, was calling to ask when I was going to show up to the meeting on increasing enrollment. Dangit. No one had told me what time (or what day) the meeting was.

I rushed back to the bridge, put on my boots, and hailed a taxi. After I told the taxi driver where to go he looked at me in the rear view mirror and asked me why I was out of breath. I held up my skates, which seemed to satisfy him. He then said it was a bit cold out. "No, morning cold, but now not cold" I said. He then looked at me again with a new question.

"Are you Russian?"

boo-yah!




Bird tracks and wing marks in the snow.

A picture from before the river got covered in snow.