I've noticed that Mongolian flies are smarter than American flies. It seems odd, but I am convinced that it is true. When an American fly meets a window it thwacks against the window repeatedly in an effort to get out. An American fly will stick close to the glass, so that if half the window is open (but the halves are separated by the window frame) the fly will never make it out.
A Mongolian fly, in contrast, takes a different approach to the whole window thing. when a Mongolian fly runs into a window it doesn't buzz in place. Instead it lands, and sits there for a few seconds. Then, the fly makes a wide arc, and lands either on a different window or in a different place on the same one. In this manner a Mongolian fly eventually succeeds in going out of the open half of a half open window.
I have observed this several times. I probably only mentioned it because Douglas Addams talked about a man who invented a fly that could go through the open half of a half open window in one of his books.

I think now that I have observed this difference between American and Mongolian flies I shall apply for a multi-million dollar research grant to study them. The future of the planet is at stake, trust me!

One short moon

This afternoon I was writing down phrases from the dictionary. I chose useful phrases like "he's an old friend" and "are you wearing women's underwear?". Suddenly I realized that I would be leaving in a month. Learning more Mongolian seemed somewhat pointless. Mongolian isn't an international language, and I almost never keep in contact with friends after I leave a place.
I keep on kicking myself for not learning more of the language while I was here.
I will say this much: whoever I marry is going to have to be willing to spend some time here, at least a few summers.

I will also say that "in ayalal gaikhaltai baison" - this trip was wonderful, but I'm pretty sure I butchered the grammar there.

So, now that the clock is ticking down perhaps my eyes will open up again. That's what I love about traveling; it opens your mind and makes you value existence.

Camera Kite

Last one, I promise.

I'm always the last one to know

One of the problems with being the only native English speaker that works at the school is that I never have the foggiest idea what is going on unless I ask. Unfortunately, I have yet to ask. This means that I'm always finding things out at the last minute.

I could understand conversations about upcoming events if I was concentrating on the conversation, but those conversations are so mind-numbingly boring that I never do. Once I stop paying attention to a Mongolian conversation it is very unlikely that I will start paying attention to it again, so from that point the whole thing is doomed.

I was in class this week, and when I looked at the schedule / attendance sheet I noticed that the term project would be in a few days. I told the students that the project would be due the next Tuesday.
The students gave me blank stares. "There's no class next week", they said.
"No class?" I asked, incredulously.
"No, there's no class", they replied.
I couldn't believe them, so I ran downstairs and asked Itgil the receptionist. Sure enough, there was no class. The entire school was being used for an evangelistic series (which I knew about) so all classes were canceled.

So... I'm going to try to find someone to stay with over the week, or perhaps several people. I want to spend a few days with people that don't speak English so that I can practice my Mongolian.

In other news, there was an interesting activity day today. Seven people came, which is a pretty good number. No one came up with anything to do, so I made pizza and we played cards. For the first time since I've gotten here everyone actually HAD FUN. It's amazing. It was probably partly due to a different mix of personalities, but I think it's also because I'm more used to people now, so I make guests feel less awkward.
We played Uno, a Mongolian game I don't know the name of, and a Chinese game I don't know the name of (there's one Chinese student). Both of them were great fun, so I'll have to play them with people when I get back to the US.
After about two hours I commented that it was almost three, and people took the hint and left.
Awesomeness.

Windy Day

It was a nice windy day today, so I decided to attach the camera to my kite and take video from the kite while it was in the air.

'twas fun.

Tsag tsag tsag tsag

English has around 600,000 words. German has about 200,000. I'm guessing Mongolian has fewer words than German, somewhere around the number that French has (about 180,000). Internet sources on the average person's vocabulary vary widely, but let's say that most people use between 10,000 and 40,000 words regularly. In other words, English just has a lot more words than it needs.

However, there are a few places where the Mongolian language is, in my opinion, somewhat inadequate. For instance: the words for clock, watch, and hour are all the same: tsag. "Time" as in "once upon a time" is odaa, but time as a general concept is also "tsag".

I tested out this oddity by creating a sentence, "The clock chimes several times a day on the hour". I then asked several people to translate the sentence. Most of the people who tried could translate it, but no one could understand them once they did. Finally someone translated it in a way that could be understood, but the meaning was somewhat different once it was translated back into English. She translated it as "The wall clock rings regularly throughout the day".

As far as ridiculous homophones go however, no language can top English. I don't think there's a language other than English that can make a sentence as confusing as this next one:

"The blue berry blew buried boars with the Boer, as the bored baler bailed her boat with a board."

I made that myself, thank you. -bows-

Homophones such as these are the bane of people who speak English as a second language. The words "pool" (as in a large, man-made basin used for swimming) and "pool" (as in billiards) have caused a great deal of confusion lately. A few months ago I asked Gerlee and a few other friends if they wanted to go to the pool. Gerlee wanted to go (though no one else did) so I went off to get my swimsuit and towel. When I came back down with my bag she asked me what was in it. I showed her. She was momentarily puzzled, and then said "AAAAAH, you meant swimming pool!".

I thought that it was over after that.

On Thursday I asked Gerlee and Datdag (her boyfriend) if they wanted to go to the pool. Gerleee said we should go in the afternoon on Friday. On Friday Datdag and I waited for her as we put together new tables for the church, but she didn't show up until about seven. When she did show up and saw me with my bag, she said "AAAAAH, you meant swimming pool!"

She then explained that she was too tired, and that she didn't want to go. I'd wasted hours waiting around for her. I wanted to throttler her, so I tried to explain the difference between "go to the pool" and "play pool", but I don't think it worked. I told her that if I ever talked about playing pool, I would refer to it as billiards.

Just when you think you've seen it all...

I've lived in six different places with snow, and this is one of them. However, today I saw an entirely new kind of snow. To say the least, it surprised me. There was some rain (seen it) followed by icy pellets (seen them) which changed into driving, horizontal sleet mixed with dust (seen it) followed by something entirely new which I have never seen. Big, triangular snow pellets started falling with an audible sound, bursting open on the ground like dirt clods. Some of them were more than half an inch across; the size of kidney beans. If it were summer I would have thought they were hail, except that the pellets weren't hail, they were soft snow. There was a definite layered structure inside them, like hail, except that hail is circular and these things weren't. They were shaped a bit like the re-entry capsule from the Apollo missions, only more elongated. Something like this:
Has anyone else seen snow like this? I asked the Mongolians, and they haven't. Some of them gave a name for it, but when I asked Sarnai what the word meant in English she said "thunder"... which I guess means they thought it was hail.
This is a picture of the snow after it had been melting for a few minutes. Seriously, a few of the ones I caught with my jacket were 3/4 of an inch long.