a couple days in the capital

August 17 - Today I officially became a Peace Corps Volunteer. There was a big ceremony, but I will not bore you with the details. One of the more important events surrounding the last few days of training was site announcements. We finally received some information about what our next two years of Mongolia will be like. For our first two months, we mostly got vague answers beginning with the statement: “It depends...” So long story short, I'm going to live in one of the cities of the Gobi desert, and I'll be living in a Ger. My situation is pretty good. I'm actually pleased that I'll be living in a desert and I also wanted to live in a Ger.

I also met my training manager. She is very nice, but does not know much English, so I was using my survival phrases to carry on a conversation. “Do you like potatoes? What is your favorite color? Is winter cold?” Actually, I asked more relevant questions than that, but my language skills are still very limited.

Before going out to site, we did some shopping in UB (the capital). I said goodbye again to some of my friends. I became pretty close to some of them, but work and distance might prevent me from communicating with them very much. At least I've got a phone now!

Oh yeah, and I took advantage of the movie theater in UB. I watched the new Batman movie and I also saw Brave. I missed out on Spiderman because the showtime was too late at night :( They were in English too, which was very helpful. There are quite a few movies on TV but they are usually dubbed in Russian, Korean, or Mongolian. Napoleon Dynamite was on the other day, but it was not nearly as good without the actual voices.