Felting

	Today we felted! It was really fun! The three colours I chose to make my hat – 120g of wool
	Making the first inside layer – small bits all in the same direction. RED!
	Making the first top layer – small bits of wool in the other direction (Mongolian merino wool). I mixed a coral/orange with a pastel pink.
	Make the joins – the orange fluffy bits around the edges felt on to make the hat round.
	Smooshing it all together – with soap and water and lots of hand mushing.
	Rolling it together – squish squish squish (note: the swirls are still in tact!)
	The machine helped a bit – round and round and round and round
		Both sides of my hat – the swirly patterns actually worked! That’s the front. The big purple stripe is the back.
	Cutting open the bottom of the hat so it opens to form a hat! (we put bubble wrap in the middle in place of our head, so as to make a hole in the long run)
		My BIG hat before we shaped it. left: the outside of the hat; right: my hat turned inside out
		After lots of shaping, rolling, kneading and squishing, the hat fits my head! Judge all you like but I like that it covers half of my face. It feels like I’m hiding under it. I can still see – you just can’t see ME!
		The hat drying at home after a good day out! (20,000tugrik for all our wool, help and our hat!)

Post-wallet

I don't misplace things, lose things or have things stolen. And some bastard stole my wallet while I was being super vigilant. I was outsmarted and I hate it. Everything's in the works. I've got cards on their way (albeit a 5 week wait), my Mongolian ID should be happening soon and I have a card/cash to get me through the next month. I bought a new wallet but it's not as cool as my last one.

I spent Tuesday afternoon at the police station and then went to the pizza night to meet the new AYADs. Wednesday was spent organising more things - my Mongolian bank card (which conveniently had a little bit of cash in it), my Mongolian work permit. And also spending more time with the new guys looking at apartments and having lunch with them. Thursday was a bit naughty. I didn't want to go to work. I mean, I went the other two days for an hour or so but was busy doing other things. So Thursday I just didn't want to go to work. I had things to do - I had to get a refund on those extra flights dad and I had to buy because the lady booked us the wrong flights. I wanted to pick up some more slippers to send home to slipper-less feet (Mongolian slippers are the bomb) and also look in to flights to London for Christmas.

I got the refund - the lady admitted her mistake (I almost fell off my chair) and said sorry. It doesn't really make up for the shit fight dad and I had at the airport, but the money (in cash, which is useful when your wallet has been flogged) and the apology goes a fair way.

Thursday night is trivia night. It was a bit further away this time but in a nice venue. It was stinking hot in there though. I shared a bottle of wine with a friend and then the bar owner gave us another for free so now I have a hangover. Damn it. I'm pretty useless at trivia. Like, I knew it was Obama's 50th birthday yesterday but when they asked 'Which head of state has a birthday today and how old is he' I had no idea.

We're one housemate down. It had to be done. Bad vibes in that house will hopefully be eliminated and now we just have to find someone else to move in.

A blog with half disclosure is probably not as true to life. So, here goes. I'm having a pretty shit time. I feel like I'm skimming each day past by just living here, and not willing to delve any deeper. Having my wallet taken and no water in our house for 2 weeks is just the icing on the cake. I knew my 3month mark would be hard and it is. My work isn't helping. My job is to turn up to work and sit at my desk. No one has given me work, even when I ask. I fake smile all day and I make fake conversations most of the time because I can't bear to think much about how I'm actually feeling. I spoke to the counsellor we have available to us yesterday which was great. All we did was talk and there was no epiphany moments. It was more just reassurance that my plan of attack is fair and justified. I will try my hardest this month to find enthusiasm and make my work happen. I will be attentive and pushy and take lots of iniative. If by the end of the month, I still feel how I do today I will take drastic measures and find a new job in Mongolia or something like that.

Tomorrow we're going felting. I think I will make a hat. I'm not really looking forward to it because I am just still so epically tired. I think my exhaustion is mainly stemming from the fact I have nothing to do, so I may as well just rest. But I am still exhausted - I still haven't been able to go home and fix up my room, wash my sheets and just sit in my room and ponder the world. I also really want to make a dress and because my house is so stinky and inhospitable at the moment, I haven't been able to do that either. So, felting will be fun because I won't be as hungover as I am today. And then Sunday I will be not doing anything. At all. I might watch a movie and some Gossip Girl and bake some beetroot.

Marmot

I got to stay in a hotel in the soum centre which was lovely. I cooked up some pasta with a tin of tuna and a tin of corn and geez it was good. I ate SO much food, it was just delicious. Proper food that I didn’t have to woof down. From the soum centre we slowly slowly made our way home. By this point I was just in a home mind frame. I hadn’t been home for ages, I needed to wash properly and do home things.

So when we left at 11am for an 8 hour drive, I knew we were pushing it. We ended up driving 120km and stopped nine times. Each time we stopped we had to drink at least two bottles of vodka and say thank you again. I was beyond livid. There’s no way to explain the anxiety, helplessness and pure anger I was feeling. When you have no option but to roll with what’s happening, your life is in someone else’s hand. When they take over another vehicle at 140km/hour on a shit road around a corner, you’re looking for fate to be on your side. When you eat next is up to someone else. When you get home is up to someone else. Where you sleep, go to the toilet – everything. And no one was telling me anything because everyone was so tired and no one wanted to be there and they were hungover and sick of translating for me.

Anyway, so that was the really shit bit. The good bit was stopping by an extinct volcano. It’s obvious from a far that it’s a volcano. Everything else is mushed up rocky mountains and this volcano is a perfect conical shaped mountain in the middle of no where with a dome on top.

The hike up the side of the volcano was epic! It was very steep and got my heart thumping out of my chest. This is the view from the top (left: looking out from the crater; right: looking in to the crater):

The bestest bestest best part was the WILD STRAWBERRIES on the side of the volcano (and maybe the awesome chunks of aerated basalt).

Have you tried wild strawberries? If you haven’t, you should. They are the epitome of deliciousness. They are small – maybe the size of your pinkie fingernail at the biggest. They are mostly white with sometimes a bit of pink of them. And they taste like heaven.

I picked and ate a lot of strawberries and my driver picked me a posy of strawberries and I ate even more!

There was a massive commotion going on around the fire. I assumed it was another khorkhog of mutton. It wasn’t until I was sitting eating my strawberry posy that I realised the commotion was larger than usual and the cooked animal was a MARMOT! A marmot is a teddy bear sized rodent that is thought to be the originator of the bubonic plague. Marmots still carry the plague. It’s a shame because they’re really cute. It’s a crying shame to see them dehaired and decapitated.

They look just like a bloated teddy bear with no head. Their little feet are still attached and poke out. Their tummies are full of hot rocks that cook them from the inside out. Once they’re cooked, they’re cut open in the belly and the rocks and guts are taken out. The juice is highly prized and caught in a cup to share around. The meat is cut up in to rudimentary chunks and looks like pork belly. It’s very very very fatty and apparently very tough. I wouldn’t know, because I ran away to pick more strawberries because I couldn’t handle these people going nuts over eating a protected rodent that carries the plague and looks like a teddy bear.

Poor little marmot VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Eventually everyone succumbed to their hangovers and we piled in to cars and left. And the stopped again another 4 times to drink more vodka and then it was too late to drive home because Mongolian roads at night are dangerous. I guess I should have been thankful that safety was made a priority for a change, but at the time I was just ever so desperate to get home. We stayed in a ger camp that was really quite pretty. We ate two minute noodles for dinner. And I went to bed early because of my busy cultural day. below: our ger camp for the night

So the next morning we finally piled in to cars again and got on the way. This time we only stopped 7 times on the way back to UB and I arrived home at 4:30pm. We still have NO running water in our house and I wasn’t in the mood to wrangle a shower somewhere, come home to more mess and then not cook because there’s no water to cook/clean with.

I packed my pink wheely bag full of essential clothes, shampoo, pillow etc and wheeled to my friend’s house. I had a shower, washed my hair and sat and chatted to beautiful friends, which was the most important thing I’ve done for a while. I didn’t sleep much/well, I’m not sure why. Too much going on because I have a lot to do as I haven’t been in town to organise myself lately. Probably.

Today was a piece of shit day. I couldn’t face going to work so I sat at my friend’s house, moping while I waited for clothes to wash. I contacted the new volunteers that have arrived and organised to help them at lunch. I did some basic shopping at the supermarket and met them for lunch. We had a long chat, I had a salad. We went to look at apartments and stopped to buy some roadside fruit. My wallet had gone. So had my sunglasses case.

SOMEONE STOLE MY FUCKING WALLET FROM MY BAG

I am SO vigilant with my bag. It is leather and has only one zip that I hold closed. I hold it in front of me even though it’s impractical and uncomfortable. I never leave it open – blah blah blah. And some GOT IT. They got my WALLET. My credit card, my two debit cards, my Alien registration card (very important in Mongolia), my work permit, my brand new Australian license. A lot of Mongolian money, two house keys. And my favourite wallet I’ve ever had.

I was with all the new guys, and out of pure exhaustion I didn’t even express any kind of emotion except for a couple of swear words and a stamp of my foot. What could I do? It was gone. All my important stuff was gone. And I needed rest time. It was just taken from me – both my wallet, and my rest time. I had to go to the police station where they didn’t believe I’d lost it because I was in a big group and carried my bag so no one could touch it and all that jazz. But someone did and they stole a part of my patience with Mongolia. I’m here to help and if they needed my money I could have helped them with that too. Motherf*****Ers.

I haven’t cried yet and I don’t know if I will. And I know in the grand scheme of things it’s no big deal – I’m still okay, nothing happened to me and it’s all replaceable (at a cost though!). It’s just very very disheartening and it came at the very, very worst time possible. It’s never a good time to lose your wallet, today just feels like an even worse time for it to happen. It doesn’t even really seem real. But it is. PAIN.

Volleyball and Disco time!

I have been exhausted, sorry for the delay. And lots of spanners were thrown into the works.

Saturday we drove to the soum centre, so our office could play volleyball against the soum centre office. We lost but it was a really fun game to watch. It was held in a very old school hall with floorboards that were all falling to pieces.

After volleyball was a disco that was organised by the soum centre. I wish I had have written this earlier as the details would have been a lot more real. It was an hilariously fun night. I kept being forgot – everyone assumes someone else is looking after me and no one queries anything. So I wandered around the soum centre (village) until I heard booming music and followed my ears to the sound. I was correct. Albeit incorrectly dressed. I had been told to bring nice clothes for the disco but of course in my flurry of unpacking from Russia/repacking for this trip, I forgot all about it. All I had was my stupid North Face pants and a Lorna Jane gym top with thongs. I didn’t really look the part, especially in between cocktail dresses and suits. Too bad. I was there, which was good enough.

I took my thongs off because it’s hard to dance a shitty waltz with a guy who can’t dance, when you have thongs on.

So I was bare foot, dirty haired, hairy legged and clothed like I had emerged from the forest.

Not to worry. It was SO cool. It was a big dance hall with BIG loud cheap speakers that BLASTED everything and ruined whatever sound came out them (and my ear drums!). They would play a waltz song and a guy would ask a girl to dance. And they would dance a two step waltz til the song was over and then share a sigh of relief and sit back down. Then a pop song would BLAST out the speakers and everyone would bounce up and dance to Lady Gaga or some other recent hip hop song.

Then a lady would turn the electric keyboard on and start the automatic sound and then play a one handed tune to the automatic music. It was bloody terrible! Partner dancing was done to this too. Everyone would sit and watch the dancing and judge everyone on how well others danced. Everyone was terrible! Including me as I just couldn’t get the steps they were trying to do. Luckily most people didn’t want to ask me to dance – yay! It was like being in year 4 at primary school doing dance lessons in the school hall again. But better, because it was way more entertaining. It was awkward to start with, knowing that everyone else felt the same way. But once you embrace it, you realise it doesn’t really matter.

Once that realisation struck, I went nuts. Who cares, right! If no one else is going to party, why not BE the party? So party it was. A song would come on that we were allowed to ‘single’ dance to and I’d go crazy, having great fun pepping everyone up and dancing in the middle of the circle being entertaining. Oh man, I was totally in my element! One song came on that no one else would dance too, and I’d already started so I couldn’t back down. So what else to do, but take the whole dance floor? AND THEN I got a helper! This Mongolian guy who can break dance to the moon and back! We danced together the whole song, everyone watching and cheering. Love it!

The night went on and on and on like that. I took my bottle of Bundy Rum that dad brought over with me. I’d saved it because I knew the vodka would run out eventually (this was the 4th night). We started handing around the vodka and one of the girls took charge and was the distributor. She hid it like it was a school disco an we weren’t allowed to dance. It was so cool. Everyone LOVED the rum. In hindsight, straight, hot Bundy rum tastes a BUTTLOAD better than hideous cheap vodka. What does that say about the vodka here?!?!?!?!??!………………………………………

Above: one of the more awkward partner dances; the soum governor trying Bundy rum; proof I was actually there!

I piked once the night was over and went to bed. It was a good decision because everyone else was up to all hours drinking more vodka and airag.