Great Mongolian Romance 2007

On our way home from our afternoon horseback ride, our guides wanted to stop off at the base of turtle rock and play some pool. There are a few pool tables set up and it is apparently their only form of entertainment. So we stopped and I met a Mongolian cowboy named Suuk Bot. He spoke no English but we had a lovely little chat, aided by Burma, who also served as our translator. We went back to our Ger and hung out at the billiards table in our little Ger town and a little later Suuk Bot showed up and wanted to hang out. It was a very funny conversation that we had through Burma, our translator. He asked me how old I was and not long after that he suggested that we get married. I thought maybe that was a little fast for me to jump into an engagement so I decided to point out some potential difficulties we might have as a couple, he gave some rather compelling arguments. I asked him how we were supposed to communicate if we couldn’t speak the same language. He told me that he would teach me Mongolian and that we really wouldn’t need to talk much. I can vouch for the fact that he really was a man of very few words, unfortunately I am most definitely NOT a woman of few words. I asked if he had ever been to the US or would want to live there he said we could go on our honeymoon there but then we would live in Mongolia. He told me he was the best looking Mongolian around and he was very rich and would be a very good husband. He invited my friends and I to his ger (which he shares with his parents) for breakfast the next morning. He said he would come over to our Ger on his horse to take us back. The next morning he knocked on our ger door and then led us over to his Ger past his herd of horses. His mother made us fried empanadas for breakfast and we hung out in their Ger. Suuk bot showed me all of their baby cows and after breakfast this dad took us to show us where they get their drinking water. They attach a plastic bottle to a tap in a tree and take the water from the tree. We had it for breakfast. It was cool and really good. Suuk Bot invited me to stay there at his Ger with him while the rest of my friends headed back to reality. I considered my options carefully, and while I do want to learn new languages and live abroad for the rest of my life, and as cool as it would sound to say I lived in a Ger with my Mongolian cowboy and drank water from a tree…I hate the cold, and Mongolia gets cold. So I said farewell to my Mongolian boyfriend and I am very happy that we ended things amicably.



We went back to Ulaanbaatar and went to a real Mongolian dance club. The live band was from the Philippines and all of their songs were in English. We had a great time dancing and then went home and crashed. The next day we bought some souvenirs and visited the square. Odd, fun fact: Most large cities in the world have a main square and it is typically my favorite place to visit. Then we got on the train to head back. The ride was much less crowded and therefore, much more pleasant…at first. I tried to sleep but the windows are not sealed very well so half of the Gobi desert flew into the train car and I inhaled it. My face and mouth were coated in a layer of dust and I couldn’t breathe so I sat up with my covered by my shirt all night.

We found a dirty little minivan with only one backseat to take us across the border. Unfortunately the border was closed so we ended up waiting for 8 hours for it to open. There were two alleged causes for the closure. One, we were told that the border couldn’t find the stamps for the passports and the second report said there was no electricity. We finally got through, and got on our bus back to Beijing. We slept on the bus and arrived in Beijing at 5 am. I went home, showered and then headed up to church. It was a fabulous trip. I got everything out of it that I wanted and would do it again all the same in a heartbeat.

Ah the Mongolian Country Life

We were greeted in Ulaanbaatar by our three friends; Eric, Devon and Mike and Burma, a girl from Mongolia who served her mission with Eric in Oklahoma. We went back to the hotel, took a much needed shower, went to the store to buy snacks and a much needed pair of sunglasses to shield my eyes from the intense desert sun and the crazy sand wind. There was not much of selection so I ended up getting some hideous things with an atrocious gold design on the side. and then jumped in cars that Burma had arranged for us and headed about forty minutes outside of the city to a place called turtle rock to experience the TRUE Mongolian lifestyle.

On the way to our campsite we saw a couple of Mongolian men with a HUGE eagle stopped the side of the road. We stopped to look at the eagle and he let us pet it and let whoever wanted to hold it, put on this big glove and hold him. The eagles feathers were so thick and hard that it almost felt like a reptile. A little further along the road we saw aOn the way to our campsite we saw a couple of Mongolian men with a HUGE eagle stopped on man with camels. We stopped and he let us ride them for 1,000 tigirig (about a dollar) a piece. It is a fairly bumpy ride but it was fun.















At turtle rock there were lots of camps full of Gers. A ger is the Mongolian version of a tee pee. It is wider and shorter and made of lambskins and everyone in Mongolia used to live in them and LOTS of people still do. Right in the middle of the city there are a bunch of little neighborhoods that are divided up by fences just like a normal neighborhood but instead of a little house in the middle of each, there is a ger. Inside the Ger there is a stove that is right in the middle with a pipe through the middle of the roof. The beds are placed along the outside walls. The front door is really short and it is pretty warm inside. Especially when someone keeps the stove going all night. We had stew for dinner and then went wandering around in the hills.




You will notice huge fake dinosaurs in front of these Gers. Come to find out, Mongolia is somewhat of a dinosaur graveyard. They dig up all sorts of bones in the deserts.


We woke up the next day and had arranged for a lamb to be slaughtered. We watched and I was expecting to be horrified but it was so quick and clean. Nothing like what I expected. The Mongolian guides made a small incision in the lamb’s chest and then he stuck his arm in all the way and snapped the lamb’s spinal chord. The lamb didn’t even move. There was no blood during the whole slaughter because they kept all the organs in the lambs natural membrane. They put the pieces of meat into a large milk can with rocks that had been heating up in the fire and then put the can on the stove in the middle of their ger.













We left on a horseback ride with our two Mongolian guides. Mongolian horses are much smaller than what you are used to in America but ther are really strong and strong willed I might add. Mine had a real attitude problem so I cussed at it in Mongolian and hit it with the reins…she didn’t care.









We visited a Buddhist temple that was up on a hill and then went riding around all over the place before coming back to a delicious Lamb lunch in our ger.














Many of you unadventurous travelers have said my vacation didn’t sound all that great. It was in fact AMAZING!! How many of you have pet an eagle, ridden a camel, eaten fresh lamb or learned how to curse at a horse in Mongolian?

Stay tuned for part three, entitled, my Great Mongolian Romance 2007....

Great Mongolian Adventure 2007 Part 1

On Sunday after church I rushed home and threw a few items of warm clothing in a backpack and headed to a bus station about 15 minutes from my apartment to start my Great Mongolian Adventure 2007. To commemorate the one-week May holiday 4 friends and I decided to brave the deserts of Outer Mongolia. I met up with my friend Faye and we climbed onto a tall red bus. Inside there were three rows of bunk beds that stretched from the front of the bus to the end. The bus started heading north out of Beijing at 5 pm and we rode, talked and slept in our bunk beds until 5 am when we reached the border town between Inner Mongolia (part of China) and Outer Mongolia (not part of China). We took our time getting off the bus (it was 5 am and cold) so by the time we got out we were the only bus passengers who hadn’t been swooped away by the over eager cab drivers. The 20 cab drivers who were left without passengers attacked and were trying to physically drag us into their cars using rather unconvincing coaxing in a mixture of Chinese, Mongolian and English. According to Faye one guy even grabbed her bum! Since when will that convince a girl to get in your car? There was one HUGE Mongolian man with long dirty hair and wild eyes. He looked to me like what I imagine Ghenghis Khan looked like. We decided that the Genghis look alike was a good omen for our trek into Mongolia so we jumped in his car and he took us to a little hotel where we could nap until the border opened at 9. We slept and then after haggling for a price for the ride that would take us through the border we got in a dirty old van and the driver drove us around town for three hours looking for more passengers.
We left China and got Mongolian stamps in our passports and were dropped off at the train station in Outer Mongolia. On the wall at the entrance someone had spray painted in English “Death is comino” we assumed they meant Death is coming but were undeterred. We got to the train station at 1 pm only to find that all the train tickets had been sold out for the day. Our friends were waiting for us in UlaanBataar and that 17-hour train ride was the only way to get there. We tried everything to get on that train. Even all the scalper’s tickets were sold out. We had asked and begged everyone but were finding no solutions.
This is the lovely border town that we almost got stuck in.

Then Baikel found us (she is the one in gray). She spoke some English and is the kindest warmest person I think I have ever met. She made us her project for the day and dragged us around town trying to use every connection she could find to get us on that train. Finally she hooked us up with a train smuggler who spoke no English, we paid the woman 20,000 Togrot (about 20 dollars). At 4:30 as all the ticketed passengers were charging the guards at the doors to the train cars our smuggler took me and yelled at the guards to lay off as she pushed me on board. Baikel yelled, “you will have to find Faye in one of the other cars when the train starts moving!” Once on board I was alone in a crowded sweaty train car with lots of boxes and tons of people who spoke no English and looked at me as though I were definitely lost. I sat down near a family and prayed that Faye had made it on board, I had no way of knowing since our phones didn’t work and I couldn’t go looking for her until the train started moving…when it would be to late to do anything about it if she hadn’t.

The train started moving and after about twenty minutes I started to walk through the crowded cars looking for Faye. I found her 6 cars up sitting in a sweaty heap with a large group of Mongolians.
This begins the portion of the trip that we loving call Tangled and Sweaty Mongolian Adventure 2007. We were so excited that we both made it. I joined the sweaty heap and we made a bunch of friends although nobody spoke any English. Fortunately, through my experience living alone in a country where I can’t communicate and teaching children who don’t understand me, I have become quite proficient at communicating without words and well, Faye is a phenomenal artist. Her drawing of a toilet wowed them all. Mongolian culture is unlike any other I have seen. Everything is communal and everyone is family right from the start. There are no formalities, (well other than if you step on someone’s foot you have to shake their hand). I figure this culture must come from the fact that Mongolians are traditionally people who live a very hard nomadic desert life in tents. They MUST help each other to survive so their charity is not so much a gift like it is with Latin Americans as much as it is a way of life. It seemed to me that the way they look at life is, if you are in their presence you are family. No questions asked, you are treated like family and they expect to be treated like your family. They get close very fast and they don’t expect gratitude for the kind things they do for you, they do them because that is who they are, not because they are looking for a reaction from you. We hung out all night until our smuggler, who found us later and brought us back to her car, and her people got off. Then we slept until about 9:30 am when we pulled into Ulaanbaatar after a 17 hour train ride across the Gobi Desert.

Here is a picture of a traditionally dressed Mongolian man who cuddled with our sweaty heap for a few hours.

My wordiness should come as no surprise to anyone reading this, but if you would like the condensed version for the next few days of the trek, let me know.

My Chinese Easter Part One

For those of you who were frequent visitors to my blog you might have noticed a prolonged absence. My excuse: I live in China and Blogspot was and still is blocked, don’t ask questions. Here is a long one to make up for it….

My Easter celebration began during my Wednesday night adult English class while I was trying to explain Easter without talking about Christ, virtually impossible. Then my students asked me why we use eggs and why we color them. The research I have done on the subject since then has been rather inconclusive. It is just a bunch of guesses. So I decided against the Easter egg tradition in exchange for something a little more Chinese and therefore a little more exciting.

On Friday night another teacher at my school named Belinda asked if I wanted to come over to her house for dinner with her mother and father and grandmother. We made Easter Jaozi. For those of you who read my Chinese New Year blog, Jaozi are very traditional Chinese dumplings. They are like potstickers, they are made with really thin dough and a variety of meat and vegetable fillings like beef and green pepper or chicken and carrot and then steamed. Belinda’s parents are a bunch of geniuses and used carrot juice, purple cabbage juice and some little green herb (not marijuana) juice to dye the dough orange, purple and green. So we folded the jaozi and they looked like Easter Chinese style. It was far less messy than all of the egg dying I remember and SO tasty. A fabulous Chinese treat. I did NOT however hide the jaozi about the house as I was a guest in the home and could not really imagine making her 96-year-old grandmother scamper around the apartment looking for them.














Saturday morning I went to watch conference at the church. There were about 50 people there despite the fact that it was a rerun. I enjoyed it so much. That evening I tried to go for my yearly Easter mass at the Catholic church here but it was so crowded I couldn’t even get in. I stayed and listened to the priest sing the Mass in Chinese for a while but then I had to go to meet Aunt Ada.














Ada (Grandma Allred’s sister) and Dex (her son, Dad’s cousin) were staying at a very nice hotel right in the middle of Beijing so I went and had dinner with them. They had been to see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and had gone pearl shopping at the pearl market. It was so fun to see family all the way here in China and on Easter no less.

That night we went out bowling and I broke one hundred. I know that claim is rather pathetic to most of you bowlers but…I bowled a 43 a couple of weeks ago. My secret, I just let the ball do the work.

I spent the night at my friend Faye’s house and was able to get to church in 15 MINUTES instead of the standard 2 hour commute to church that I have grown to love and hate. That was my first Easter miracle, then I got two bags of Easter chocolately goodness from a couple of the amazing members of the branch here. Side note: If a person gains nothing else from living abroad other than the chance to see how wards were, in my opinion, meant to function like a close knit loving family then it is all worth it. I have been blown away by how amazing the members of the church are here and how kind and loving they are toward me. So, bags of chocolatey goodness was Easter miracle #2. Conference, as always, was amazing but I was really sad to see Sister Parkin be released. I am sure the next General RSP will be wonderful, but for some reason I really loved Sister Parkin. She just seemed so humble and real to me, like someone whom you could just sit down with at her kitchen table and talk about life and she would be wonderful and understanding and loving and down to earth. More on that later. After church a family from the ward invited the YSA over to Easter Dinner; Easter miracle #3. There was hanging out and general Easter appropriate merriment to be had all day. All in all it was a fabulous Easter weekend and what with three miracles, someone should be sainted.

Fall Carefully

I haven’t posted much from Beijing but I am having a blast and my internet is a nightmare. I am paying for unlimited access BUT I have had the internet guy out here twice already and it works well for like the day that he comes and then it starts to get spotty and unreliable again.

So, class is going well. I am learning how to be a first grade teacher and as it turns out it is kind of tough and really exhausting. I tell everyone that I teach a swarm of first graders because I think that is the best way to describe them. They are like a swarm of bees, cute, in constant motion and ALWAYS making noise. It is especially interesting because the kids don’t understand me. To them I sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher and so they find it very easy to tune me out so that is exactly what they do. They have been given English names to emphasize the “English environment”; problem being I only know their English names and most, if not all, of them can’t recognize their name. So I can say their name a bazillion times and they will never turn around and stop hitting the kid behind them. I have however learned some great techniques let a teacher or a speaker know that you’re bored. One of my favorite includes acting like you died all of a sudden and you just slink out of your chair and fall motionless to the ground and remain there until the pace of the lesson changes to something more exciting. The other one that I think works well is getting out of your chair and going to the back of the room and acting like a frog leaping across the room. This one will usually draw the attention of all the other people in the room that are bored and cause them to join you.

Every day at 10:00 am all the students have to go to one of the courtyards and they do “exercises.” There are a bunch of dances that the PE teachers have taught the kids. They blast music through the loud speakers and the kids are all supposed to do the dance in unison. These are my first graders. They don’t do it as well as the 7th graders but they are getting it.

I teach about 50 of the teachers at the school every Wednesday night and that class is REALLY easy in comparison and actually a lot of fun.


A guy from the branch who speaks really good Mandarin taught me his method for learning new vocabulary and correct sentence structures. It consists of carrying a small notebook and a pen with you wherever you go and writing down new words and the way that people use them. A teacher from my school invited me to go with her to a huge botanical garden in Southern Beijing. It is March and still freezing so this garden was all housed within these huge greenhouses. Having never been much of a flower person, I went more to get more Chinese vocab for my notebook than for the flowers but I was amazed with how beautiful the gardens were. We were there all day and I had a blast with my friend Belinda, her parents, her grandparents, her friend and her friend’s daughter. These were my favorite ones. In Chinese they are called beautiful Butterflies.

This last one is just because well, as China becomes more and more foreigner friendly they are trying to translate a lot of their signs into English. Some times the most entertaining part of a tourist attraction are the translations. This one is one that I liked from the gardens. It says "fall carefully" and is placed over a pool of sludge. What, may I ask, does it mean to "fall carefully?"

Miss Desk

So I made it to Beijing despite the crazy bus driver’s best efforts to kill us all. I did get to see how the people of rural China deal with a car crash from my seat in the bus I could see the big crane lifting the car and aided by about sixty onlookers. No police tape, no concerns about safety and really no supervision. What will become of China when people learn how to sue?

So I got to Beijing and was promptly taken to my apartment. I live alone in a “nice” two-bedroom apartment south of Beijing in a little suburb called Yi Hai. The school that I work at is like a five-minute walk from my apartment and I get all my meals for free there. They are actually pretty good meals. The school is a HUGE private school with about 2,500 students. Many of the students live at the school and they all wear these great brown uniforms. I was hired to participate in a new program that gives the first grade students three classes with a foreign teacher each week. I have nine classes with about 30 students in each class. The students are, for the most part, well-behaved. They have a ton of energy, which, comes as no surprise because they are first graders. The other thing that makes teaching a bit difficult is something the Chinese call the “little emperor syndrome” which affects many of the little kids in China. Since China’s one child policy is still in place (although not as strictly enforced) it means that all the children in China are only children and not only are they only children, for this generation they are also only grandchildren which means they are used to being doted upon and cherished and well, spoiled so they get a little cranky when they have to share the attention of a teacher between 30 students. So far it is not too bad but every teacher that I have met in China says that this situation is a particularly difficult challenge, especially among the wealthier families. I teach 29 classes a week including two classes to the teachers.

On the first day of class they asked me to do a review of some of the vocabulary they learned last week. So I had the kids running around touching all their vocab words. Like the door, something blue something red, the blackboard etc. When I told them to touch a desk a bunch of them ran up and started touching me. I was really confused at first but it turns out that Jessica sounds very much like “desk” to a first grade Chinese student with a limited vocabulary. So now the students call me Miss Desk and I am sure they are very confused as to why my parents would name me desk. Mom, Dad and explanation? I will try to take some pictures this week but I don’t’ feel very touristy in Beijing.

In the meantime...here is a picture of one of Cui Guo Hua's nephews. I took it to show you all the famous Chinese split pants. This is the East's answer to diapers. Basically little kids wear pants that are split in the middle until they are potty trained. When they are little they just pee on the floor or on the sidewalk or wherever. They are potty trained a lot earlier here (I have been told) because they never learn to pee in their pants. The result, all the little kids saunter around with their bare bums sticking out and it makes me a little uncomfortable to hold the babies.

New Years Day!

On New Years Day I was startled awake by the blasting in of the New Year with all sorts of explosives. For breakfast we had Jaozi as is the custom and my Chinese little sister Mimi put on her new clothes which she was thrilled about.

Then I went with Cui Guo Hua to perform another very important New Years custom, that is to go around to all of your friends and relatives and wish them a happy New Year. At each of the homes they offer you fruit, candy and nuts from a platter and beg you to sit and stay awhile. At each of the houses you refuse and leave within five minutes.
We visited Cui Guo Hua’s uncle’s home and I took this picture to show you a typical Chinese farmer’s home. It consists of three rooms, the one that you enter is the kitchen and then there is a bedroom on either side, the bedrooms typically also serve as sitting rooms to entertain guests. The bed is a huge brick block that takes up on whole side of the room and is connected to the stove in the kitchen by tubes underneath to keep it warm. The front is ALL windows and typically faces East so as to let in the light and the warmth and there is a huge pile of corn in front of every home in this area of the country they are all corn farmers.

We also visited Cui Guo Hua’s grandfather. He was so sweet and nice and I thought he looked like cute old Chinese man.

For lunch and dinner we had jaozi again and I had hid a quarter in one of them, Cui Guo Hua’s mother found it, Lucky her!







That night when I got home, Mimi wanted to go and light fireworks in patio by her apartment complex, so her father took us downstairs to light some. Mr Hui works in the forest service and regularly gets calls in the middle of the night to go fight fires and Mrs. Hui is a nurse so you can imagine how mild the fireworks they let Mimi light are. It was a completely different experience than the night before.





The next day Cui Guo Hua’s friend wanted me to go with his parents, his wife and he to visit the village where he was born that was up in the mountains and has only had a paved road between it and Ping Quan for a few years so you can imagine how isolated they have been. In Ping Quan the people stare at me as they walk past. In the small villages they actually stop in their tracks and act as though they have seen a ghost. His friend's father was born into what was a wealthy family before the revolution and so, because of his last name, was ordered by the communist party to go with his wife to a tiny, poor village up in the mountains to be a doctor for what the Party called "reeducation." This picture was taken in front of the home of the lady who babysat Cui Guo Hua's friend.















This is the hospital that his father worked at and is still being used as a hospital. Inside it was freezing and very dirty and there were tons of broken empty glass medicine bottles.