My Thanksgiving was interesting. The site-mates came from not only my immediate Aimag center but the two soums as well. I literally cooked all day and used every last but of water for clean up. When the cooking was said and done, despite not having a turkey, I would say we did darn good! We had chicken seared in butter and oil, marinated with lemon, red wine, garlic and seasoned with parsley flakes and pepper. If I do say so myself it was moist and delicious! We also had mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, garlic bread, pie and cookies. We drank wine and champagne. It felt like posh corps for a hot minute! And talk about delicious! When we were done we were stuffed and fully satisfied. We even had Thanksgiving decorations that had been passed down from other volunteers.
The week after thanksgiving was filled with rehearsals. I had a teacher come to me the Thursday before thanksgiving and ask that i teach her students a dance for an upcoming competition. We practiced literally three times for three hours and by Tuesday I had fully taught the students the dance. It was tedious and I definitely do not want to have to choreograph a dance that quickly again because it made me a bit of a bear (especially when the students weren't focused and laughing the time away), but I have to say I was pleased with the outcome and today when talking to the teacher she stated that the dance went маш cаин байна (mash san bain) very well! She also said her students thanked me. It was greatly rewarding.
On Thursday I left for the big city (Ulaanbaatar). All of my site-mates and I left early and were pleased to arrive no problems around 4. I had a very nice long restful night. Friday I went to the British Embassy Christmas party with Marc. It was a lot of fun, and I got to meet a lot of really great expats living in Mongolia. Marc grabbed tickets to a drawing that was occurring and lone behold (definitely due to his luck and not mine) we won a bar tab! It was an exciting moment;-)
After an amazing night I had to be up bright and early for training. It ended up being a tedious 10 hour long training Saturday and an even more tedious 10 hour training on Sunday. It was great for our CP's but not so great for the PCV's as we had another 5 days of training ahead of us. This is Brittany's counterpart and mine during the lunch time training.
Saturday night the PCV's went out to a club. It was a fantastic time had by all...as is evident by the pictures!
IST was filled with a TON of information and lot's of nights like pictured above. By the time Friday came, I was ready to get out of there and have some down-time. Saturday, after saying my goodbye's to Marc (he went to the UK), I did all of my laundry and went out one last time to celebrate Angela's birthday. It ended up being hip hop night where we were and dance offs occurred. Artists were drawing on the walls all night as well. It was a nice ending to a long week and all the PCV's had an amazing time. My sitemates and I made it home to Arhangai about 10pm on Sunday and I spent all of Monday running around completing errands. When I got back home and was ready to clean and put away my food I couldn't find my keys. I had accidentally thrown them in a dumpster and the words needle in a haystack came to mind. Thankfully Will had an extra set and needed to go to the black market to make copies. I was able to grab a tree and some decorations so I called it a win win. After halfway decorating my Christmas tree, (I need more lights) I made some food and crashed. It had been an amazingly long couple of weeks and I am glad it is over.
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