Home

It's amazing to me that I have been in Mongolia for six months now. I have been living in Tsetserleg for four, and it just recently hit me that I consider it home. When I was on my way back from UB after Thanksgiving I just wanted to get home. My life here has settled into a pretty nice routine. I have a dog whom I love, and that certainly makes my apartment feel more like home. Sure we have our arguments about the acceptableness of peeing on the floor or jumping on my head at 6:00am and whining, but all in all she is super cute and fun to have around. I have also made good friends that I spend a lot of time with. We go riding on the weekends, or make dinner together during the week.
I've even started to feel like people in the community recognize me and are starting to realize that I live here, I'm not a tourist. There are certain little kids that always smile say "Hello!" to me as I pass, and some the delguur owners are starting to recognize me. There are also several kids around my apartment who know Sophie and anytime I take her outside they all swarm around saying "Soapy! Soapy!" (Mongolians have a really hard time with the "f" sound).
Realizing that Mongolia feels like home also makes me think about all the things that I have come to accept as normal, that only a few short months ago seemed so strange. One of the biggest is hand washing all my clothes. I have never before in my life hand washed clothes, and it really is a huge pain in the ass. I'm a lucky one though, I actually have a bathtub with hot water. I've gotten it down to a certain science now, and though my clothes don't ever seem as clean as they used to be when they were washed in a machine, it works out well enough. With the cold weather it's become a bit more of a hassle. I only have one short line over my bathtub to hang laundry inside, so I usually just hang it outside even though it almost immediately freezes. I have found, however, that if I leave it out for about three days it will be dry (even though it stays below freezing all the time now, the sun hits my balcony all day so my clothes can melt/dry).
It's strange to think that I consider a place where I understand maybe one third of what goes on around me home. I've gotten used to only communicating with my limited vocab and/or hand signals, and not understanding the conversations that go on all around me. It will be so weird to go back to America and understand everything everyone says.
I've even almost gotten used to buying meat at the market. I don't buy meat for myself, but I do buy it for Sophie (I hope she appreciates the lengths I go for her). The cold weather helps, because the meat market doesn't smell as bad as it did when it was warm. But I don't know if I can even call it a "meat" market anymore, it's more of a "fat" market. All the animals have fattened up from the summer, so now the meat table is a sea of white, with maybe a little actual meat snuck in some places. Usually the only meat I eat is that cooked by others, and I'm ok with that. Cooking meat is just way too much hassle for me.
Cooking in general is a hassle. Every meal I have to cook myself, and sometimes it's depressing to be really hungry and know that it will take nearly an hour to cook anything. That being said, there is Korean Ramen that I can buy in the Delguur in my apartment building, so when I get really desperate and lazy I can eat that. But it's nothing like at home where you can buy pre-packaged meals that only take like 10 minutes to make. Oh how I miss those frozen Bertolli pasta meals!
Probably the strangest thing that I have actually gotten used to is peeing in the middle of a flat, open field. Traveling in Mongolia is a whole different world from travel in America. There are no gas stations with bathrooms to stop at. There are some Delguurs scattered along the road to UB, but they do not come equipped with indoor plumbing. Maybe an outhouse, but usually not. So every time the bus stops everyone piles out and scatters. The older women in their dels are smart, a del is almost like your own private outhouse, the rest of us just suck it up and walk a little farther away and hope no one is watching. That being said, in this matter Mongolians respect each others privacy. Privacy isn't really a concept at all in Mongolia, but when it comes to the necessity of peeing in a flat field, people look the other way.
Mongolia is a strange country, but if you really think about it America is more of an anomaly. A good portion of the world lives a life that is much closer to what I experience here than that in America.