Howdy everybody,

Hope you are all enjoying the coming of spring (or fall, depending on your hemisphere), wherever it may find you. I’ve been in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, for almost two weeks now. Though the temperature is around 10F when I walk to school, Mongolians think the daily high of around 16F (-8C) is perfect spring weather – not too hot and not too cold. The 12 American and 2 Japanese students I’m living with disagree.

Today is International Women’s Day, so there is no school. Yesterday our language instructors gave us roses and cake in honor of the holiday (a remnant from the days of Communism). So Happy International Women’s Day to you!

The smog here has got to be deadly, so I wear a surgical mask when exploring the city, as do most people who spend a lot of time outside. As hard as it is for me to adjust to urban life, it has been a lot of fun feeling like a four year-old again, sounding out the Cyrillic letters on buildings and signs. But unlike learning to read in English, I have not the faintest clue what the signs in Mongolian mean. And so I walk around with my nose in a dictionary. 2006 is the 800th anniversary Chinggis Khan’s founding of the Mongolian Empire and there is a lot of stuff going on leading up to big celebrations this summer.

I was really sick with a fever the first week, but have almost fully recovered. On Sunday, our first day off of class, another student and I went for a hike in the mountains around UB to get some fresh air and play in the snow. We accidently came down the wrong side of the mountain and ended up in the president’s vacation home compound where we were promptly escorted by Mongolian military into a guardhouse for interrogation. After failing to successfully communicate in Mongolian or English, they made us sit and watch ice skating with them for almost half an hour while the head guy must have dialed every phone number he could think of, trying to figure out what to do with us. Finally they ripped the film from my friend’s camera (having not found my camera in an inside pocket when they searched us) and we were free to go. They sent us off with a “Nice to meet you!”

One of the lecturers who spoke to our class last week is a professor and national security advisor to the Mongolian government. It was inevitable that questions came up regarding Mongolia’s enthusiastic participation in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ and the strong public support for the sending of 120 troops to Iraq/Afghanistan. The professor replied that ‘People here don’t mind because secretly, after 800 years, they are glad for Mongolians to be back to Baghdad’. We got a great kick out of this, a running joke and not a serious explanation of public opinion.

Sorry to ramble for so long, I’ll write again in a few weeks when we return from our first rural homestay, in the Altai Mountains of Bayan-Olgii province near the southwestern border with China. I hear the Kazakh people there only eat horse meat . . .

Alana Wilson is a friend of mine at UNC Chapel Hill. The university funds her exciting expeditions to places as far off as Alaska, Africa, and Mongolia. As you may have noticed, she’s also a dedicated vegetarian.