It's warmer now! Like 10 degrees during the day!

Oh no! It has begun. I am lagging behind in my blogging. I will be posting again soon about all the exciting New Year’s festivities, but for now here’s an update about life in Mongolia.

A few days after the buuz-making extravaganza my new roommate Holly moved in! Holly is one of the Fulbright English teaching assistants (ETAs) and has been in Mongolia since last August. She had been living with a Mongolian host family but things were getting stressful and so she was looking for a new place to live. Right about this time I was looking for someone to move in and split the rent. Perfect! The next day we braved the cold and visited the giant outdoor Narantuul market for some additional home goods including some interesting mugs, more plates, an outlet, hangers, and a trashcan. We hadn’t thought about the approaching New Year, and the market was mobbed with people shopping for gifts. It was like Christmas Eve shopping or something. We have to go again tomorrow to get a desk and a table because the market will be closed for a few weeks after Tsagaan Sar. Apparently this is because everyone spends all their money preparing for Tsagaan Sar and there is no point in opening the market until at least a few weeks afterwards.

As we are approaching the 7th nine of winter, the temperature is definitely warming up. It's still cold at night, but during the height of day it gets up to about 10F. The snot in my nose doesn't even freeze! It's so warm you hardly need a hat! Lulled into a false sense of warmth, it's easy to wander around outside for half an hour until you realize that 10F is actually still really cold and you have lost feeling in your toes.

But for keeping warm I'm in luck, since my friend Hannah taught me how to knit! We then spent a day traipsing around UB trying to find yarn, which turns out to be extremely uncommon. For a country full of wool-bearing livestock, this seems odd. We think there must be a place that has it, and hopefully we’ll find it soon!

So that's just a little of what I've been getting up to, I'm also still keeping up with the language learning and networking. I will add more pictures soon and the next post will be about Tsagaan Sar, which is coming up next week!

Bayartai!