The Journey Begins

In three days, my 12-year-old daughter and I are flying to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It is slowly sinking in, as I look around my house, that we are really doing this. Back in March I responded to a call for instructors by the Media and Communication Department at Mongolia International University. I asked my daughter, Emma, whether she’d like to spend a year in Mongolia. Her reply: “Sure, if we can visit Japan on our way home!” So, that’s what we are doing. We have our visas. We are mostly packed. And we head for the airport early Wednesday morning.

We decided to call our blog “Two Vegetarians in Mongolia” because the only thing I really knew about Mongolia before this (besides Genghis Khan) was that people there seem to eat a lot of meat, and we don’t. The blog isn’t going to be about food specifically. We both believe dietary choices are personal, so there won’t be any efforts to convert people to vegetarianism or anything like that. We just thought it was a way to point out that we expect to encounter a lot of cultural differences over the next year. That’s what we are going to write about.

So, if you choose to follow our blog, you can expect to learn about all aspects of our lives in Mongolia, not just what we eat. We’ll write about how it feels to be away from home, the new people and places we come across, and what we learn along the way about ourselves and the amazing world we are so lucky to live in. I’ve lived overseas before, but Emma never has, so I’m especially excited to see what she is going to make of the experience. We are going to miss our home, our pets (we have two dogs, two rabbits, a tortoise, a parakeet, and some fish that a house sitter will care for), our friends, and the beach, but we are looking forward to new experiences and new friends.

Thanks for joining us!