Hotel quarantine sign It’s Saturday morning in our apartment in Ulaanbaatar, and I’m sitting on our new patio chairs in what I’ve dubbed our sunroom, the enclosed balcony off of my bedroom, which also doubles as a drying room for our laundry. It gets the morning sun (and sunrise is around 4:30 am these days) … Continue reading Quarantine
Tag: Mongolia
Foreign contaminants
To enter Mongolia during the late stage of the pandemic, I had to be vaccinated. And since Emerson could not yet be vaccinated, we would have to quarantine for a week in a hotel, and then Emerson would have to stay home for a week after that. We also needed negative PCR tests within 72 … Continue reading Foreign contaminants
Back in Mongolia at last
We’re back! We’ve been back about two weeks, and I finally feel settled down enough to write about it. When charter flights to Mongolia started up again in the spring, and we started to feel like we could actually make it back into the country, we settled on May as the month to try. There … Continue reading Back in Mongolia at last
Not quite getting back to Mongolia
It’s been months since I’ve written regularly for this blog. When I started this (a few weeks ago) I couldn’t even remember the last post I’d written, so I just re-read it. September seems like ages ago. Some things have changed, and some have stayed the same, so here’s an update. The punchline: We’re still … Continue reading Not quite getting back to Mongolia
Our rooted rootlessness
Rootlessness is so strange. Don’t get me wrong. I love that world-is-our-oyster feeling that I’ve had since I sold our house in July. That feeling that I haven’t been able to act on because the global pandemic has shut us out of the country we had decided to live in. I love it. But what’s … Continue reading Our rooted rootlessness
Realizing what we’ve lost
Really, she's photo bombing. Start of school, 2018 It’s August now, and usually I/we start to think of the coming school year. I took July “off.” I wrapped up the sale of our house, did some administrative stuff (you never realize how many people and organizations have your address until you move, especially when you … Continue reading Realizing what we’ve lost
Waiting for Mongolia’s borders to open again
Brand new Monarch butterfly A new post is long overdue. A lot of things have been happening, and I’ve been having a hard time writing. Between the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the movement that’s responding to George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor’s murder by police in Louisville, and Auhmad Arbery’s murder by … Continue reading Waiting for Mongolia’s borders to open again
Back to Mongolia?
Sheltering in place, March 2020 What seems like a lifetime ago (it was March 12, 2020, less than two weeks), Emma and I were sitting at the café table outside of the art studio where she took art lessons until Covid-19 closed everything down. She was talking about what was becoming a familiar topic: how … Continue reading Back to Mongolia?
What we learned from living in Mongolia
A "ger" tissue box I wanted to write about our time in Mongolia for a number of reasons. I have lived overseas several times in my life, but many of my experiences are lost to me because I never consistently wrote about them. You always think you are going to remember things, but you start … Continue reading What we learned from living in Mongolia
How it all began
I am writing a book based on our experience in Mongolia, and this morning I wrote out how it all got started. People still ask me how we ended up going to Mongolia. Here's how: The email subject line was “Teach in Mongolia?” It was from a professor in my department at UCSD, sent out … Continue reading How it all began
Two Vegetarians in Mongolia 