Frozen Steppes of Asia

Guess where I am!  That's right! The cold steppes of Asia!  Actually, it is not that cold now.  Some days.  Except for a few days ago when we had to walk around in a frigid ice-sand storm.  Cold deserts are fun!

The flight was like all flights, really long but you survive.  Going to Korea was cool! The airport was more like a mall with airport terminals stuck on, so many shops!

So, I got here Sunday night (3 March) and spent the night with two Elders who I then followed around on  Monday for their P-day activities.  They took me to the Church office building, and we went to the airport to pick up the rest of my district that was arriving on a later flight.  Then we started normal missionary stuff.  We read Elder Maxwell's dedicatory prayer on Zaisan Hill where he first gave it.  Then we did various things at the office, got some training, and met our companions.  Mine is Elder Lloyd, which is funny because his name is pronounced the same in Mongolian as it originally should have been in Welsh!  What a coincidence.  We live in Onor, the farthest western area of Ulaanbaatar.

My companion teaches English at a private elementary school, and he has between 1-4 hours of class during the day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  During that time, I study language and read the Book of Mormon, but I will soon also be planning to teach my own English class.  I'm not sure yet, but it sounds like I will be teaching at a sort of community college, or rather, a school between high school and university.  But I probably won't start until April, so they say.  Anyway, I will be an "employee" of the school, giving tests and issuing grades and all that.  It will be cool.  You may wonder how we can teach any missionary lessons with a part time job.  But we are plenty busy, mostly because Mongolians are awesome!  Essentially, we replace tracting time with English time, and then we teach investigators we meet through referrals, and it's great.

The food is ... interesting.  It's hard to get a cold drink, but we can buy delicious juices at the store.  Most drinks are heated (go figure, it's cold here).  One drink is called hyerem; if you want to taste it, mix milk (the irradiated, Mongolian kind) with water and a lot of salt, then drink very warm.  It's an acquired taste.  I could go for some lemonade.

Elder Lloyd is a pretty good cook.  We made some sort of chicken stir fry a couple of times.  Once we had a stroganoff of sorts, which was like stir fry but with horse instead of chicken.  That was pretty tasty.  Dried sour milk curds are not tasty.  But I'll get used to them.

It looks ... cold!