Settling in

We are adjusting well to our new home(ger) in Murun. We are learning how to do everything on our own (such as laundry, fetching water, cooking, food preparation, and cleaning). We didn’t realize how spoiled we were at our host families. Everything takes us a lot of time, everything is a process. We do have electricity and we are thankful for that but we can only use one electrical appliance at a time which makes cooking interesting. It also doesn’t help that we need to run our water purifier for about 5 hours a day. We are also learning how to live without a refrigerator. We didn’t realize how much we would miss it. It makes food gathering on a daily basis a little more time consuming. Soon we won’t have to worry though outside will provide us with natural refrigeration. We have basically become vegetarians only because we can’t store it. Poor Mike!! He can’t wait for winter.
There is a family of Americans here that run a farm on the edge of town. Yesterday, they were so kind in letting us pick all the American veggies (such as corn, green beans, peas, dill, lettuce, and zucchini) that we wanted. It was like Christmas in Aug. we haven’t seen many of these veggies since we left the states. We mainly eat potatoes, carrots, garlic and onions so one can imagine our excitement. For the next couple of days quite a bit of our time will be spent drying and freezing these veggies for the winter and spring. We have heard that in the spring time there is not a lot of food, so every little bit helps.
The weather here has been really nice although we can tell winter is approaching. It has been getting up to 70 during the day and dropping down to 40’s-50’s during the night. Luckily our ger has been staying really warm. We have only had to make a fire once so far. We have also been getting a lot of rain over night which always makes for an interesting morning. When it rains water tends to creep in under the sides and sometimes comes through the top opening of the ger. As far as maintaining the ger it is almost like a ship. There are ropes everywhere and every rope does something different. Alli and I are becoming expert knot tiers and know what just about every rope in the ger does. After we winterize our ger next month we should have a much more intimate knowledge because we will have to take the whole thing down and then put it back up. That’s all for now, we love and miss everyone. Alli and Mike