Movin' on Up

We got a refrigerator!!!!! We are so excited, it is probably hard to imagine our overwhelming excitement but we didn’t realize how much of a luxury it was. We can’t even explain to you how much it means to us to receive mail, emails and phone calls. It is like having Christmas everyday! Allie started work this week. She is supposed to wear a suit and heels to work. She is teaching teachers, 2nd, 4th and 8th grade students English. My name is now Allie Bagsh (or Allie teacher). The students here are amazing and very well behaved. They seem to have a lot of respect for their teachers. All of my students wear uniforms colored according to their grade. The teacher’s schedules are a little hard to figure out but luckily I have really nice counterparts that have basically held my hand throughout the process. I think my schedule changed 5 times this week and is still not set in stone, luckily I am pretty easy going and don’t mind change to much. The first classroom I walked into I was scared to death, I almost felt like I was a little kid again going to school for the first time. When I walked in to my amazement all the children stood up and in unison asked how I was doing or Sain Bain uu? A little overwhelming to have 40+ students confront you at once, but very cute. Mike said that they did the same thing in Nepal. The school system here is different than what I was accustomed to in the states. Here they have a split schedule- that is even grades go to school in the morning and odd to school in the afternoon. They have to do this because of the amount of students and space. The students also stay in the same class all day and the teachers move. I have also found it interesting that almost all of the schools are within the same 1 mile radius.
I think the best thing about going back to work this week is that Mike had the week off and became the housewife. I would come home to find him hand washing the laundry, cleaning or cooking us food everyday. I asked him if he was sitting at home eating bon bons and watching soap operas but it turns out he was eating mutton and throwing knifes.
It is a really interesting feeling to be a foreigner. It is really hard to describe how weird you feel being totally different and only being able to understand a very small amount of what is going on around you. Now that school has started and the kids are out in full force we do have a lot of people staring at us. Hopefully the more we become integrated into the community the less staring we will have. This morning I had about 10 kids walk me to school it was a very interesting conversation- they were all talking really fast and intermittently throwing in Allie Bagsh and the only thing I could reply is that I like bananas.
We are still enjoying Murun and all it has to offer. We now can use the internet just about whenever we want since it is only a 5 minute walk. We found really good tutors (our hasha family) so hopefully our Mongolian should continue to improve. There is a restaurant that serves really good schnitzel every Tuesday. At night we are able to see every star in the sky and the entire milky way and every morning we are able to wake up to the beautiful scenery of being surrounded by mountains. Life is good. We love and miss you all—Allie and Mike