Click here to view our Picture GalleryUlaanbaatar, Mongolia - Wednesday
Allison Graham (One World Youth Project Board Member and teacher in Massachusetts) and I have arrived in Mongolia!
Tonight, Tuul (teacher), Odnoo (university student mentor), and Odnoo's grandmother (the school director), met us at the airport and we made the hour and half drive to the city of Ulaanbaatar where the New Generation School is located.
The first glimpse of Mongolia I saw was a land from a story book. As we drove from the airport to the city the night was as velvet dark as you could get and I saw stars scattered across the sky in all sorts of places that I never knew had stars. In the distance were dozens of glowing rectangles -these rectangles were the doors to gers (yurts... a common house structure in Mongolia). Tuul and Odnoo spoke in bursts of joyful sounding Mongolian in the front seat. I was so tired that I had to focus on certain visual landmarks to remain awake -my hand, the back of the front car seat. It was as though, for the first time ever, I could actually feel the rotation of the Earth - and it had carried me on a conveyor belt to the other side of the world.
You know that feeling when you first step off a 'moving sidewalk' -so fast, so easy... then boom!...the world slows down and you have to work for balance. Well, I had to work for balance tonight. I had to concentrate on the expected differences and lean closer to the similarities - otherwise I might have tipped over from exhaustion.
As we were driving, Tuul kept receiving text messages from the students on her cell phone. "They want to know if you are here yet!" she said. "They say that they can't sleep until they know whether you have arrived."
They invited us into their apartment and we had a nice dinner and drank delicious aloe juice. Then around 12 am they drove us to our hotel so we could sleep.
Tonight, Tuul (teacher), Odnoo (university student mentor), and Odnoo's grandmother (the school director), met us at the airport and we made the hour and half drive to the city of Ulaanbaatar where the New Generation School is located.
The first glimpse of Mongolia I saw was a land from a story book. As we drove from the airport to the city the night was as velvet dark as you could get and I saw stars scattered across the sky in all sorts of places that I never knew had stars. In the distance were dozens of glowing rectangles -these rectangles were the doors to gers (yurts... a common house structure in Mongolia). Tuul and Odnoo spoke in bursts of joyful sounding Mongolian in the front seat. I was so tired that I had to focus on certain visual landmarks to remain awake -my hand, the back of the front car seat. It was as though, for the first time ever, I could actually feel the rotation of the Earth - and it had carried me on a conveyor belt to the other side of the world.
You know that feeling when you first step off a 'moving sidewalk' -so fast, so easy... then boom!...the world slows down and you have to work for balance. Well, I had to work for balance tonight. I had to concentrate on the expected differences and lean closer to the similarities - otherwise I might have tipped over from exhaustion.
As we were driving, Tuul kept receiving text messages from the students on her cell phone. "They want to know if you are here yet!" she said. "They say that they can't sleep until they know whether you have arrived."
They invited us into their apartment and we had a nice dinner and drank delicious aloe juice. Then around 12 am they drove us to our hotel so we could sleep.
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