Learning my ABCs

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The writing’s on the wall.

Fruit salad, yummy yummy.

Better in than out.

It’s snowing this morning.

I stay huddled in my room. At least it’s good working weather.

Taking an experimental route to my first Mongolian class at Nom-Ekhe at 2pm, I regret my decision when I arrive there late. No-one else is late and I infer that it’s important to be punctual.

My teacher is friendly, but seems doubtful that I can learn enough to get by in only 2 weeks. Nevertheless she’ll do her best. Each session will last 80 minutes and cost ₮ 25,000 (NZD 19).

She sends me home with a handful of A4 photocopies to revise. On the way, I stop at the supermarket to buy 4 large cans of Del Monte Tropical Fruit. They’ll be eaten, eventually, but their function right now is to prop up my work desk – my posture is suffering terribly from bending over all the time.

Plastering my wall with yellow sticky notes, I allocate one to each character of the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t do this in Russia. Ok, I didn’t actually have my own wall there, but it would have made a world of different to be able to understand the world around me.

Pillage the fridge

At dinner time I retrieve my food from the shared fridge, but am disappointed to find that someone drank the rest of my vodka and left the bottle in the fridge!

A disrespectful act, more so as it was the Genghis Khan brand. Or perhaps that’s fitting?

On the upside, my stomach is settling down and gas is the worst thing that I’ve had to content with today.