How to Cross the Street in Mongolia

The camel walk and the dragon walks. These are two walks I created to navigate UB. The camel walk is a useful walk to employee at night or when walking on uneven or slick terrain. It is especially useful for detecting the many manholes strewn about UB. It is also a good way to detect if a manhole is sturdy or not if you choose to find out if it can support the weight of a person. Of course sometimes it is best to just avoid the manhole if you can. If anyone has seen a camel walk, you know how to do the camel walk. You just raise your leg a good foot off the ground and put it down slowly and methodically. It looks a little goofy but it beats falling in any manholes. That happened to a good friend of mine and he got a rather good gash on his chin as a result of falling in. I showed the walk to some secret laughers (Mongolian women) and they found it to be quite funny.

The dragon walk is a useful method one can employ to cross one of the crazy streets in UB. What it amounts to is making yourself visible to other cars because Mongolian drivers will not stop for people wanting to cross the street. At the same time one should be able to leap out of the way and/ or run. Sometimes it is best to just wait for the light. I am usually able to get drivers to slow down or stop their car. It is alway a good thing to be mindful of where you're going and if you see a sudden lull in the traffic and you know that you need to cross the street; you should cross the street. There are probably another 20-40 cars coming all of whom will in all probability not slow down for you. I do not about Mongolian law on the matter but culturally Mongolian drivers have the right of way on the roadways.

Recent trip to my site

While working and living as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia, I lived in Khuvsgol Aimag, Tarialan soum. Aimag is roughly the equivalent of state or county and soum means town. I lived about 9 hours by car southeast of Lake Khuvsgol just north of the Selenge river.
I returned to Tarialan about 2 weeks ago to visit the family I lived with while a volunteer. Elhagvaochir is a physical education teacher in the soum. His wife was one of my adult students. She's a fourth year (almost done) student at Mongolian National University in Erdenet. She's studying to be an English teacher. I saw their children and Elhagvaochir's younger sister. I was really happy because when I first arrived the little girl I named when she was born remembers my name. Urnaa, Ochir's wife, asked her daughter "Who is he?" in Mongolian. Saikhnaa said my name followed by a word that means older brother. I was so happy as I thought she may have forgotten me, but this wasn't the case. Other than that I visited the houses of most of friends in town. Most of friends were other teachers and assorted school staff, some store keepers, and some people who work at the local cultural center. There is a new Buddhist structure on the hill east of town. So everybody in Elhagvaochir's family including me visited this stupa to offer cheese and milk to it. I stayed in Tarialan for about 9 days until I had to return to help 2 Italian social scientists my best Mongolian friend and I are helping do research in Khuvsgol and in the Republic of Buryatia in Russia. They ran into some problems and Serdamba and I need to make sure they return safely. Serdamba was especially concerned because two English people we met, Serdamba and his brothers ran into some problems with the border guards. The actions taken by the border guards was completely unfounded. They're just a bunch of jerks who threatened to put the English people in jail even though they had not broken any laws. In the end they only had to pay a 10,000 tugrig fine for Serdamba. In the end we prevailed over those jerks.

Tim & Sam

My name is Dean Villa. I first met Tim and Sam on the lonely planet thorntree. They like my posts and contacted me because they thought I could help them find the type of experience they wanted in Mongolia for their honeymoon. My friend Serdamba, his family, and I were able to fulfill their needs. They are spending their honeymoon by accomplishing dangerous undertakings such as mountaineering and horseback riding. Part of their mission is to learn how the locals do it in selected areas. So in Mongolia they wanted to learn the horseback riding skills that Mongolians use. A little bit more about their incredible journey later. I'm new to the art of blogging and am just learning how to post and such.

A little bit about myself. I'm a former Peace Corps volunteer who worked in Mongolia as a PCV between 2000-2002 working as a TEFL teacher in a small town in Khuvsgol. Stayed on working in a private school in UB for another 2 years and then returned to the states. I returned in the summer of 2005 working as a tour guide. Now I am back working in educational exchange. My hobbies include travelling, learning foreign languages, bouldering, swimming, hiking, reading books, and watching movies. My ultimate dream is to live sometimes in Gachurt which is a small community east of Ulaanbaatar and some of the time in Northern California.