She called Family Shikdang, the Korean restaurant just across the street from the State Department Store, and inquired about buying a kilo of Chosun comfort food. When told this was possible, we left at three, and by four o'clock, we were savouring chigae, bibimbap and various scrumptious side dishes. For some reason, we had about twenty tablemates in the form of flies. Why they weren't bothering the other patrons escaped logic.

We spoke with the couple who own the restaurant. They've been here for two years, and their elementary-age children go to a private Mongolian school. They like it here, but they worry about their kids education. In fact, they wondered whether we would consider tutoring them, but we politely refused, what with everything else going on. I mean, one of the reasons we came here was to have more free time to ourselves. We worked ourselves ragged in Korea, and now we feel we re entitled to your average Joe's 35- to 40-hour workweeks.

After paying nearly T15,000 for our meal and kimchi (a whopping T4300/kilo), we crossed the street to explore the State Department Store, of which we'd only gotten a taste last week.

There are four floors: one for food and books, one for clothes and cosmetics, one for furniture and electronics, and one for souvenirs. Needless to say, the prices were exorbitant, and the customers mostly foreign, at least on the upper floors. We found and bought some red-pepper powder, radish kimchi and soy sauce in the Korean food section, as well as some Tupperware and processed cheese slices for her lunches. I searched in vain for an English-Mongolian bilingual dictionary. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that there is no proper bookstore in all of Mongolia, judging from what I've seen in Ulaanbaatar. But then again, we have to remember that this is still a 'third-world country' by our standards, with a small population of two million and an underdeveloped transportation system. No matter, we have everything we need for leading a comfortable life, and I can ask Khanda for a dictionary on Tuesday.

One final trip to our supermarket made our day complete, as we settled down to a Korean meal of rice, soup and cabbage, radish and cucumber kimchi before Sun-duk went to bed and I watched a French programme called Union libre.

The scenery was simply gorgeous! Fall at its gaudiest, with catwalks of yellow-garbed larches and birch trees marching up and down the Tuul river. Herds of horses, sheep and goats dotted the landscape, quietly filling their stomachs alongside campers and day trippers. The day was warm, sunny and inviting, and the Koreans had brought with them a basketful of dried squid, chamehs (small yellow melons), grapes, kimchi, apples, and other assorted victuals.

First, because of our six o'clock meeting with Chris, I had to leave at the same time as Sun-duk, who will need our one and only key to the apartment an hour or two before I get home. She takes the number 2 trolley, which stops by our apartment complex and drops her off in front of her workplace ten kilometres away. The trolley is incredibly crowded; people were crammed in like sardines, until it actually hurt. I really fear for Sun-duk and the baby, and told her we would have to find her another way to get to work. The problem is that she can't get a ride - all of her colleagues live in "Korea Town", near the FftHI headquarters -, and that she can't get a travel allowance for, say, a taxi or taking a less crowded bus and transferring downtown to another bus or trolley.

Reaching the Soros office, I bid Sun-duk goodbye, got off, and once inside, worked for the next four hours on our homepage, discussed my Onol contract with Buman, lined out my vision for the various EFL and newsletter web pages, and answered e-mail. Then John, Kelly and I went to a really nice pizza place a block away and talked about a variety of topics which would be on the table during our monthly Monday meeting.

We discussed Liz first, of course. John and Kelly knew quite a bit more about the affair than I did; Liz, in fact, spent her last night in Mongolia at Kelly's apartment. Neither of them, however, could pinpoint what it was exactly that spurred her to abandon ship. It's my feeling, from what I knew of her, that she lives her life according to her intuition, a sort of vibe she believes comes from the universe - a new-agey thing a lot of women I've known subscribe to - and advises her from time to time. (If I'm mistaken, Liz, and you're reading this, please forgive me and tell me what went wrong.) The problems she was experiencing were not insurmountable, especially given the fact that Mongolia is so poor. All things being equal, I thought two-and-a-half weeks were not sufficient time to condemn a program or a country, but if my theory is correct, then nothing could have prevented her from leaving.

This sudden defection worried a number of people in SPELT, MFOS and New York. No one seemed angry or frustrated, just disappointed (this is not the first time something like this has happened); and so Chris called a meeting to make sure the rest of us are okay. John got the impression that our bosses wanted to know how they could improve our living situation and ensure our continued happiness and presence, and asked Kelly and me if we had any demands. A number of suggestions were made, including more money (John was getting US$500 a month in Azerbaijan, as opposed to the two hundred we're being paid here), a longer training period, more language lessons, an extra computer, easier access to paper and other office supplies, etc. All this was eventually brought up at six, and the response was fairly positive. We'll see...

Our two o'clock meeting with Buman focussed on our SPELT activities in the coming months. Number one on our list of priorities was the Medical College seminars next week. We visited the English staff last week - they almost all have Ph.D.s, but not in science and medicine -, and toured the department. George Soros has donated dozens of computers, hundreds of textbooks, and loads of software to help teach medical English, but the teachers/professors feel overwhelmed by the immensity of it all, and asked us to do several things, including integrating all the material into a comprehensive series of syllabuses, giving some methodology seminars, and teach academic writing. John, Kelly and I decided to split those three tasks amongst ourselves; John, the teacher trainer, will obviously hold forth on methodology, while Kelly will concentrate on syllabus and computers, and I on drafting articles and essays for journals and graduate dissertations. Because the funding is limited, the seminars have to be held before the end of the month, or else the money will be withdrawn. This leaves us short on time, but we'll do our best. The staff is actually pretty fluent in English, so I look forward to working with them.

Other items on the agenda included the in-service teacher seminars in Terelj next month and in February (a three-day retreat where methodology will be taught to high-school teachers of English toiling in the countryside), and another junket, planned for December to Dornogov province, on the eastern fringes of the Gobi desert. I, for one, cannot wait to visit more of Mongolia!

We had a bit of down time between Buman and Chris, so Kelly and I went to her apartment to pick up the suitcases Liz had left for Sun-duk and me. She was very kind in giving us two bags worth of clothes, almost all of my Jagi's size, and a boxful of medicine which we can use and/or donate to a local hospital. Thank you, Elizabeth!

Last, but not least: Buman received a notice from the post office that they had received a bunch of parcels from abroad! I tried to contain my excitement, since the boxes might have been sent by Liz back in June, or contain nothing more than textbooks for the various MFOS programmes. However, both Sun-duk and I have our fingers crossed that tomorrow, possibly, we could be celebrating Christmas early!

Buman left just before my three-thirty class, but I saw her again at six, when I went to the Soros office to join her and the other teachers for a visit to Zaisan Memorial. Oh, and did I mention that three boxes were waiting for us by Buman's desk?

We loaded the boxes into two cars, picked up Sun-duk and drove straight to the memorial, which sits atop a hill outside the city, offering a very nice view encompassing all of Ulaanbaatar.

The monument was built by the Soviet Russians in the seventies - ostensibly to honour unknown soldiers and heroes (there are several graves of Mongolians who fought the good fight) -, and is a prime example of socialist-realist architecture. There's a giant concrete soldier holding an even bigger concrete flat bearing a hammer and sickle. They're both connected to a huge concrete ring bearing a boggling - no, absolutely incongruous - assortment of images: medals, seals, emblems, Lenin, Alexander Nevsky, Stalin, and - get this - several Russian admirals! What the heck are Soviet naval officers doing gracing a Mongolian monument? Everything is written in Russian, with Sukhbaatar the only sop to the local populace.

The inside of the ring is a little better, lined as it is with a colourful mosaic of seminal events in communist Mongolian history. They depicted the 1921 revolution, the wars with China and Japan, a few other things I m not sure about, and, finally, a depiction of the first and only Mongolian cosmonaut, who went up into space in the early eighties, according to Buman.

I didn't take any pictures for two reasons: one, it was too dark (past seven, actually); and two, I'd forgotten to bring my camera! We'll go back some other time, though. It's an interesting place, and an excellent vantage point, as I've noted, to view Mongolia's largest city and its surrounding countryside.

(One last remark, and another reminder of just how close still Mongolians are to their roots, despite Ulaanbaatar's relatively big size: Lonely Planet, in its directions to Zaisan Memorial, tells the traveller to "catch bus No 7, which goes past the Winter Palace; Get off at the Agricultural University, walk across the fields, up a goat trail to the car park and then up the steps to the top." (p. 132) As a matter of fact, herds of livestock graze all around the city, just outside its perimeter. It's incredible just how thin the veneer of 'civilisation' is in this country. I hope it never changes, because we in the West can only dream of such symbiosis with Mother Nature and our "bestial brethren".)

Anyway, on our way back home, I chatted with our driver, a friend of Buman's. His name is Tsengel. He's an engineer, educated in Bratislava, like so many of his compatriots, in 1970s Czechoslovakia. He didn't speak English, so it was another wonderful opportunity to go at it in Russian. I sometimes surprise myself at my degree of fluency after six or seven years of this part of my brain lying fallow, but I yet wish I could go beyond small talk and take part in more learned discourses. All in due time, I imagine...

None contained my suits - much to the chagrin, I'm sure, of all who must look upon me and the pitiful state of my garments -, but there were a number of items which will nonetheless prove useful in the immediate and long-term future. More favourite textbooks from Korea, others for Onol, the balance of Sun-duk's wardrobe, my overcoat, a sweater, pictures (pre-wedding and modeling), toiletries, paper, tapes, etc. Three boxes worth.

I ate alone, this evening, a dinner widower; Sun-duk's boss' wife cooked up a batch of fish, that one thing which our expecting mother really misses in landlocked Mongolia. (Of course, I myself am jubilant at the fact that seafood here is as common a sight as flying pigs.)

Okay, now I'm about to rattle off a series of observations and private thoughts that have just been itching to get out.

Both water and cable are cut off for minutes or hours at a time during the day - usually to effect repairs, I'm told, not for any kind of rationing or conservation purposes.

I love the Chinese movie channel! No, Kirstie and Matthew, they don't show films from Hong Kong - they're all Western and Japanese. But my goodness, they're so much better than the movies on AFKN! Sure, there are duds, time-fillers like Scanners III and Eve of Destruction. Then there's the rest: movies such as Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility, The Man Who Went Up a Mountain and Came Down a Hill, Quiz Show Working Girl, Unstrung Heroes, Vertigo, Toulouse Lautrec, Lawrence of Arabia, and others. Average flicks from September include True Lies, The Glenn Miller Story, Waterworld, Jungle Fever and The Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments and Lawrence of Arabia were shown in the same time slot one week apart, and it was very interesting to compare these two movies shot only a year or so of each other. The first was a Hollywood production from beginning to end, all shot in a studio with kitschy sets, stilted, puffed-up dialogue and static cinematography. It really didn't differ a great deal from movies made in the thirties; it's as though the innovative twenties, the German UFA school, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and the French nouvelle vague had never happened. Lawrence, on the other hand, was an English effort, shot on location in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with wonderfully naturalistic characterization and speech, and gloriously fluid, even subtle camerawork. The fact that its artistic integrity was preserved on television - i.e. it was broadcast in letterbox format - made the four-hour journey through this prime example of Le Septieme Art, a pure delight for the mind and senses.

I'm also lucky, even overjoyed, to have TV5. Every night, there's a new movie on, invariably one I've never seen. France makes a lot of movies, for both theatres and TV, but not many make it abroad, not even to Quebec. They're always much more interesting than anything you see on English North-American television - but that's Europe for you. Apart from a deeper tradition in, and respect for, literature and the arts in general, the lack of money European filmmakers have to waste on special effects and big-name stars, all in the hope of attracting the lowest common-denominator viewer, translates into engrossing character portrayals, disturbing psychological dramas and thought-provoking philosophical musings. What more could a discriminating celluloid palate ask for?

There are no fast-food chains or Western restaurants in Mongolia. I like that!

Deposits and withdrawals at the bank are written down and then stamped in the customer's bankbook by the cashier, just like they used to do back home before the computer revolution hit in the early eighties. I like that!

There are no ATMs, thus no bank cards; so you'd better make sure you have enough money to last the weekend. Remember when you were young, how crowded the bank always was on Friday afternoons? I liked that!

Mongolian supermarkets have real bread, real cheese, and real cold cuts unlike Korea. I like that!

Czech Disko cookies are absolutely delicious! I love them!

Anyway, first, we got acquainted; then we talked about what we all wanted to accomplish this semester. I encouraged specifics, because Soros requires a syllabus. It was finally decided between the four of us that we would hold weekly discussions on textbooks and methodology for all the different English subjects taught at Onol: Business English, Legal English, Grammar, Culture, History, Geography, Phonetics, Conversation, General Translation, Lexicology, and a couple of others I can't remember.

At 2:45, I left school to meet Sun-duk at her office; today is Exercise Day at FftHI. However, there was practically no one there when I arrived, and for ten minutes, it looked like this week s sports-a-thon would be cancelled, and I would have a couple of hours to play on the internet! At four o'clock, the ministers and their interns all returned from their business trip, and I wound up learning something just as valuable: how to use the scanner they've got there! In fact, nobody there really knew how to use it, so they turned to me for help. I only have limited experience with scanning programmes myself (I had a scanner for a few months in 1996 in Ottawa), but I'm a quick (self-)learner, so I took my seat before the monitor and had at it.

What they needed me to do was scan pictures, edit them and paste them onto a Word document that would eventually be turned into a sort of pamphlet. They had absolutely no idea whatsoever how to go about it, but I had everything figured out in half-an-hour. Of course, I suggested that if they wanted to do further editing - more sophisticated effects like lighting, blurring, sharpening, etc. -, they would have to get a real image editor like the one I have on my Acer; so I'll give Sun-duk a copy of my XN Viewer on diskette for her to install on her boss' desktop.

Lucky for me, everyone left at around 5:30, so Sun-duk and I were alone with the internet until six, when our stomachs just couldn't stand being alone anymore - they were crying out for food, docile playmates for their little acidic children to push around the schoolyard.

We watched Spike Lee's Jungle Fever on the movie channel, a film I'd only seen once, in 1992, when it had first come out. I remember the stink Lee had raised at Cannes when he lost the Palme d'Or to the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink, going so far as to insinuate racism was involved in the judges' decision. Well, I ve seen Barton Fink, and after reviewing Jungle Fever, I have to say that the much better film won. Jungle Fever is a heavy-handed, clunky effort, with cinematography that can best be described as pedestrian. It's not a work of art as Barton Fink is, as all of the Coen Brothers' films are. That's not to say that Lee's movies are bereft of any merit; their function as consciousness-raisers in America's ongoing battle against racism is powerful and effective. Just not artistic, 's all.

For reasons that we poor mortal men can only pretend to understand, Sun-duk and the female intern desisted after a quick perusal of the premises. The male intern and I, however, didn't have much to lose from a bad haircut in these days where bald is in; so onward we pushed, all the way into the barber's chair.

It was fast - fifteen minutes at the most. Sun-duk stood beside my tonsorial torturer, gesturing what she wanted done on this portion of my head and on that. When my glasses were returned to me, and I had put them back on, I was very pleased with the result: short, yes, but stylish. Everyone had feared that my (female) barber would butcher my fine, and all-too-seldom-seen Caucasian hair, but I wasn't too apprehensive, for the reason mentioned above, as well as the fact that a Russian had preceded me and walked out in good follicular shape. For you see, my brethren, his neighbourhood is not only known as Korea Town among Chosun expats, it also harbours most of Ulaanbaatar's remaining Russian population. Et toc!

Tomorrow morning at 6:30, Sun-duk will leave with her FftHI colleagues to northern Mongolia, just below the Russian border, for a mission of charity. She'll be gone two days and one night. Everyone thought that since she was going, I must be going, too, since no Korean husband would ever let his wife travel without him, i.e. afford her the least bit of autonomy. Another lesson in gender equality for the good folks of Misogynist Central.

In any case, I really wish I could accompany Sun-duk into the Siberian wilderness of larches, birch and lakes. I'm sure it looks a lot like eastern Canada. And for the anthropologists among you (and in whose number I include myself), they will be visiting the Buryats, whose spiritual beliefs and lifestyle are the stuff of legend in learned circles. (Most Buryats live in Russia, and they are the Mongolians' closest ethnic and linguistic relatives.) We made sure she packed the camera; if all goes well, we will have two rolls' worth of beautiful pictures developed within a fortnight, after which we will scan the best and upload them onto this homepage.

Speaking of this site, you may have read the announcement at the portal page that we have been working very hard on expanding the scope of Our Peregrinations into the realms of EFL and bicultural marriages. The former is still a ways off - we'll probably put it up in bits and pieces, extensive a subject as it is -, but the latter has gone through the planning stage and is almost ready for execution. We hope it will be ready by November.

As for the Mongolian section, it's still a couple of weeks away. I have several more themes I need to research and write down, and I also want to find a couple dozen photographs and graphics to complement the text. It'll be nice, we promise you!

... I spent the morning working on the soon-to-be-released Mongolian section for the homepage, and on my upcoming seminar on medical and academic writing. That was sort of boring, since the connection to the internet was so slow, and I barely got anything worthwhile done. However, my first day at the Russian school was very interesting.

There is a joint Mongolian-Russian high school in Ulaanbaatar, near the Mercury Market. (You may remember that Enkha, Buman's daughter, goes there.) It's one of several foreign-language schools in Mongolia; there's also a German high school and a Korean elementary school, but I don't know whether they're as good as the Russian one. In any case, I must say I was impressed by the quality of the education I witnessed, and which is heads above the local public schools, I'm told.

First, the school is a two-storey, brown-brick building, attended by several hundred teenagers from the ages of twelve through sixteen. Most of them are native Mongolians, but there are not a few Russian kids, as well. They're much better behaved than in the West: they stand and greet the teacher at the beginning of each lesson; they pretty much stay quiet during class; they often get up to answer questions; and they're much more enthusiastic about learning than any schoolchildren I've ever seen. Maybe the cutest thing I saw there were the cloth slippers - they almost look like cheap handbags - everyone puts over their shoes to keep from tracking in mud and dirt.

Buman and I were joined by Buyanlkhan, one of the directors of ESPI (English for Special Purposes Institute). Her English is very good, and best of all, she believes experience is more important than theory - an especially comforting thing to hear for a man without a degree in education.

Our task today was to administer four exams in two-and-a-half hours: Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. The school has five English teachers, and we spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes with each one while the others concentrated on their exam.

It was interesting to note that all the teachers were women, and that all but one were middle-aged. Two were Russian, the others Buryat. All are from Irkutsk or Ulan-Ude, the two closest major cities outside Mongolia's borders (both lie on the shores of Lake Baikal, but Ulan-Ude is the capital of the autonomous Russian republic of Buryatia). Only two spoke English as second languages; the other three had originally majored in either German or French.

The youngest teacher there was, of course, the most fluent, but three of her colleagues speak English better than I do Russian. Still, using the UNDP's criteria for foreign-language speakers, we had to give all of them lower scores than they had received last year (the examiners then were Mongolians, not native speakers). They seemed to have trouble with the exams, too, as a cursory look at the papers showed. Saranchimeg corrected the listening and reading tests, while I performed a pitiless editing job on the short essays, whose topic was, "What do you think of the Mongolian education system?" Scores to be announced tomorrow.

Afterwards, the three of us went to the school principal in her office, and following a thirty-minute conversation Mongolian and Russian (most Mongolian, unfortunately), the principal offered me a part-time job teaching English to Mongolian teachers and advanced students for four hours on Saturdays. Salary: T10,000 a day, or about US$10. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's very good by Mongolian standards - enough to buy about five kilograms (thirteen pounds) of beef. She also lent me a two-volume Mongolian-Russian dictionary, hot off the press. If I decide to buy it, it'll cost me T30,000. I took it, since I haven't been able to find anything even remotely better anywhere.

So I've increased my monthly earnings by 15%-20% - not a bad deal, and I get to practice my Russian to boot.

At home, I celebrated by watching some Russian television (my listening skills are still pretty rusty - I'd say I only understand 60%-80% of what's said, depending on the speed and register. Then I watched two movies on the Hollywood channel: The Accidental Tourist, with William Hurt and Geena Davis (didn't she win an Oscar for this role?) and Grace of My Heart, a pretty kitschy TV movie-of-the-week about a girl who grows up to become a successful songwriter in the 1960s pop scene.

Grace of My Heart is a tacky compendium of every cliche and music personality of that era. I can't remember the star's name, because she's been a life-long second banana, but the supporting cast consisted of Eric Stoltz, John Turturro (the guy's everywhere!), Matt Dillon, and Patsy Kensit. Stoltz played a bohemian songwriter whose only hits were with what's-her-name (Ike Turner?), John Turturro acted a lot like Motown's Barry Gordie, Dillon played a combination of Brian Wilson and Brian Jones (drugged-up genius behind The Riptides (!) who eventually drowns in the ocean fronting his beach house). Names are dropped: Phil Spector, John Lennon, Joan Baez; and we get glimpses of facsimiles of The Supremes, the Everly Brothers, and Jefferson Airplane, just to mention a few. This piece of mind-candy kept me up 'til one in the morning, for Pete's sake, and I've got to get up at seven!

September 26

I added comments and suggestions to the teachers' essays, and graded them at the school at ten o'clock, with Buyanlkhan's help. She showed me the results of the other three exams, and they were very nearly disastrous. Although they're good enough to teach English to high-school students without committing too many errors, it's obvious that their own skills are far below college level. Again, we opted for strict grades, the better to shake them out of their complacency - although I know that if one of them had evaluated my own Russian-language teaching at the University of Ottawa back in the early '90s, I probably would have been eviscerated, as well. (And I won't even think about what my own peers might think of my present performance at Onol!)

Then came the actual teaching evaluations, where we had to sit in on each teacher's classes, observe and judge. None of them were bad; they all used the communicative method to varying degrees. Some had no warm-up; no review; accepted incomplete sentences for answers; jumped from topic to topic, grammar point to grammar point, without much continuity; or adhered too closely to the textbook. All of them, however, conducted their classes much too quickly, we thought. Maybe they were told to go through the whole book in ten months, regardless of the pupils' level; I don't know. Yet even though they're teaching children whose linguistic skills are far above that of my own university students, I felt they should have lingered on a theme and given additional examples for the purposes of ease and consolidation. Still, I'm far from being a perfect teacher myself, and I wasn't too keen on criticising my peers, especially since their third language is better than mine.

Buyanlkhan and I discussed each teacher's case with Buman at three, and an hour later went downstairs to give our results to the principal - but she had gone somewhere. We spoke to the secretary and agreed to meet again on Monday, during which time we will have type up a proper report.

If I haven't said this already, I want to mention it again: the students at this school are bright. They nearly all graduate with the ability to speak four languages fluently, and the education they receive in all other subjects is much better than what they would get outside the capital. And they're such a pleasure to be with! Polite, eager to please, hungry for knowledge... I almost wish I were teaching there!

Sun-duk didn't come home until 10:30 at night. She said she was sick to her stomach for most of yesterday, and didn't have anything to eat today. A combination of greasy meat and bumpy roads, I suspect. Mongolia only has 1400 km of paved roads, most of it in and around Ulaanbaatar; the rest of the country makes do with thousands of miles of dirt roads (it's easier on horses' hooves).

September 27

We were down to our last T2000 (US$2) when Sun-duk finally got paid - in dollars! I've been paid as well, but whenever I've had time to go change the money in to tugriks, the banks are closed. Fortunately, Sun-duk had a friend go to an exchange office nearby (she was running an errand, and it was on her way), and we now have one hundred and eight big ones for a whole month's work. (One hundred dollars, remember?) This will last us at least two weeks, and with the T100,000 Onol's giving me, we'll be able to set aside the US$120 (about T130,000) I get from Soros each month for the baby.

Sun-duk also got her business cards today - one set in English, another in Mongolian. Check it out! 'Administrative Coordinator'! I wonder when I'll get mine; we ordered them last week...

September 28

I went to Sun-duk's office after classes to do two things: to scan our traditional outdoor Korean wedding photographs, and to bring back home a sack of potatoes which Sun-duk had bought on her recent trip (they were 66% cheaper than the spuds here in UB).

The scanning didn't go so well. The quality of the images wasn't quite up to our expectations, no matter how much I tried tweaking them with the Microsoft Paint and Imagine programmes, and with my own personal favourite image editor, Xnview (from France, natch). We could have scanned the pictures and uploaded the whole lot, but we like to think of our homepage as a 'classy' site - so friends will have to wait, unfortunately (my family has the originals, which we shipped to Canada).

The cable made a welcome return to our house after two days in snowy, crackling limbo. Sun-duk watched Korean news, and I gorged myself on French quiz shows. The quiz shows are copies of the $25,000 Pyramid and Jeopardy, with a slight twist - they're even brainier, the host is chattier, and the winners get what Americans would consider pitiful consolation prizes: encyclopedias and dictionaries. But ask a Frenchman if he would prefer money over books, and he'll invariably choose the latter. (I mean, look at me!..)

September 29

The Onol students will be the death of me. Half my classes - that's sophomores and juniors, for those who've lost count - are in desperate need of a bilingual teacher. Even though they've been studying English for at least three years, their vocabulary and knowledge of grammar - never mind speaking skills - are hopelessly wanting. It's not really their fault; most of them are from the countryside, where almost every English teacher is a (poorly) retrained Russian-language teacher. Some kids - my best - were lucky enough to have been taught by native speakers working for ELI or the Peace Corps, but they are in the decided minority.

Still, it's beyond me why half of them can't speak, write or understand English better than I do Mongolian. I spent two weeks going over simple questions - What's your name? What do you do? Who's your favourite movie star? What are your hobbies? What are you doing after school? -, then asked them to prepare and perform a short group interview with a famous Mongolian personality (Chinggis, Sukhbaatar, Kamerton, etc.). I gave them forty minutes in class and a whole week to get themselves ready. So of course, when the time came, none of them had done their work; worse yet, not a single one was able to improvise. I ended up doing one of two things: either whispering Mongolian questions and answers for each student to try to translate into English, or chewing them out for being so lazy.

The real problem is that this is a private institute, and the only grades given are As and Bs; nobody fails. Kids (or their parents) pay money and are assured a degree four years later. The onus is on the students to behave responsibly, but unfortunately, too many of them don't. They skip half their classes, don't do their homework or write exams, sleep or put on make-up during classes... You name it, they get Bs, regardless. I've told them that if they're serious about being translators - good translators -, they'd better get their act together, or I'll take their jobs away from them in no time flat. I stressed the importance of being able to not only read, but also write and speak English, if they care to succeed in the least way. The result has been a decrease in class size: where I used to have twenty to thirty students per lecture, I now have between eight and fifteen. So it's getting a little better, for both me and the more serious students.

And there you have it - a sour note, the first to be struck. If I knew more Mongolian, I wouldn't be frustrated in the least; but as things now stand, I often find myself spending ten minutes trying to explain words like 'exception' and... 'frustrated'. The fact that I speak four languages doesn't help, either, since these students did not attend the Russian or Mongolian high schools. Oh well, nothing to do but keep on studying Mongolian - and I am making significant progress. So please don't despair for me; on the contrary, rejoice, as I soon will be fluent or semi-fluent in no fewer than five tongues!

Nyah, nyah! (dit-il en tirant sa langue!!! ;-)

At six o’clock, there was a birthday party at the office – or should I say a mass birthday party. Back in the days when there were only a dozen employees, everyone’s birthday was celebrated individually, but with a staff presently exceeding fifty in number, the parties are now held on a monthly basis. It just so happened that five people wee born in September, so this time, there were five cakes, half-a-dozen pizzas, bananas, grapes, beer, red and white wine, snacks, chocolate, and so much more awaiting us. Kelli had an appointment, and Sun-duk went to her Chinese-language club, so John and I were the only new kids on the block.

It so happened that this was also a farewell party for two ladies moving on to better things. One, in fact, got a full three-year scholarship to study in Germany – and she doesn’t even speak German yet! (Wish Sun-duk or I could wrangle that kind of a deal!) What surprised me was Chris’ Mongolian-language skills. He had led us to believe, the first time we met him, that he was only a beginner; but from what I saw and heard, as he addressed each departee and thanked her for her hard work at Soros, is that Chris is overly modest and knows Mongolian better than I do Korean. If I hope to work for a UN branch here after SPELT, I guess I’ll have to put my nose to the grindstone to increase my chances of being hired over a local or an insider.

September 30

I couldn’t remember where the medical university was located, having gone there only the once, so I asked Buman last night to meet me at eight-thirty and walk me to where the seminars were to be held. She attended part of our classes (John’s and mine) to observe and take pictures; apparently, she has to make a full report to OSI. In fact, yesterday, I was asked whether I knew how to operate a video camera; they wanted to film us, if possible. I answered in the affirmative, but when I saw that their camera was a big, ancient, TV-type dinosaur, I balked and offered ours instead – if they supplied the tape. They didn’t think there were any six-millimetre videocassettes, or that if there were, their budget wouldn’t allow such an expense, so I looked more closely at the camera and saw that I could operate it with a tripod. Unfortunately, they didn’t have one, so the whole plan was scrapped.

Be that as it may, I went ahead and began my first four-hour class. After a brief introduction, I asked the teachers what they were concerned with the most vis-à-vis their students’ writing skills. They promptly answered 'Everything', leaving me to pose just a few more questions until we had determined that the biggest problem was organization; their reports, essays and theses lacked all cohesion and structure. That helped me narrow my approach, and I immediately reached for my Words in Motion composition textbook for low-intermediate EFLers. (I know some people, especially at Kyung Hee, don’t like this book, but it’s great if you take the time to supplement the lessons with material and quizzes of your own. My Taejon University students benefitted a great deal from my year-long course with it, and their compositions improved significantly in form, content and grammar over an eight-month period.)

I mentioned first how I have students describe a series of pictures – Who’s in it? What are they doing? How do you think they feel? What do you think they’re talking about? What’s the weather like? What smells and sounds do you think they’re experiencing? And on and on… I simulated a lesson so that they could better understand the technique.

After this, I dove into the terrifying world of the paragraph, and then the five-point essay. Using the well-known, well-worn Idea Bubbles method to show how I help students brainstorm, then focus their ideas into paragraphs containing a single theme. We all had a great time creating the skeleton of a short essay devoted to the budget Western traveller on a trip to Mongolia. They really liked the technique, and felt it would suit their needs to a T.

After a short break during which I made a pile of photocopies for the second half of today’s seminar, we got into the summary. Here, I brought out the Writing Workshop textbook I had used at Kyung Hee with sophomore English majors. We spent two hours summarising an interesting article on the different kinds of friendship between women, then I gave them several abstracts from actual medical articles to read for homework. Again, they felt they had learned a lot from my having simulated actual classroom conditions, and told Buman, who’d been snapping away for the last hour, that they would like additional seminars after this weekend. I was very gratified to hear this, of course – especially as it comes from seasoned pros with Ph.D.s.

(Maybe I should mention here that only one of the seven professors actually has a degree in a scientifically related field. The rest are mostly linguists, but the dearth of qualified English-speaking professors in the medical field has forced the university to hire people with tangential skills. Korea does the same – look at the year I spent teaching Medical English at Kyung Hee. I’m not putting them or myself down, because we do a good job, and work very hard at it; however, it’s still a case of fitting a square peg into a round hole.)

We had an hour for lunch before John gave his seminar, so all of us – professors, Buman, John and I – went to the ritzy Ulaanbaatar Hotel Restaurant for some fish. Fountains, chandeliers, live band, spacious hall… and rotten fish, according to Buman, who sent hers back. I can’t smell a good fish from a bad one, so I just pecked at my plate until it was clean. Later, Sun-duk came round and smelled the remains of my meal, and declared it… fishy-smelling! Buman was vindicated, and everyone looked at me, waiting for me to keel over in a fit of botulism.

Sun-duk had had an appointment with a Mongolian girl who had come to her seminar three weeks ago. They talked for a couple of hours, then parted, and she and I, after a couple hours’ preparation at the Soros office for tomorrow’s lesson, went to try out the grub at Happy Happy House, a Korean restaurant not far from the State Department Store.

I wasn’t really hungry, but Sun-duk ordered a large serving of chapchaebap. We talked for twenty minutes with the owner before leaving. She’s been here under a year, and is feeling kind of low. She’s alone, hates the weather (of course, I love it) and what it’s doing to her skin – but affirms that her employees are kind and generous people who help get over the troughs. We promised to come back; the food here is cheaper than at Family Restaurant, but not quite as good. A rock and a hard place, you see…

At home, I had planned on watching a couple of movies and Union libre, but was exhausted by the day’s events, and we both turned in at nine again.

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