Travel Blog Mongolia

After surviving my real bad cold and adapting more and more to the climate here some curiosities which I experienced the other days….But first of all, winter is coming! Yes, you have heard it correctly or rather, you have read it correctly! Thursday the 24^th of September as my weather app told me. I did not want to believe it and thought myself, this is just a joke and we gonna see, it will be cold yes, but SNOW…. No please not… But to turn to more interesting news…

I met the headmistress of the school this week because last week she went with some pupils to Poland for a basketball competition. Beree and Swenja from the Goethe Institut were at the meeting as well. The headmistress is a real lady in pink with pink nails, well dressed and she is very concerned about her appearance. Beree was more or less our translator and I had to introduce myself, Swenja said a few words, my German teachers about my projects and in between her phone rang several times. Normal here and they answer and even in class they answer calls. Unbelievable in Germany though!

The Mongolians are very sweet and cute; So she called me straight away “her volunteer” and “her daughter”. I think I am well accepted here and respected. She even told me that there will be some teachers coming from the Inner Mongolia and they are going to do several little trips. I join them to see more from the country! Which means the weekend of the German Unity is pretty full: Friday the 2^nd Welcome in the German Embassy (Yeah being on German ground for at least several hours :D), Saturday the 3^rd: big party for all teachers because of the Mongolian teacher day on Monday (5^th) and on Sunday a trip to a monastery in the direction of Darkhan (around 130km away from UB). Well definitely a weekend to write about later….

Yeah and pupils trip Number 2 done: We went to the International Intellectual Museum, close to our school. Close means here about 20 minute walk. Luckily Jessy, another German volunteer from the 38^th School joined us and we went with seven pupils from grade 11 and Minze (our current intern at school) to the museum. The German teacher did not have time, which was totally ok for us :). As we arrived there we could only book either a Mongolian or an English tour and we decided to do the English one even it was the aim of speaking German with the pupils… Together with some little kindergarten children we started the tour by getting an introduction in Mongolian from the founder of the museum (it was founded in 1990), who more or less created nearly all the games (as he said :D; I do not believe him; they just exhibit EVERYTHING even cuddly toys!). Our guide translated some parts of it but in rather bad English so that Jessy and I did not really understand a lot. Minze tried to explain some parts later. He basically said that children get more and more lazy, just watch TV, play on their smartphones and so become stupid (YES; I can underline this for sure!!! At least in my family the TV and the laptop is THE most important thing!). So the first part was more or less a sensibilization of the children to do other things. He mentioned that there are three important things in life: Work, then do intellectual games and then education. (and yes in this order!) Furthermore he explained that everybody could learn magical games and that there are different ones, there are three basic methods (I already forgot them) and he showed some games. Then our guide took us through the 4 floors of the museum. It was too fast and you did not even have the chance to try more things out. It was more or less a puzzle museum, because nearly everything was a puzzle, sometimes more or less difficult. Her favourite sentence was: “You need XYZ moves to solve it and there is nobody of our visitors who can do it in one minute (or another period of time). If you can do it our founder will give you $100.000.” But she never led us try…. Totally strange! At least the kids had fun J

Afterwards Jessy, Minze and I went to one of the coffee shops here (TOMn TOMs Coffee) and I had my very first Caramel Latte, which tasted yummy! And Jessy brought some real german Schwarzbrot!!! YUMMY and thaaaaaank you therefore! :* You are the very best!

Other school stuff: Minze and I had our first own lesson to give, pretty much spontaneous. It was awesome and we really liked it! Just speaking preparation for the A2 test in the 10^th grade. Topic: How to ask questions and how to answer in a good way (example was: going shopping). They are doing well the kids, except that they do learn by heart instead of understand the question they are asked but I think I will be able to drive this out of them 😀 Let’s see how the kids will develop in the next weeks. In mid-December it will be exam period!