#Languagecourse
I have never told you about my progress of learning some of the Mongolian language. As volunteers we have to participate in a course. Jessy and me decided to take classes together which is nice ☺ Every Monday we have 80 minutes course and our teacher tries to challenge us a lot to speak as much as possible. And every time we come out of class out head full of new stuff, willing to repeat it over the week and then…. No time, already Sunday, huuups I still have to do my homework… One time we had a supply teacher who just spoke bad English. So we had to even think Mongolian-english. Also Hard!
But now to come to what we have learned so far: We can speak some simply everyday things as “hello”, “how are you”, “Goodbye”…., we have learned the numbers (and yeah on the black market we can ask “how much does it cost” and we understand their answer ☺) Happy about this. We can ask questions (yes-no and questions with a question word), we can talk about our family, we should know the colours and some adjectives. At least we should know it all. Not by heart and it is always hard to remember soooo many new vocabs. So we will see what I can talk after 5 month being here.
It helps to get into contact with the Mongolian people living on the countryside and we learned a lot of vocabs during our trip in the Gobi 😀
Here some of our everyday usable words:
Really = timoo?
Auf gehts! = Jauiiiii
Ja = tiim
Kamel = timee
Nein = (o)gui or just gr (more a sound than a word)
Good Night = sächn amrarai
Did you sleep well? = Sächn amarsn u?
#Deel
I did not tell you about my plan to let me tailor a traditional mongolian clothing for their New Years Party at the beginning of february. Lucky me that my host mom is a tailor and knows the business. One of her friends tailors the costumes at the Drama Theatre and is very good in tailoring Deels. One day Jessy and I went there to get measured to know how many meters of tissue we would need. To cut a long story short: Nearly 2 weeks later she brought me my Deel back home and I tried it out… Have a look!
#UBFacts
Here some facts about UB that I have learned during the week!
One Day in UB “fresh air” is as smoking 5 packages of cigarettes.
It seems that in a lot of Mongolian families the TV and the laptop is the most important thing. At least, in my family. A point I do really hate because it hinders the integration into the family.
You can buy Tempo packed in red packages white-dotted. This is the tempo style sold in Germany last winter 😀
#familynews
Saturday 21st Tsogo the oldest sun had birthday. It was a kind of strange that they already sang happy birthday songs on Friday evening. I gave him a German – Mongolian book to learn more German as he lost his vocabulary book, supposed by accident which I do not think but nevertheless I do not care about it because it is his learning, which will not get better. I heard my host mom already learning some phrases, let’s see how long this will continue 😉
To come to more difficult news concerning the family. Normally I would not care what they buy with their money but the tell me always when I gave them the rent what they bought with it. They already bought those things: a balance, a coffee machine and recently they bought a cheap lustre for the living room… Instead of investing the money in their children to provide them maybe lessons to learn piano (which exist already in the flat) or what ever… But yeah this is not my decision to take and I just see how important the furniture of a flat might be here… Kind of says how rich the family might be…
#trailrun
Even the temperatures fell extremely the last two weeks we still go every once in a while trail running! It really makes a lot of fun except that my heel does not really like it.
