2022.10.07. Dipping my toe in the sea of Mongolian bureaucracy

Woke up to the sound of a huge bird (a crow, I think) walking up and down our windowsill, its claws knocking on the metal.

Sitting up in bed and pulling the curtain to the side, we could see how big and close it was, and he also spotted us, the three of us staring each other down for a few seconds before it flew off. I’m pretty sure I’d never had a crow using my windowsill as a catwalk before but then I’d never lived on the 14^th floor either.

Today, I’ve finally been to the university buildings. First, I’ve gone to meet Munkh (my head of department) and the local Italian teacher and an administrator were also there in the office, although they didn’t seem to speak any English (at least the administrator definitely didn’t). There wasn’t much that Munkh has told me – only that the person overseeing language courses, Mrs Otgontuya, won’t be in until Monday, so that’s when I can meet her. He also told me to have a curriculum ready by next week and that I should also start teaching my classes next week; I’ll have one group of about 35 students, and he said he thinks it’ll be about 3 times a week. So that’s what I’m planning with.

He also gave me a gift that all university teachers had gotten this week for this 80^th anniversary: a small box of chocolates and a kinda cool notebook that has a built-in power bank and a small pen drive in its binder, apart from the notebook pages and a few pockets on the inside of the binder. It’s pretty heavy bc of all these features but I still think it’s pretty cool.

The symbol of the university in front of the library

Once he told me what he wanted to (and I had the opportunity to ask my most burning questions, even though he couldn’t answer most of them, as he kept telling me they would be answered next week by Otgontuya), one of his students took me to the international administration office – she is a student of French BA but she spoke quite good English, luckily –, showing me the library building on the way. At the administration office, they gave me a bunch of papers to fill out and asked for some things that I’d already sent (so did Munkh’s administrator though, my degree copy and passport copy, both of which I’d sent them several times already), and then told me that I need to go to a hospital for a medical evaluation and also to some office that gives me a certificate that I live on the address I do. Advising me to take someone who speaks Mongolian to the hospital with me, since they won’t speak English, and telling me how much money I’ll need to pay in fees for all the papers, they let me go, asking that I return with the completed paperwork and medical papers as soon as possible. Meaning my day will start at the local hospital on Monday, alongside a Hungarian girl who lives here and can apparently speak Mongolian – I don’t know her yet but the embassy told me to ask her and she agreed to go with me. Once I have all the papers for the international office, I’ll need to send some of them to Munkh’s administrator and also go to a Mongolian bank to open a local bank account (but I need both a work permit and a residence permit for that first), and I’ll also need to send my bank info to this woman in Munkh’s office. So many papers to sort out even though I’ve already filled out and signed and copied and sent so many of them while we’d still been in Hungary. It’s not completely unfamiliar to me, this endless game of paperwork and bureaucracy, but that doesn’t mean I like it or can tolerate it well. Guess I’ll just have to accept that Mongolia is very much like Hungary in this aspect.

Surprisingly exhausted at this point, I went back home, had lunch with my husband (he’d cooked a teriyaki veggie rice in the rice cooker which turned out really good), then fell asleep on the couch, cuddled up to him. After a short nap, he woke me up and we talked about dinner plans and random things, when he got up from the couch to go to the bedroom and that’s when things suddenly turned to shit.

I’ll try to keep it short: he accidentally kicked one of the suitcases lying on the ground (we haven’t unpacked completely yet, unsure whether we’ll stay here or rent another apartment) on his way to the other room, and his pinkie toe took the hit – that had happened many times before, him kicking into furniture, but it’s always been fine after all, just painful. We’d known instantly that this was not one of those mostly harmless kicks, since his pinkie toe was sticking out to the side at an odd angle. We didn’t know if it was broken or dislocated but it was definitely not in the right place, so we started looking for hospitals online and while he contacted his insurance company, I texted the diplomat at the embassy to let him know and ask for help. My husband could not step on his left foot at all, so our only option was that he hops his way to the taxi on one leg (using me for support) and we go looking for a hospital that would take him and be able to do an X-ray (which is kinda rare here). Luckily, the Consul could come here to pick us up in a taxi and then come with us so that we could have someone who speaks Mongolian. We went to a nearby hospital first (ruling out the first 3 options as their websites said they were all closed for the day – it was 8pm at this point), but that was closed as well. In lieu of any better options, we headed to a hospital quite far from where we were that was supposed to do emergency intakes and have an X-ray machine too. It took our driver some time but we got there, and the Consul went in to ask if they could take my husband on and to ask about waiting times; they said they could take a look at him in about 2 hours but that there was no doctor to operate the X-ray machine until the next morning. That meant that even if we’d have waited our turn, they wouldn’t have done anything to it – that’s obvious, as no X-ray means they can’t know if it’s a broken bone or a dislocation or something else. This way there was no point in waiting – and keeping the Consul, who was nice enough to sacrifice his Friday night of fun/rest for us, waiting with us for hours, all for nothing. Therefore, we just decided to come back home and go to a private clinic the next morning. (Just to illustrate how long this journey of nothing-useful took, it was past 11pm when we got home.) Fortunately, my husband reported a low-level pain so we knew he’d be able to get some sleep during the night.