2022.10.19. Busy day – a bit of everything (alternative title: Can u have a class today?)

Made myself not sleep in today,

and after confirming that Munkh cannot meet me for our scheduled meeting today, I went for a swim in the morning. Did a nice 3400 m practice, then came back home to ditch my coat (it gets super hot in my winter coat with a hoodie underneath when walking, but I had been expecting much harsher weather, tbh) and my swim stuff. At this point I was already tired (from my 3 km swim and 3 km walk) and hungry, so I didn’t even change out of my clothes, just got my husband to get ready and we left for another long-ish walk to a vegan restaurant in the city.

I look like a walking Decathlon-ad at the pool (for a reason).
- Also, who can spot the Dalahäst? -

(not so) random yurt (aka ger) next to Sukhbaatar square

"Hello!"

This was the first time hubby left the flat since his injury (well, since we’d gotten back from the hospital more than a week ago, his foot in a splinter) but luckily, he reported no pain or discomfort – even though I can see he’s still limping a bit. He was supposed to wear the splinter for 3 weeks altogether (so it would be another 10 days or so) but he’d ditched it yesterday.

The restaurant was nice, the food plenty and tasty (if a bit more expensive than in the other vegan restaurant we’d tried in our first week here). From there, we had a quick walk to State Department Store to get some groceries, then walked right back home. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to linger (I’d have taken many more pictures and read many more labels) since we had to get back in time for me to quickly prepare (mostly print stuff out and go over my lesson plan) for my class today.

Well-deserved vegan feast (never had so much mock-meat in my life)

Look what I found

And about that class. When I woke up this morning, I still had no idea I would teach a class today. Then I got an email from Otgontuya (just after 9 am), saying ‘Morning Dalma can u have a class today at 4pm?’. I mean, yes, I could (and I did) but at this point she doesn’t even apologise for the late notice. Mongolians seem to have a weird but strong urge to toy with other people’s time. I wasn’t mad either, I was just happy I could finally have my second class of the week. However, I still have no idea when the third one will be (I asked Otgontuya right away in my next text message to her, and she said tomorrow at 4 pm but my students didn’t hesitate to let me know that they already have another class tomorrow at 4 pm so that shouldn’t be possible and now we don’t know again).

Btw the class itself was great, although only 9 students turned up, which may have been due to the late notice, but these 9 students did pretty well, I’d say. I noticed how pronouncing vowels like ‘ü/ű’ and ‘ö/ő’ and ‘u/ú’ and ‘o/ó’ were especially hard for them, and we did some practice on that (and they got noticeably better by the end of the class) but we will need to work more on this issue.

Since I’d gone for a swim, gone out for lunch/groceries, and had also taught a class, I was pretty exhausted by the time I got home after my class. Still, I had to get some work done after our small dinner (just leftovers from lunch and some snacks). Sent out some emails (to the Ministry, to my students, to Munkh and Otgontuya), filled out some paperwork (documentation for the Ministry), checked my lesson plan for the 3^rd class – whenever that may be – to see if I needed to prepare any material (but luckily I had been smart when writing it so now I only had to get 2 pages of a book scanned). Then I did a very short entry in my knee diary and this longer one here. I still need to try and learn a few numbers in Mongolian bc tomorrow we are supposed to go to Naran Tuul with my husband to get fancy clothes for an event on Friday. If I don’t fall asleep first.