Like the goat, you’ll mourn for your beard.
…If you think that to grow a beard is to acquire wisdom, a goat is at once a complete Plato.
I see it all unfold from about, without. A meta-travel. We goto this land for many reasons that are all the same. We run from broken homes, repentant lovers, dead pets.
Flip through the study-abroad brochures advertising semesters in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam. Flip to the next page.
Now you are in the Exotic section. Beijing, Hangzhou, Dakar, [...]
I don’t know what whore you give the tip on this Night of Joy, but our boys have been in there almost every night and they haven’t turned up anything.
…She padded her way purposefully down each link of the fire escape, pausing only once to watch a man groggily swat at his blaring alarm clock.
_To some people, the five South American dialects she spoke and translated, sounded like birds clicking and squawking at each other–to her it sounded_ like rain on a summer’s eve…. _A pebble on the ground caught her attention–she didn’t know the word for “pebble” in this part of the Amazon.
Stand by and look uninvolved as she grilles the drivers for rates and times; you don’t want them to raise her rate because of you.
…She said she drinks, but just “doesn’t feel like it.” On your birthday?
The sun, an abstract circle shining light onto the 2nd most prolific — the moon — both gazing down onto our humble blue-green oblate spheroid (sort-of circles)…. 1-800-Spiralz Classical Music Through this confluence of sounds we gaze into worlds gone by a saccharine pop ballad for a lady with corset-fractured ribs, and impotent, hunting husband.
You push from your mind the ever-surfacing thought that her english is just a little too good to be working for some college student for $20 a day, let alone working as a Mongolian language teacher at SIT.
…After your week in the countryside—during which you simultaneously try to conduct interviews through confused translation, and try to win over your stand-offish translator, say that you hope she had some fun, that you enjoyed working with her .
The first time I heard heavy metal— the kind I listen to, from Scandinavia — in Mongolia was also the first time I heard this music broadcast on mainstream TV, while staying with a herding family in East-Central Mongolia.
…Usually, I get up every ten minutes or so to clear my side of the ger, if only to lessen the number in my immediate vicinity, for a few moments of relative peace.
As if the fruit hadn’t been fully separated from its skin, and took bits of skin-adhesive with it, leaving traces for the eater to ponder.
…And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
General Advice on Mongolia Travel
If they fail to recognize you for your achievements (i.e. survival), realize they don’t get it (yet) and have faith that their time will come .
…well the G is swallowed, and calls up from the bottom of your throat, leading to a slippery o that somehow terminates in a soft V. Realize you won’t be learning this language from a book.