Our New Home! (8/19/15)

This Chinggis Khan statue is Mongolia's largest statue, at 130 ft tall.
 It is on the road between Ulaanbaatar and Chinggis town.

Caleb and I are finally living together again in what will be our home for the next two years. Our apartment is very nice. We just got internet today, which is great! We can now easily be in contact on a regular basis with everyone back home. We don’t know our address yet, or the best way to send and receive mail, so please be patient on that front. We will find out within the next week, hopefully.

The entrance to Chinggis Hot!

Our apartment is nice! It is on the second floor and is super secure. All of our neighbors take pride in being clean, quiet, reasonable people. Our apartment has three main rooms: a bedroom, living room, and kitchen. We also have a bathroom, and the hallway connects everything. Our bathroom has a toilet and a bathtub with a shower head, but unfortunately there is no hot water. The water that comes out of our faucets is very chilly, so neither of us are really interested in taking an actual shower. We must heat water using our water boiler and stove top to have hot water.

Our bedroom

We have a large bed in our bedroom, which was a surprise to me. It is super comfortable, and our room is dark and quiet at night. There is also a large wardrobe (in the corner not pictured here) that amazingly houses all of our clothes. Our living room has a couch, table and chairs, and an entertainment center type furniture piece. We don’t have a TV, which is fine with us. We have lots of movies and TV shows we can watch on our computers. Our kitchen has a table and two chairs, lots of cabinet space, a single sink, a refrigerator, microwave, and small just-a-little-bigger-than-a-toaster-oven oven/stove.  

Our living room

Our kitchen

Caleb and I have met each of our supervisors and several of our coworkers. Everyone has been super helpful and nice in making us feel welcome here. We have done a lot over the past few days. The first day we arrived, our school directors and several of our coworkers prepared food for us in our apartment. It was a nice surprise, and it made us few pretty special that both of our school directors wanted to meet us the day we arrived. The second day we were here was a rest day, which is a first in a long time. We slept in, unpacked, and went for a walk around town. There are several small food stores very close to us. My school is just a stone’s throw away from our apartment building, but Caleb’s school will be about a 20-30 minute walk for him.

Yesterday, Caleb’s supervisor and coworkers took us shopping. We bought several things for our apartment and bought some groceries. To my surprise, there IS cheese in one of the grocery stores; however, it is sold by the slice instead of by the pack. Later that evening, my supervisor came by to walk us around and introduce us to our neighbors that live in our part of the apartment building. This, I think, was super helpful, and two of our neighbors are taxi drivers. It’s good to know the drivers in Mongolia.

Today, we went to the police station and the government building to get registered and to meet official people. That went pretty well. We also bought a modem for internet. Since then, we’ve been interneting. Yep.

Chinggis Hot from a distance. This was our first look at our new city.

Chinggis Hot is very flat, but we can see mountains far in the distance. Mountain hiking will definitely have to be planned out for us, but at least there are mountains close enough to get to as a day or weekend trip. When we have time off from work, there are mountains in the north part of our aimag that we definitely want to visit, too, including the sacred mountain where Chinggis Khan was probably born.

Please feel free to get in touch with us via facebook, email, or in the comments on this blog. We are much more reachable now that we are at our permanent site! Ask any questions you may have! We are happy to respond.

~Sally