Yes Mother, you are right, I have been using my blog as a way of bitching and moaning, and its boring - I began to think of it like a private diary - I shall try and make it more interesting!
STILL got the head cold, so life is actually a bit difficult, constant discomfort in my face, and slight deafness, but even I am bored of complaining about how under the weather I feel so moving on....
For the last three days I have been staying at a summer camp in the countryside. The whole of VSO mongolia went, staff and volunteers, for a conference, where we confered about vso's work in mongolia, practical and logistical issues, directions, networking, etc etc.
The conferring was fine, but boring to any non vso, so I feel I should talk about two notable things.
1, the weather, it was so hot last week, I packed light clothes for the conference. It was NOT hot at the conference. It was lovely the first day we got there, and we swam in the river. That night however, it began to rain......and rain and rain. We were all sleeping in these wooden cabins, with holes in them......I awoke in the night, with rain pouring into my bed. No fun!
The next day it rained constantly too, but morale was retained, as everyone spent the day cuddled up to eachother for warmth. The family who work in the kitchens there live in a ger on site, which was the only place with a stove, so they said we could go in there to get warm. There were 56 of us - so we took it in turns for groups of around 10 to squeeze in to the ger and dry out a bit.
2, horse riding. I have mentioned before my colleague PF, an alaskan who has three horses out here which he has trained using 'mnatural horsemanship' methods. He brought them to the conference, and when the weather calmed down a bit, he and I, and another girl went for a ride. We were out for about an hour and a half, first walking and taking in the scenery, then PF suggested a "lope". Now, I havent ridden a horse since I was about 6 years old, and back then I was "ponied", as in, someone else help the reins, and I never went faster than a light trot. I have never actually RIDDEN a horse by myself, but I am game for anything, and felt that I was getting the hang of controlling the horse and that me and him were getting on ok, so I said yeah, why not.
So we galloped through the rolling steppe, and it was so amazing. Until my horse - for some reason (PF said it was just overexcited) - bucked.
That was probably the most terrifying experience of my life, but I held on for dear life, and got the horse to chill out and stop. PF said he was impressed. All I could think of was my sore bum, I had gone clean off the saddle, then WHAP back onto it a fair few times. It hurts.
Me and the horse made friends again though, and we even did some more galloping - then walked to a river, where my horse became stuck in some mud and started bucking even more wildly than before as it tried to free itself. WHAP WHAP WHAP! I kept my cool, and kept on the horse, and we got out of that fangle.
The rest of the conference was pretty uneventful, good food, good conversation, a bonfire, a quiz, speeches etc.
We got the train back today, and I am v tired, bed remained wet the whole time, so v v v vcold at night, not a lot of good sleep. but the place was stunning, and the three days were enjoyable, and although i do have a VERY sore bum, it was worth it for the experience, and PF said I was a real trooper, and I am going riding again soon!
Now though, home to my flat, and to my lovely warm dry bed, and a very early night.
Tomorrow I have to organise the whole of friday's session, and next week's chingeltei lecture.
It is raining hard here in UB too, miserable!
Oh, and we got a trian there and back, that was cool, it was exactly like this train I got one time from Riga to Vilnius, in Lithuania. The vso bunch took over a whole carriage and it was fun.
Phew, ok, home to bed now - slaters - hope that was a bit better mama!
Some photos of the place, it was stunning -
Mongolian flowers are exquisite - it is a little like something out of the imagination of one of the animators on "Avatar" - they are all so lovely. I will take some more photos and show you in another post.
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