Mongolian Chores

So, the Peace Corps has given us a list of activities that we have to do with our host family and by ourselves before the end of our training. I'm well on the way. Most of the activities are chores that we need to learn before we live on our own. So far I have fetched water from the community well, washed my hair in a tumpun (a big bucket), observed a Mongolian meal being prepared, and cooked a Mongolian meal. There is a community well about a 10-minute walk from my house. You have to pay for it, but I think it's only about 1 tugrik per liter, which is not very much (1300 tugriks = $1). I filled up 2 large jugs, about 60 liters. The jugs are in this metal wheeled thing, so fortunately I didn't have to carry it myself. Because there's no running water, there's no shower or bathtub, so you bathe in a tumpun. Actually, I almost prefer this form of bathing to the freezing cold showers we took at the dorm when we first arrived here. For the meal, I helped to make bansh, which are small meat dumplings boiled in milktea. The filling is mutton, onions, salt, pepper. I wasn't very good at folding the dumplings up. I was quite the source of entertainment for my host mom. I did much better at rolling out the dough. We have milktea at every meal which is salted, watered down milk with no actual tea in it. It's pretty good. This morning we had buckwheat cooked in milktea. Yay fiber! Well, I'll write more when I do some more things on my list. Our training starts in earnest this week with full days of language and technical training. I should be pretty busy from here on out.