We arrived in Ulaanbaatar around midnight on the night of the 31st, local time. Since then we’ve been preparing for our first expedition southwest to Bayankhongor and Arvaikheer.
Camping gear and workshop materials are strewn around the apartment we rented, along with our notebooks, camera gear, map, luggage and laptops.
The apartment has one bed and two futons brought in for our three foreign team members: Thea (myself), Teddy (our educator) and Yeweng (a friend of the ISMD).
Teddy arrived yesterday and Yeweng arrives tomorrow. Bolor is staying with her mom down the street until we head into the countryside on Sunday. And Bindi, our translator and museum/workshop host, lives here in Ulaanbaatar. We hired two drivers this evening and we have a third driver for the Moveable Museum who I haven’t met yet but Bolor knows him from previous expeditions.
Bolor’s brother, Bayaraa, volunteered to pick up the Moveable Museum tires from the airport for us and had to deliver the bad news that we owed the Mongolian government about a million tugriks in customs tax, or roughly $540. Part of the reason for the steep fee is a recent dip in the country’s economy related to the election here this summer. On the upside, our dollars from this campaign are going farther we expected them to for the same reason, so hopefully it evens out.
I’d like to introduce you to one team member in each of the next few updates, starting with myself to get the most boring one out of the way. You’ve seen my name in every update so far but you may not know how to pronounce it. The “h” is silent– think “Tay-ah.” Other mundane facts about me include working in advertising for the past ten years, living in California for most of my life, and being a mere 40ish episodes of Deep Space Nine short of having seen every single episode of every single Star Trek series. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was three and then, well, the advertising thing happened. But here I am now combining the two by doing digital outreach for paleontology projects, and I’m pretty pleased with it and sometimes feel like I’m getting away with something. My personal goals for this trip are to journal every day, take some spectacular photos, and to learn enough Mongolian to have a conversation. A dull one would be fine. Today I learned that I should probably not eat horse meat ever again. And that’s me.
Til next time,
– Thea
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Posted: September 2, 2016 by Bolortsetseg Minjin
2016 Campaign Update 3
We arrived in Ulaanbaatar around midnight on the night of the 31st, local time. Since then we’ve been preparing for our first expedition southwest to Bayankhongor and Arvaikheer.
Camping gear and workshop materials are strewn around the apartment we rented, along with our notebooks, camera gear, map, luggage and laptops.
The apartment has one bed and two futons brought in for our three foreign team members: Thea (myself), Teddy (our educator) and Yeweng (a friend of the ISMD).
Teddy arrived yesterday and Yeweng arrives tomorrow. Bolor is staying with her mom down the street until we head into the countryside on Sunday. And Bindi, our translator and museum/workshop host, lives here in Ulaanbaatar. We hired two drivers this evening and we have a third driver for the Moveable Museum who I haven’t met yet but Bolor knows him from previous expeditions.
Bolor’s brother, Bayaraa, volunteered to pick up the Moveable Museum tires from the airport for us and had to deliver the bad news that we owed the Mongolian government about a million tugriks in customs tax, or roughly $540. Part of the reason for the steep fee is a recent dip in the country’s economy related to the election here this summer. On the upside, our dollars from this campaign are going farther we expected them to for the same reason, so hopefully it evens out.
I’d like to introduce you to one team member in each of the next few updates, starting with myself to get the most boring one out of the way. You’ve seen my name in every update so far but you may not know how to pronounce it. The “h” is silent– think “Tay-ah.” Other mundane facts about me include working in advertising for the past ten years, living in California for most of my life, and being a mere 40ish episodes of Deep Space Nine short of having seen every single episode of every single Star Trek series. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was three and then, well, the advertising thing happened. But here I am now combining the two by doing digital outreach for paleontology projects, and I’m pretty pleased with it and sometimes feel like I’m getting away with something. My personal goals for this trip are to journal every day, take some spectacular photos, and to learn enough Mongolian to have a conversation. A dull one would be fine. Today I learned that I should probably not eat horse meat ever again. And that’s me.
Til next time,
– Thea
Category: Blog Posts