Darkhan June 6th 2011

We've arrived in Darkhan, we'll be training here until Thursday when we'll have to be moved once again to finally live with our host families for the next three months.  Darkhan is Mongolia's second largest cities with a population of around 100,000 people.  We are staying in a set of dorms adjacent to a Buddhist monastery and its pretty exciting to see the local monks move about.  We attended an awesome welcome ceremony with traditional Mongolian singing, dancing, and music.  We then were grouped into our small training villages where we'll be taken on Thursday, I found out my village will be one of the farthest south from Darkhan.  Unfortunately none of the people in this new small group (12) are individuals I've gotten friendly with.  I hope that changes soon as I'll be spending my next three months with them as my only English speaking American company.  After they grouped us we had our first language class.  I can tell already the language training is going to be intense.  Our two Mongolian teachers spoke no English through the entire lesson.  Through a series of gestures and repetition we were basically forced to memorize and learn what to say just to interact.  After that we went out to eat, I had my first Mongolian beer and it was actually pretty good not too dark and not too light, it will be a good Yuengling substitute, big relief! 

After dinner I was sitting on the stoop in the courtyard of our dorms when five Mongolian boys walked by, when they saw my guitar they all strolled over and began watching me play.  They excitedly began rambling off questions in Mongolian (remember this happened about an hour after my first language lesson).  With this limited knowledge I was only able to tell them, my name, that I worked for Peace Corps as a teacher and I was sorry my language was bad.  Now assuming I was a music teacher they began gesturing towards my guitar and what I can only assume was making song requests.  After several minutes of straining to understand one word they said one of them finally said a word I recognized and all the others began echoing it in unison, Beatles.  I quickly began playing the most popular Beatles tune I knew, suddenly their excited Mongolian banter gave way to a perfect English chorus as they sang along to Let It Be.  After I strummed the last chord they clapped, waved goodbye, and scurried off.  I sat dumbstruck with what had just occured and wished ther was a way I could have interacted with them more.  Thinking of the only solution I could I packed up my guitar and headed to my room to begin studying Mongolian.