It’s snowing!

It’s snowing! It’s snowing!

Woke up today and the air smells fresher, less soot and less haze in the air.

As per my colleague’s explanation, the more soot usually means the air is colder as the poor burns more wood to keep warm. Also, the nearby power generators needs to fire on more cylinders to provide enough juice for those with electrical heaters to keep their rooms warm. So either way the poor and rich contributes to the soot.

We placed a thermometer out the window the night before and as you can see below, it’s at a warm –10*C. However the increased moisture greatly contributed to the formation of snow flakes.

^ Usually it drops till  –27*C near mid December so there’s still lot of room to drop

Also, it so happened to be Mongolia’s Independence Day but for no particular reason, there isn’t much celebration out the streets (perhaps due to the cold) but we did notice an increase of people going out with friends and families as it’s a non working day.

On previous years, today is a working day. They are trying to create a national identity here.

^ As posted in Facebook, we get to dress in non formal cause it’s a special day! Also forgive the bright sunlight cause we’re not sleeping late but merely the sun rises earlier this time of the year. It’s barely 7.30am.

We still had to work cause we’re not Mongolians and we have a tight schedule to keep, but as we walked down the street, we can’t help but notice that Mongolia is undergoing a rush of modernization.

As you can see above, the building in the background is the first of many modern construction that is sprouting around the city. There is also a lot of renovations going on among some of the older apartment in the city.

The bank interest rate here is around 12%  and a good landed 2 room property with garage only costs USD 83,000.

We theorized that we can deposit some cash here and by next year’s we can withdraw it and feel a bit richer seeing the economy is not doing so well.

Most of our job involves travelling among the many clients all over the place so we could tell the difference between outings. Other than the thermometer outside our window, we can tell merely by feeling how many layers we need to wear, that and the local weather channel.

The weather here changes quite dramatically on an hour to hour basis. And that is not including wind chill. For example it could be –10*C in the morning but it might be only –3*C in the afternoon before dropping to again to –17*C at night.

Also, all this travelling and zombifying around the streets generate huge amounts of static. Much more than walking on carpets can do. We usually have to discharge ourselves before using out laptop as static does goes through the plastic casing and it’s a disaster if any of our machines fail (already it’s showing signs of stress with undiagnosed sudden shutdowns and restarts).

The short winter daylight is quite extreme and can play havoc with your body clock. But I believe we’re getting used to it now. There’s no time difference with Malaysian time but the daylight just seems to wane early.

^ Taken from the office window at 5pm. 30 minutes later and it’s pitch black. Clouds in the sky means more snow later evening.

I can’t wait till tomorrow and there’s so much to discover, but I need my sleep. Gotta stop composing all this posts so late at night.

Daily activity listing

It’s Day 02 and things are starting to fall in place. Here’s what happens on a daily basis:

“Waking up” to “heading out”

1. Wake up at 7. Hit the snooze button for the umpteenth time.
2. Dress up in long pants, t-shirt, jacket, slippers and zombify towards the cold cold bathroom.
3. Shower, wash up face inch by inch using water too cold to be capable of flowing out the tap
4. Head back to room and remove everything earlier and dress up in thermal pants, thermal shirts and head over to the kitchen.
5. Boil water that doesn’t seem to heat up, cook noodles that doesn’t seem tasty anymore, drink ‘fresh’ orange juice that’s 3 months old.
6. Head back to room, dress up in formal, wear ear muffs, wear cap, wear jacket, wear windbreaker, weak neck scarf, wear gloves, apply sunblock to exposed skin, apply mosteriser to neck and jaw line, apply lip balm.
7. Head out door and walk down 6 stories.. face the wind of the day.

“Office” to “lunch”

1. In office, hang outerwear and find desk to jack in. Not much desk space is available and sometimes we have to borrow a room. (The mongolian office is around half of Level 13)
2. Receive email and reply to email. No MSN and Gmail as it is blocked :`(
3. Work work.. sometime heading out to clients office a few times, meaning dressing up in office and dressing down at clients 10 minutes later. Hot Cold, Hot Cold.
4. Get headache due to the constant temperature variation.

“Lunch” to “dinner”

1. Call colleagues and arrange a meeting point. Usually it ends in “the place that look like a bus station when you walk in to work”. We usually go with some locals so we get to understand what is being offered. Else we’ll just point to pictures and show up 4 fingers. Worse case is to wait till something comes out the kitchen and point to it, and show 4 fingers.
2. Head back to office, repeat above. Work work.. till 5.
3. By 4.30 the skies will start to darken and by 6pm it will feel like 9pm in Malaysia.
4. Local colleagues will start to pack up around 6 and we get the signal to do the same too. Everyone leaves around 6 for any later and it will be dangerous to be walking out. Both from the weather and from pick pockets.
5. Dinner with the local colleagues is usually the norm as they know the place where great food is served and we enjoy the company to dine in.

“Back home” … repeat tomorrow

1. We usually share the bill for dinner and walk some of the nearby colleagues home and build up rapport among the staff for next year’s job.
2. We walk each other home (2 different apartments) and try to keep to groups to ensure safety.
3. We will arrange a meeting time and location for tomorrow at this point.
4. Climb back 6 stories back to apartment and dust off before entering. Similar to how you clean off your feet after coming back from the beach, we do the same only starting from hair, cloths, shoes and jump a few times just to be sure.
5. Drop all bags and strip away the layers of clothing and hunch under blanket and write another blog post.

Some interesting photos to share:

^ This is a shoe polisher that looks like a miniature car wash machine. This is because Mongolia is a very sandy place and clean polished shoes has become some sort of a status recognition. Just like their car.

^ There’s no ‘close’ button on some lifts. There’s only open (far right) and open faster (center button). The “X’” button on the bottom is the emergency stop!

 

^ Took a picture from the room window today. For the first time I manage to see the little houses on the hill slope near the horizon. Doesn’t it look like Half Life 2? I can tell you that the more you live here, the more you believe that it’s actually where they get their idea from. I’ll get more picture later on.

^ We had dinner at this restaurant today. It serves great food and I would consider it one of the more ‘posh’ type.

Things I notice today

1. Still no ugly girls.
2. Gloves will get smelly faster than socks as you sweat more from palms.
3. There is 2 kind of taxies here, official and those that stop when you call for one. Locals pay around MNT500-1000 per trip. There’s no meter, no mention of where you might go and where they are going to drop you. Hop in, pay, hop out and pray you don’t get mugged. Also why everyone inside is a local and no tourists dare enter.
4. Orange juice is the best drink you can get.
5. Orange juice stays cold even after 30 minutes. In fact it gets colder.
6. Melted Metropolitan ice cream is served as a drink here.
7. Due to the blowing sands, static is a big issue here. Merely walking along the street will charge you enough to give you a numb throbbing finger when you open the office door.

I have arrived!

Note: Finally managed to get this out. It’s not easy to find internet connection this far North, read on…

Note2: I didn’t bring my camera so excuse the quality of the pictures ya! Unless you want me to stream 1080p videos, the YouTube version will have to wait until I get some time off to convert it.

*~*~*~*~*

Plane took off Sunday morning on a day long flight to Mongolia. Total flight time 6 hours with another 6 hours transit in Beijing.

This would be my first official overseas working trip and I wouldn’t be any less excited than today. Taking things to the extreme it’s Mongolia, the land where (at this time of the year) everything freezes solid (more on that later).

The flight to Beijing is uneventful and in fact the slight turbulence did cause a slight headache in some of us as the plane keep switching altitude to avoid cloud layers. Ears popping all over the place.

We took off at 9am and reached Beijing around late 3pm. Terminal 2 is slightly separated from Terminal 3 which is built in time for the Beijing Olympic earlier.

We took the Beijing transit as a test of mettle. The captain announced that local temperature is around 7*C and we’re already gleefully hopping in and out of the terminal entrance. (You know ,the kind you do in Genting when you were a child.)

^ My colleague outside the Beijing Airport.

It’s already late 9pm when we had to catch another 2.5 hour flight to UlaanBaatar (pronounced as Uu-Lan-Ba-Tor), the capital of Mongolia.

^ China Air stewardess working on a check in counter for Mongolian Air.. weird.

It’s very very interesting to be hearing a foreign language that I will soon be required to understand and speak in the slightest capacity.

^ UlaanBaatar written in Mandarin

I couldn’t see any city lights on the approach to Mongolia until mere seconds before touch down before a few dots of headlights can be seen through the fog. We realized later that it’s the main highway leading to and fro the airport… and it’s unlit… and bumpy… like the trunk road to Batu Kayu Hitam.

^ Me and my colleague at the Mongolian Immigration. Notice how we’re the only people that’s still in short sleeves.

Thanks to the local staff we got shuffled into a 4×4 and drove off into the night. We (3 of us) stayed in an apartment on the 6th floor so you can imagine all the hard work getting all our luggage up. People that has travelled with me know how little I pack and still I had 3 bags no thanks to all the winter clothing’s.

It’s also quite dark everywhere as there are no street lights anywhere at all. In fact according to my local liaison, it’s quite dangerous to be walking out alone after dark… at 5pm! There has been cases where people are robbed and pickpockets abound so we also got a crash course in how to protect our own possession and left at that.

A little about the apartment, the first thing we did is to trip the fusebox due to a blown light bulb, followed by random banging on the shower room as the shower curtain kept falling off the wall, shouting and cursing at the steam iron that refuses to steam nor irons etc.

There’s a couple of horror stories as well as the pots and pan are all rusted, the tap water is oily (and stinky) and that the wall sockets have no switches. Also due to the bad tap water, we’re buying mineral water for the rest of the month to cook our meals and orange juice as our daily beverage. Thankfully there’s a water fountain in office so we usually fill up before we go back.

^The next morning, dressing rather light for the –13*C weather. No wind chill.

Waking up the next morning at 7am is (Monday Malaysian time), the entire apartment is freezing cold. Seems like sometime during the night the water boiler is switched off and as a result, the heater that runs off the hot water pipe cooled down, sucking heat OUT of our apartment. As a result, the hand lotion dispenser in the toilet froze over.

Never the less we dressed and got ready for work.

^ Typical Mongolian skyline. Realize that there’s no clouds anywhere!

A few observations about Mongolia so far:

1. Everything freezes in Mongolia!
2. There are frozen spits all over the place!
3. Mongolia is still primarily a desert, so sand gets everywhere, including your best shined shoes.
4. People in Mongolia crosses the road like they are Iron-Man (and in time so did we).
5. There is no such thing as a red light junction.
6. Thanks to the dust in Mongolia, there are no clean cars in Mongolia. Even the display units are covered in dust.
7. Things in Mongolia are DIRT CHEAP. Currently RM3.5 = USD1 = MNT1000. Watches, printers, alcohols, clothings are all can be bought for less than RM30. A big bottle of Chivas Regal 12yrs premium costs USD9.

Despite all the doom and gloom so far (and I still haven’t touch on the language barrier), there’s a glimmer of hope in Mongolia, that there are NO UGLY GIRLS IN MONGOLIA (Serious! I’m a Hou Tat convert. Even Jerry says so!)

Work is going to be tough. More so due to the limited time we have to work. To get us through on a day to day basis, we usually hang out with other collegues for a dinner and then in a gay way of speaking, walk each other home for safety.

^ My colleagues trying out some of the local beer, Changgis Beer anyone?

 

^ Dinner like this costs like MNT 7200. Sounds like lots until you convert to RM. 

I’m going to bed now as it’s late. And work gotta start early tomorrow. I can only get internet connection back in office so I’ll try to compose my posts and upload it the next day. Unless I’m working in at a client then it’s the day after next lor… what to do?

Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again

I’ll be leaving Sunday morning for Mongolia.

Looking at the weather channel for the umpteenth time, it still shows a -ve value for most areas. The place I’m going, Ulaanbaatar (UB in short, like KL) is a freezing -17.8*C and it’s only going to get worse till February.

Except the north pole and maybe Russia, I believe it’s the coldest most of Malaysian will ever encounter on their travels. I mean even the Himalayas is a balmy -5*C in comparison.

There are just so many factors in play when packing up for such weather. My watch is likely to die on me in that kind of temp (it can’t even go more than 5 meters below the waterline), a 2 hour battery on my camera will last me at most 20 minutes there and not to mention I have to be careful about condensation else it’ll be a paperweight when I come back.

I’m planning to travel light as the main purpose is to work there, not leisure. Therefore other than the 90 packets of instant noodles I’m bringing (3 per day, 1 month supply) everything else is optional.

A colony of butterflies just hatched in my stomach this morning, bloody things are fluttering in me all day. There’s just so many things to worry about that trying not to think about them scares me more. Not thinking about clothing for cold weather because “we shouldn’t worry too much” is just plain stupid and asking for trouble.

Oh well.. I’ll update the blog and Facebook with photos when I get a chance to go online alright? Stay tuned.

PS: I like this theme, clean and wide enough for big ass pictures.

A bunch of rocks