Zeb CP#3

    On Saturday (the 20^th) I tried to arrange several meetings with students, but Bayasaa was the only one who ended up being able to make it. We met at the public library around 10:00 in the morning and ended our meeting close to 12:30. We talked about a rather wide variety of things, ranging from his profession and studies (he's a radiologist/medical imaging specialist in Ulan Bator Central Hospital), his wife's profession (she a radiotherapist), the fact that he lives alone and must do his own cooking (and what he cooks), hunting (both here and in Mongolia), as well as other interesting facts about the US and Mongolia.

    Mongolia has a population of around 2,800,000 people and 40 some million livestock, of which 20 some million are cashmere goats. It also has large numbers of sheep, cattle, horses and Bactrian camels. If I understand correctly Bayasaa's father owns some kind of farm or ranch, and Bayasaa has some animals of his own there. When he retires he plans on having a farm and keeping some cattle. I talked some about my family's dairy farm and showed various pictures that I had on my computer, including pictures from when we had our cheese operation. He seemed to find those quite interesting, and when I came to some pictures of French mold ripened cheeses he thought that the cheese was rotten until I explained that mold is normal on some cheese and is actually Penicillin mold.

   Mongolia has a very cold climate. Bayasaa said that the winter daytime high temperature where he lives might only reach -30F. I asked him how they heat their houses in the winter and the best I could tell (his vocabulary, like most language learners, has very pronounced strong/weak areas) they use coal fired steam heating systems. Coal is one of the main mineral resources (as are gold and copper), and if I understand correctly many areas do not have very many trees, so I suppose coal is the natural choice for heating. From what I understand the capital city (Ulan Bator) has very serious pollution problems.

   Bayasaa (sort of joking) said something about maybe after he is done with his studies in Japan that he will see me teaching English in Mongolia. He said there is a very high demand for English teachers, and it seems they can make a decent wage there.

   Quite a few times in our conversation we would come to a word that Bayasaa didn't understand, so I would write it down on his notepad and then he would look it up in his translator dictionary on his phone. The next time I see him I am going to suggest that he should keep a list of new words that he encounters in conversations and try to learn them, since it is likely that if he encountered them once he will meet them again.