Since I have arrived in the city I will put up a post. This post is on Halloween, with the help of my counterpart we had a Halloween costume contest by class in my school (the way my school is divided each grade has 2 classes and they stay the same so class 7b has all their classes together, and will become 8b next year).  Some of the classes got really into it (my counterparts class was one of the best), other classes (10 and 11^th grade were too cool for it).  The winning class had a guy in drag, a girl dressed as Michael Jackson, a boy with spring in pantyhose on his head (I think he was going for a spider) and a guy who had pinned an entire skeleton to his black outfit.  They were really awesome costumes!  I was a little surprised because their class teacher (in addition to being the same class for 6 grade through 11^th grade they also have the same homeroom teacher for all those years) seemed to be one of the more resistant teachers (at least from what I could understand – but maybe she was just asking more questions – we get back to my problems with Mongolian) to the idea and because it was one of the 11^th grade classes and the other 11^th grade class had no one in a costume at all.  It was super fun, and it went WAY better than I could reasonably expect it to, given my lack of Mongolian, and the newness of the holiday.  I am super happy about the results.  I think the kids had a lot of fun, however maybe next year we will not have them wear their costumes to school because I don’t know how much was learned today.  Defiantly no English was learned (I helped teach some of those classes).  But next year I will be better able to communicate with the people around me so that will help.

Other news, it snowed again, just a little.  Well, I say just a little it actually snowed REALLY hard for about 20 minutes (like white out conditions) but then it stopped and the sun came out and it melted.  The weather here feels a lot like Maine, and is about as predictable.  The one redeeming factor is that there are very few weather men, so you don’t get excited about big snowstorms etc that don’t happen.  But I don’t think we have snow days anyway.  No one gets bussed from anywhere; in fact kids that live a long ways away live in a dorm, even the 6 year olds.  I know it is a cultural thing but I can’t imagine a 6 year old living in a dorm.  I guess most of them have older brothers/sisters/cousins that live in the same dorm and would probably be taking care of them at home too, but it is still strange to me.

So I guess that is all for now.  I am going to be back in town for Thanksgiving.  I am not sure how the next month will go, and the month after that will be even more difficult, but hey I signed up for this.  I hopefully will be going to the countryside for part of my school vacation, so that should be interesting, my counterpart’s 4 year old has promised to teach me how to ride horses (actually my counterpart will probably be doing the teaching and the 4 year old will be showing off, she promises me that they have nice horses – we shall see).