Thought I'd do a little more description of the school. Its a very basic but big 3 storey building, with around a thousand students in attendance. Its clean, but most of the windows are broken so it can get very chilly. The children come from a small variety of backgrounds, some are reasonably well off, well dressed with small families and quite nice but basic houses though alot are not so well off in small, basic accomodation that they share with an extensive family and are unable to buy the required textbooks for school which can make teaching difficult.
Mongolia is a very poor country, the evidence is everywhere especially in Ulaan Baatar, the streets are filled with the homeless (mostly children) which make a huge contrast to the well dressed population as they stretch out by the road side with a small cardboard box for donations from the people passing. You can smell the stench of sewers and on the backstreets there are mountains of decaying rubbish, many of the buildings and all of the streets are in disrepair. Around the State Department Store on Seoul Street is what is the most upmarket square km in all of Mongolia (apart from the huge fenced off mansion just outside the city where the president lives) but about 5-10 minutes walk and you come upon a huge shanty town of ramshackle huts and ghers. It's not a pretty or particularly nice city by any stretch of the imagination.

The last week and a bit have been reasonably uneventful, I've mostly been fighting off various mild but annoying illnesses I've picked up.

I'm now socializing more with my colleagues from the school, there's four of us who go to a local pub, drink beer, eat peanuts and talk. It was recently decided that we should go out to one of the nearby clubs last night. Two couldn't make it but me and Ankhaa went along anyway. It was a far cry from the last time I went clubbing in Zante, the dance floor was a sobering experience. But at the same time it was incredibly entertaining in a cringing way. I think me and Ankhaa were the only really sober ones there in the tiny, mostly empty club, everyone seemed to be dancing to some rhythm other than that the music was playing (although convinced that they were dancing really really well, most of the men transfixed by the mirrors that lined the floor watching themselves dance) and the staff were pulling out every abysmal tune they could possibly thing of most of which were impossible to dance to so everyone stood around looking awkward. It was very entertaining for me!

Sorry thats all for now, I'm not feeling very inspired at the moment!

At the top are some photos from my first few weeks that my Dad has managed to upload from my Facebook Album - More will appear as I get the technology sorted out