Going ahead

Well, I've taken the plunge, I've set my datetime to be on Ulaanbaatar time which is currently 7 hours ahead of British Summer Time. It does mean all my posts will be retrospectively changed to this time as well, but you can't have everything on blogger.
I've been here in Mongolia now a little over four months. In Mongolia, al has a very different meaning to a harmless abbreviated name - it means vagina. So I guess you could call my posts in Mongolia as the Al Monologues. It certainly gives a new twist to the Paul Simon song "You can call me Al".
Now the rains are becoming heavier and more frequent, the city authorities are making a determined effort to clear the storm drains of rubbish (which, ironically, are some of the greenest parts of the city with vibrant swathes of grass growing on top of and around the mouldering heaps). Workers use spades and pickaxes to break the compacted waste into suitable sizes to put into wheely-bins and sometimes the detritus is so solidified that JCBs are employed to excavate with their long digger arms to help the manual workers. Their work has a purpose. Last night, the rain was for so long and so much of it that the streets turned to rivers, something I'd rarely thought I'd see in somewhere as dry as Mongolia.
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