Mongolia

Anyone know anything about it? And I mean straight up Mongolia, Outer Mongolia. Not the Inner Mongolia that is a part of the PRC. From the little information I could gleam from the net, is appears you don’t need anything besides a TEFL certificate (and likely not even that) and they always need jobs? (yet I can hardly find any job postings online.) I know it would be cold as f**k over there, but perhaps it would be a decent place to get one or two years experience before hopping over to Taiwan? I don’t know, I wasn’t interested in Mongolia at all until today, and now it might seem like a decent stop gap to gain some experience as opposed to going to Taiwan without any. (besides what I would get when I go for my CELTA and from my language exchange)

The only ad I find on Dave’s forum only says “Very competitive salary” which could mean. . . anything.

Anyone ever teach there? Or hell, does anyone know someone who knows someone who’s cousin went over there? I can find so little information I’ll take hearsay at this point.

What little information I could find so far:

onestopenglish.com/community … 41.article

eslbase.com/advice/mongolia

teflworldwiki.com/index.php/Mongolia Found this right before I pressed “Submit” said pay is around 800 a month with accommodation paid for. Anyone know the cost of living, etc?

EDIT: Also, the teflworldwiki.com site seems to have some incorrect/out of date information on Taiwan, so I don’t know if I want to trust it for Mongolia.

It’s very poor and so while the pay is low living costs are also low. However, if you want to enjoy life, expat things cost more. The capital is very heavily polluted. I would say it would help prepare you for Taiwan in the sense that Taiwan would look pretty good to you after Mongolia. I think that Taiwan would be a much easier place to start teaching though - there will be less culture shock in Taipei, for example.

Thanks for the reply! :slight_smile:

I have no doubts that I will not enjoy Mongolia outside of the winter. I am actually dying for some culture shock, it has been three years since I’ve traveled abroad, (really haven’t been living up to my online handle) and I am itching for an adventure. I have wasted a good five years of my life basically doing shit jobs, and so I will only just now be getting my ASSOCIATES degree (in education) at the end of the spring semester. My original plan is to get that, then get my CELTA, then do one more semester toward my bachelors, then head to Taiwan with that and just do my best while finishing up my degree online (not an online degree though, just some online classes at a real school).

But looking at the market that doesn’t sound like it will be enough. But I simply can’t stay here for much longer, Virginia is boring, Mongolia might not be fun, but it certainly won’t be boring! I guess what I am asking is what will Taiwan employers think of my (potential) experience in Mongolia? Will saying “I have a CELTA, One (or two) years experience teaching in Mongolia, and an associates degree in Education” put me on at least equal footing with another F.O.B. who has a bachelors?

EDIT: Also, are jobs as easy to get as I am being led to believe?

Experience teaching is looked at as a positive, so an associate degree with a CELTA and some experience should make you about equal to someone with a Bachelor’s degree and no experience. That you were teaching in Mongolia will not impress anyone, but it won’t be a minus either.
If you want somewhere different with few foreigners, Mongolia is not a bad choice. The capital is grey and depressing, but there are interesting tourist sites. There are job opportunites simply because not many foreigners want to live there for a year.

I haven’t taught there, but I have been there. As bababa says, Ulaan Baatar is a little drab and it is very cold from September onwards. There are other foreigners there and a pizza place, if I remember rightly. The warmest place is probably in a yurt but failing that there are underground heating ducts (like New York) in which street kids spend the winter.


I can highly recommend The Steppe Inn on Friday nights in the British Embassy compound, though the Ambassador cum bartender has changed and I’m not sure how you go about getting an invite.


The electrics in hotels are not necessarily to be trusted.


The locals are friendly and there’s lots of space.


Should you fancy a day out, there’s an abandoned Soviet airforce base somewhere in the Gobi. There’s only one road so you should find it.


If the locals pull you over at 9am and insist you drink vodka, it would be rude to refuse. If they want you to drive their jeep, don’t worry, there’s nothing to bump into.

Cool, thanks guys! I have a while to make a final decision, but right now I think I’m going to head over there after I get my degree and get my CELTA. (Then, FINALLY I’ll be ready for Taiwan) I didn’t think Mongolia would be anything extra special for experience to employers, but it is one of the few countries that don’t require a degree, so it is one of the few that will let me get experience, so, so long as that experience isn’t worthless, then it is worth doing. Hopefully I can get reliable internet access there and continue towards my Bachelors education while there.

Thanks especially for the pictures fruitloop!

We played hockey there against their National team.
Their players had to share sticks and gloves. They were pretty accomplished at changing sticks on the fly.

It’s an extremely poor country. Yurts line the highway in downtown UB.

If it’s culture shock you are after, this can be areal step back in time. We stopped our bus at a little Mom and Pop groc op and when they ran out of change, they paid us in Tic Tacs. Not entire packs of Tic Tacs, no. They broke it open and spilled a few minty treats in your hand.

I’d say a great place to visit, but teach there? :no-no:

Dress warm man. It’s the coldest place I’ve ever been. And I’ve been to Edmonton.

Hmmmmm, Facebook images can’t be hosted as images here?

My Mongo Pics.

In the course of doing translation and writing support work for a (retired) Okinawan proferssor who has written about Mongolia (and also visited there), i was in the enviable position of having to do some extensive background research concerning that country, but i have not yet been there myself. Meaning that, although i can’t claim to know anything about that country that you couldn’t find on the web, i have collected some information that i will use if i ever get to go there, and you can have some of that right here. :slight_smile:
For example, i would recommend that anybody going to Ulan Bator (Ulaanbataar) to work there should make their lives easier by making personal contacts on the campuses of the universities there, since there you can find educated people who can speak English, Japanese, Russian, or Chinese (depending on your own language of preference).
To get started, here are the URLs to the English pages of four academic institions there:
miu.edu.mn/
num.edu.mn/eng/
must.edu.mn/must_en/
infosys.ife.edu.mn/ife_web/
I would also recommend reading the English language newspapers published in Mongolia to get an idea of what the issues are - try this site for a few links:
world-newspapers.com/mongolia.html (if your budget is too limited to subscribe to the papers, you can access them on university campuses)
And some information about internet services there can be had here:
ostamyy.com/ISPs/Mongolia.htm
:2cents:

Awesome! Thanks for the great replies!

@Toesave: Well, I am used to going back in time, for short amounts of times at least. I did some charity work in Mexico back in the day, and I’m not talking about Tijuana or Cancun or the tourist destinations, nor am I talking about big Metro areas like Mexico City, no, I’m talking about little shacks without running water and only sometimes electricity. But I never spent the night there, much less a year, so I am sure it will be interesting/hard/crazy. But, where else can I get experience with only an Associates degree? I am open for suggestions, but don’t tell me to wait two more years to get my Bachelors, I’ll be damn near 27 by that time. (Like I said, I wasted too much of my life doing shit jobs). I am also used to freezing cold, I used to live in upstate NY, where it can get below -30F (-34C) at times (when you count windchill). It is hell, and I hate it, but I can deal with it, and I have some good winter jackets and long underwear already. (I know it will be colder in Mongolia, but one can only be so prepared for that cold) Also, LOVE your avatar. :smiley:

@Yuli Wow! Thanks for all the helpful info! But should it worry me that the link to “The biggest ISP in Mongolia” is to a down/dead website? :ponder:

Temporary inaccessible not “dead” (Google has a snapshot of their site dated 2011年8月25日 04:15:21 GMT)… Anyway, the MagicNet website is hosted in the US - so i don’t know what this means. :slight_smile:
But when the professor i mentioned was in Mongolia recently he sent me mail from there without any problems, and the other sites i mentioned to you are up, so i wouldn’t worry about internet access (especially since there are netcafes in town as well).

I made this mistake when I went to live in Sichuan. -40 (not even taking the wind chill into account) in Saskatoon, so how bad can Mianyang be? Well, I found out it can be pretty bad. In Canada and the USA, cold places have indoor heating, heated cars, heated buses, heated work places. Poor countries, even very cold ones, don’t necessarily. A temperature just around the freezing mark when you cannot escape the cold and are that cold all the time, will feel much colder than well below freezing when you only actually have to go outside for a few minutes a day.
That said, honestly I kind of wish I were in a position to go somewhere like Mongolia for a year. Living in Taipei was easy; living in Sichuan was most definitely not, but the culture shock wore off after a while, and the experience was worthwhile. Be realistic about what to expect, but I say go for it.

Yeah, definitely understood. I know it is going to be much colder and I will be miserable at times. From what I can gleam from the internet, Ulaanbaatar does have heat for the whole city, but it is an old soviet system and isn’t adjustable. I guess it depends on what apartment you get, some of them keep it reasonably warm, others, not so much, and it turns off and on at certain dates, regardless of temperature. I can only hope that whatever school I get employed by will be in the practice of wanting to keep their teachers around, and will give me something adequate, if not, I guess I will just have to do what the locals do, whatever that is. (besides hanging out underground) From a NYT article I read, the last two winters have been especially cold, hopefully the 2012-2013 year breaks that trend. I have no illusions about it, I don’t think. Taiwan is my dream right now, and I may have illusions about there. If I could hop on a plane tomorrow I would. But I will likely only get one shot at it, going there with just a CELTA and an Associates degree with no experience, well, it might work, but if it doesn’t and I have to return to America penniless and with my tail between my legs, it will be an irreversible blow to my ego, plus, with my parents retiring and fulfilling their own dream of getting an RV and traveling around there country, I’m not sure exactly what I’d be returning to. So I need to make sure I am prepared, yet waiting two and a half more years for getting my Bachelors is not an option. My life has been too easy, I desire challenge, I desire adventure, I desire experience. And so, armed with the advice, knowledge and encouragement presented in this thread, I think I will do it.

I was doing some research on UB, as I was intending to do a work trip there. I didn’t end up going, but one thing that the others that did go noted was xenophobic aggression/potential or actual violence. I spotted this as something of a theme in my research, which admittedly was focused a bit too heavily on night life, perhaps. The other was that they are damned big people that drink a lot. If the bigness, passion for drink, xenophobia and violence come together, things get ugly quickly, it seems.

Anyway, the good news is there’s a website called Mongol Expat. The bad news is here’s a link: http://mongolexpat.com/foreigners-targets-of-violence-in-ulaanbaatar/

There’s quite a resources boom happening in Mongolia just now. Obviously the supposed trickle down isn’t quite reaching the lower echelons. But there are some that are putting it away. I was recently at a forum and met with the head of Mongolbank and the Minister of Finance. The latter an extremely impressive individual. Needless to say, they have a rather bold vision for the country’s future based on the treasure mostly still dormant under its plains. I suspect too, however, that this is a cause of a lot of the apparent nastiness.

HG

This is the first time i hear about this, which would appear to be a particularly alarming issue since it involves physical violence not just stares, odd behaviour, or strange talk. Most of the materials i’ve read about Mongolia were related to (and written by) Japanese people and organisations there, and nowhere did i see any mention of this kind of violence or any other dangers except the weather (my acquaintance from Okinawa, who has been to Ulan Bator more than once, also never mentioned any untoward happenings there). Although nothing about the affected expats’ appearance has been mentioned on the site you linked to, i suspect that a “western” appearance is one of the trigger points in this context. Perhaps the OP might consider working in Saudi Arabia instead (his qualification/ certification might just be sufficient for that country, although i am not sure) - there he can experience a strong cultural challenge without the threat of physical violence over his head.

Yeah, I did see that website, hopefully I can avoid that violence. If UB was to be my destination long term I would be far more worried, but I think, only being there a year I can avoid the nightlife, with an eye towards Taipei’s nightlife as soon as I get my experience. The few times I do go out, I’ll likely go to the places on mongoliaexpat mentioned as reasonably safe.

Too bad about Mongoliaexpat.com though, their forum is just full of 1 post posters who never had their question answered. I wish I could find a place like here for Mongolia before going.

As for Saudi Arabia, no f’in way. Thanks for the suggestion, but a place where alcohol is banned? Not that I’m an alcoholic who needs to drink everyday (or even every week for that matter) but not at all? No-thank-you. I’d rather risk getting beat up! :laughing:

Plus, surely there must be some threat of violence for an American in an Arabian country, no?

EDIT: Actually, I had not seen that specific article, I will now have to keep an eye on this. Luckily I have about 9 months to decide. , .

Double Edit: Actually, looks like I hadn’t been to that site at all, I was thinking of this one mongoliaexpat.com/ So thanks for that!

Perhaps it is an anti-Caucasian thing. I’ve read several “survival” type guides that reccomend “blending in” or “hanging with a Mongolian.” I’ve never been there, so don’t know, but I have heard this several times second hand.

I sort of had to chuckle about your suggestion for Saudi Arabia. The line “threat of physical violence hanging over your head” got me immediately thinking of this incident.

Maid’s beheading in Saudi Arabia halts Indonesian domestic worker scheme

HG

:laughing:

Why should there? Saudi Arabia is a US ally. (I’ve never heard of anything out of the ordinary in regards to Americans when i was there - i used to work with, and associate otherwise with, people from the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, Egypt, Lebanon, the Sudan, and the Philippines.)

[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]The line “threat of physical violence hanging over your head” got me immediately thinking of this incident.
Maid’s beheading in Saudi Arabia halts Indonesian domestic worker scheme[/quote]
I’m not sot surprised - laboureres, drivers, maids, etc., who usually come from other Islamic countries that many Arabs look down on (like Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sudan, etc.) are often treated (and cheated) in a despicable manner (in the case of women working as household maids that can even go as far as having to suffer being raped by a male member of the household), but nurses, doctors, engineers, teachers, etc., who are sort of “white” and come from non-islamic countries that are perceived as having a higher status *) are usually treated quite well as long as they don’t blatantly provoke the wrath of the religious or political authorities (drinking in public, putting a cross on the roof, in the case of women: driving a car or and various other prohibitied actions are bound to get people deported). So no kidding about cultural challenges…

*) High status countries, from what i’ve seen while living there (no claim to completeness): Japan, Korea, China, any of the countries in Europe where a Germanic language is spoken, Canada, the USA, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain

This is the first time I hear about this, which would appear to be a particularly alarming issue since it involves physical violence not just stares, odd behaviour, or strange talk. Most of the materials I’ve read about Mongolia were related to (and written by) Japanese people and organisations there, and nowhere did i see any mention of this kind of violence or any other dangers except the weather (my acquaintance from Okinawa, who has been to Ulan Bator more than once, also never mentioned any untoward happenings there). Although nothing about the affected expats’ appearance has been mentioned on the site you linked to, i suspect that a “western” appearance is one of the trigger points in this context. Perhaps the OP might consider working in Saudi Arabia instead (his qualification/ certification might just be sufficient for that country, although I am not sure) - there he can experience a strong cultural challenge without the threat of physical violence over his head.[/quote]

I spent a month last year in UB and in the Gobi. Lots of American peace corps type kids there. Not much violence per se, but lots of alcoholism (and related violence).
not much xenophobia, except they despise Chinese. They respect Russians, and seem to tolerate Japanese. Lots of Korean business influences but that may be a mixed bag of welcome and resentment. I walked alone in a small town, ran into a drunk group of mining engineers and was invited to drink with them, and they bought drinks for me - no fear of violence anywhere in Mongolia, in particular after I told them I’m from Canada. Met up with a kid from DC at a hostel doing some degree/field work there who had a Mongolian gf. That was slightly frowned upon (weird looks etc), but no outward hostility. The saddest thing was the alcoholism, the loss of livelihood (from the bad winters) resulting in men coming to cities being drunks and pushing their women to prostitution to support the drink habit, etc. But other than that, the people I met in the country outside the city were quite honorable, though not perfect (some were petty, some were selfish, but all very human).

That is good to hear, perhaps the claims of violence is just a sensationalist media.

What is this I hear about “exit visas” if you don’t get your job’s permission you can’t leave the country? I don’t plan on breaking my contract no matter how bad it gets, because that would ruin the whole point of going there, but losing that leverage on an employer and basically being their slave until my contract is up does not seem desirable.

From the US State Department website:

travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_t … s_973.html

[quote]Since the spring of 2010, an increased number of xenophobic attacks against foreign nationals in Ulaanbaatar were reported to the U.S. Embassy. A number of these attacks occurred without provocation, and robbery was not the motive. Attackers targeted the victim(s) based solely on their ethnicity or perceived foreign nationality. Some of these attacks were directed against U.S. citizens.

Additionally, nationalist groups frequently mistake Asian-Americans for ethnic Chinese or Koreans and may attack without warning or provocation. Asian-Americans should exercise caution walking the streets of Ulaanbaatar at all times. [/quote]

I guess I should just be careful, I don’t think that is going to impact my decision. Of much more concern to me is:

Yikes, anyone have any experience with “exit visas” either in Mongolia or elsewhere?