That said, I'm self-aware enough that I know these are not sustainable life choices. Coming home from school each day to order Songo and watch anime in the dark for several hours...
...speaking of which, yeah, instead of my usual photography you're getting (mostly) anime swimming gifs today instead. You're welcome...
...before falling asleep way too early is pretty much guaranteed to wreck both my body and my mind. So as my November payday crept closer, I resolved that I would join a nearby health club that had a pool. The pool is important because we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of my feet being shit, and even though I spend less time on them on any given day here than I did at any point in Japan, they can still be a bitch.
Back to being lazy as fuck, one of the ways in which Mongolia beats Japan most days is that things are relatively simple. For example, rather than a long winded bureaucratical nightmare if you need a phone in Mongolia, you just drop in on Mobicom with your passport and you can walk away with a SIM card. However, I knew from previous experience that joining a gym - or at least, one with a pool - involved a doctor's clearance...less for my own sake than for the fact that I might bring something communicable into the water. However, this damn doctor's clearance was what kept me from joining a pool in the five years I was here before, because it required a pap smear, and on general principle I refused to do it. Since you can't get an STD from a swimming pool, I failed to see how the state of my vagina was any of their business.
Well, I still object, but since I haven't had a proper checkup since I lived in Shanghai I wrote it off as killing two birds with one stone, and went and got it done. And then waited around for two weeks for payday so that I could afford the membership fee. And then promptly got sick, so it was almost three weeks before I finally got into the pool. I’ve never really thought of swimming as hard work, so it said a lot to me that in my first lap I could already tell that my muscles, such as they are, were getting beat up. I kind of thought I was going to be swimming for like an hour every day, but after that first excruciating lap, I knew I’d struggle to finish 30 minutes. The upshot to this is that I slept like the dead those first two nights.
There are other challenges beyond the shape I’m in (ie, round). A big one is the fact that I live by Songo delivery, and I often skip lunch. It was tough waiting til I got home to eat, and involved a balancing act of ordering in advance and hoping that the driver shows up when they’re supposed to. If they get there too early, I’m not home yet. If they arrive late, I’m so hungry that I actually want to bite the driver, I’m that angry as well as that hungry. I've been better about cooking since winter break, though, especially since the quarantine...which is a topic for another blog. A logistical nightmare of a different stripe is getting home with wet hair. Before I started actually going this was my biggest fear; that on the 5 minute walk home my hair would freeze and break off (I may need to get it cut, but not like that!). This has been a ridiculously warm winter, so I've gotten away with just bundling it up, which is good because I didn't particularly want to torture my hair with a blow dryer, only to turn around and shower as soon as I get home.
However, after my first night swimming I had to upgrade my biggest fear. About halfway through my swim two middle school boys got in. They were speaking English, and though I was trying to pretend they didn’t exist, I made eye contact long enough that I’m pretty sure I recognized one of them as an eighth grader from my school. I was kind of prepared for the fact that I’d run into students there at some point, but when I got out of the pool fifteen minutes later I realized someone had left the doors of the women’s locker room open. I obviously closed them, but I’ve been terrified ever since that some dumbass will leave them open when I’m changing. I don’t know who would be more traumatized, but considering how awkward it was when a female former student came in while I was getting dressed, I’m going to say everyone.
So my (more or less) nightly swim's not perfect. But the water is warm and with my earplugs in I can't hear the shrieks of the little monsters whose parents send them there without any supervision. As I glide through the water, I do feel a little more peaceful, like my worries are floating away in my wake. Walking back to the apartment, the moon greets me in a light, night sky, limning the hills in white and transporting me to a different place. And I have to admit that this has at least been one new experience for me in Mongolia.
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