This morning I got up bright and early and headed to SOS. This time I grabbed a taxi, madee him reset his trip meter to zero, and agreed on a per km price first. This trip only cost me 1,500 MNT instead of the 4,000 from last time. Much better! Dr. Gantulga wasn't in yet when I arrived. I found out he'll be working the late shift (3-11) this week so I'll have to come back later, but I dropped off his white doctor's jacket he lent me for the ambulance last week.

I walked back home and stopped in at the Buddhist cafe again to get a little bit of work done before calling for mother's day. It would have been nice to be in San Diego to celebrate with the rest of the family but we'll be there soon enough.

After an hour-long conversation, I headed to the Irish pub I was going to head to yesterday. There was plenty of space there today and I was able to sit down and order a coffee while I did some more work. I got several more hours done and a now ready to send it off to the rest of the group for incorporation into the main document. Whew! I hope there's not much more to do there - it's such a pain.

I headed back to SOS since it was 3 pm and I met up with Dr. Gantulga. I told him about my presentation I have to do about Mongolian health and we decided that my topic should be Hypertension. I will be looking at all aspects of hypertension in Mongolia, from prevalence and causes to its preventions and outcomes. It is certainly a very relevant topic here and is a major problem for most Mongolians. More about this after I finish the project.

I also had a good chat to him about the recent "hand, foot, and mouth" outbreak that's shut all the schools down. Apparently, many kids have suddenly become infected and it spread very rapidly. It usually resolves in just a few days, but since this strain is caused by enteroviruses instead of coxsackieviruses, it has the potential to affect the brain. Hopefully shutting the schools and limiting public gatherings of kids will prevent the spread. For some reason, adults don't seem to get it.

Today a big dust storm also kicked up. The sky is filled with dirt that looks like fog but just a different colour. And if you open your mouth to breath, you get grit in your teeth - yuck! I've seen a lot of people wearing face masks today but that's as much for the disease outbreak as it is for the dust (though the mask won't help with the infection!) I sure hope it settles down soon because my contacts are getting really irritated.

It'll be leftover pizza again for dinner tonight. In fact, that's what I'm eating right now. Anyway, I'm off to call Michelle now so see ya!