{"id":4975,"date":"2017-07-16T12:17:50","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T19:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/?p=4975"},"modified":"2017-07-16T01:44:48","modified_gmt":"2017-07-16T08:44:48","slug":"country-change-june2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/2017\/country-change-june2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Change in the Countryside &#8211; June 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By Julian Dierkes<\/em><\/p>\n<p>For some years, I have now taken notes about <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/category\/ulaanbaatar\/change\/\">visible changes in Ulaanbaatar<\/a> on my periodic visits.<\/p>\n<p>In part this is note-taking for my own self, because there are so many things that I don&#8217;t remember already about the time when I first started coming to Mongolian (mid-2000s), and I want to use this observations as records for myself.<\/p>\n<p>Also, since I come regularly, but with long intervals in between, some of the changes may be more visible to me than to residents.<\/p>\n<p>So now, I&#8217;ll start a similar listing for the countryside. Though short visits to Mongolia for me mean that I don&#8217;t get out to the countryside every time I&#8217;m in Mongolia, but over the years these visits are regular enough that some notes might be useful.<\/p>\n<h2>Visible Manifestations of Social Change in the Countryside<\/h2>\n<h3>What has Arrived?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Guardrails in some curves on major cross-country roads<\/li>\n<li>While it used to be that street signs (speed limits, warnings of curves, etc.) were a curious rarity (&#8220;when there hasn&#8217;t been a sign for 100km, why this one?&#8221;) they now seem to appear in clusters.<\/li>\n<li>The state is reasserting its authority in some places. Roadside safety inspections of vehicles have returned.<\/li>\n<li>Fences around large parcels of lands. As far as I can tell these are hayed for winter fodder as nothing seems to be planted there. Fences keep out animals in this case to let grass grow.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve long heard discussion that many of the projects carried out with the Local Development Fund were public toilets. I have now seen some of these!<\/li>\n<li>Not all fences around <em>xashaa<\/em> (property lots) are wood anymore. There are some prefab concrete slabs, corrugated metals, etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>What has Disappeared, or at least, Nearly Disappeared?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The clever move to simply drive cross-country around toll booths on major roads.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>What will Appear in the Future?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Much more directional street markers.<\/li>\n<li>Cross-country biking, hiking, and riding routes away from major roads.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>What will Disappear in the Future?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Roughly in the 2000s, I would guess, more cars were beginning to show up in the countryside, but road-construction was not revving up yet. That meant that on big cross-country routes, entire valleys were scarred by multiple parallel tracks. Along the paved sections of major roads, these scars are slowly disappearing in the landscape.<\/li>\n<li>At construction sites, the paved roads are often simply blocked with large dirt heaps across the lanes. Effective, but scary at night.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>What won&#8217;t Disappear in the Medium Term?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Composite electricity poles. In the countryside these consist of a concrete base to which a wooden pole is tied with wire\/brackets which ends in a triangle that has space for three attached cables. Metal poles have appeared, but I know similar composite poles from the Yukon and Alaska, so they \u00a0must be well-adapted to extreme temperatures and will thus last.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Julian Dierkes For some years, I have now taken notes about visible changes in Ulaanbaatar on my periodic visits. In part this is note-taking for my own self, because there are so many things that I don&#8217;t remember already &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/2017\/country-change-june2017\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[983140,307968,307856],"tags":[983090],"class_list":["post-4975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-change-countryside","category-countryside","category-curios","tag-julian-dierkes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4975"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5112,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4975\/revisions\/5112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}