Erklen is a really cool guy and is currently a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. We actually met each other in Ulaanbaatar last summer.
One of Mongolia’s most popular artists is Magnolian. You can get a glimpse of what life in Ulaanbaatar is like through his music videos on YouTube.
I’m also currently going through a phase of enjoying jazz music, and I have a goal of listening to fifty jazz albums in 2026. This week, I listened to Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis and The Amazing Bud Powell by Bud Powell.
Another Peace Corps volunteer in Ulaanbaatar turned 25 on Saturday, and many of us had a celebration by going to karaoke.
I’m close to finishing Clashing Over Commerce by Douglas A. Irwin. Written by a respected economist at Dartmouth, it is a very comprehensive history of U.S. trade policy that lasts for almost seven hundred pages. I’ve learned a ton about how the American government has shaped our commerce with other countries for over two hundred years. After this book, I might start Nomads and the Outside World by the historian Anatoly M. Khazanov.
While I have not played any sports myself recently, I have been watching many baseball games since the start of the Major League Baseball season. Mongolia’s timezone is fifteen hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time, so I can watch the evening games when I wake up in Mongolia. My Dodgers are having an excellent start to their 2026 season, and the quest to a third consecutive World Series title has begun.
