We lived in Mongolia in the early 1990s, for a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during a time when the system had officially ended but its habits had not yet loosened their grip on daily life. I was in my early thirties, married, with two young daughters, trying to build a life far from anything familiar. We were not passing through, and we were not insulated expatriates. We were attempting to function inside the local economy, under local conditions, with consequences that were immediate and personal.
At the time, I did not think of what we were doing as preparedness. I had no language for it. There was no ideology attached to the experience, no checklist to consult, no theory to reference. There was simply life as it presented itself each day, and life required adaptation. At first, the differences felt cosmetic. Language, clothing, food. Small disorientations that seemed manageable with time and effort. But slowly, and then unmistakably, deeper assumptions began to collapse.
Food was the first. There were no grocery stores in the sense we understood them. No aisles. No fluorescent lighting. No refrigeration cases humming steadily in the background. Food came instead from informal markets and small vendors, scattered and inconsistent, appearing and disappearing without explanation. Availability shifted from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour.
Shopping, I learned quickly, was the wrong word. There was no list. No meal planning. You did not leave home intending to buy something specific. You went to see what existed. On cold mornings, we would walk toward the market with no clear expectation of what we might find. Vendors stood behind rough tables or crates, wrapped in layers, their breath visible in the air. Goods were arranged simply, often without protection from the elements. If something appeared for sale, you made a decision immediately. Hesitation was punished. Waiting was rarely rewarded.
Staple foods were usually present, though even those could vanish without warning. Meat was another matter entirely. When it did appear, it was rare, and it often sat openly on counters in unrefrigerated conditions. There was no illusion of modern food handling. You assessed quickly, decided quickly, and adapted.
Imported goods surfaced occasionally, but they were expensive and unpredictable. They were treated less as staples and more as anomalies, temporary interruptions in an otherwise constrained reality.
Out of necessity, my wife learned to bake bread. It was not a hobby. Rather, it was a response. Homemade bread became a constant because it could be controlled. When supply chains are unreliable, personal control becomes stability.
Even then, ingredients were compromised. Flour was not commercial-grade. Much of it was castoff material swept from the floors of Chinese flour mills and sold through informal channels. It arrived gritty, uneven, sometimes contaminated with debris. Before it could be used, it had to be sifted carefully, inspected, and worked with patiently.
Skill mattered more than quality. One of the moments that stays with me most vividly from that time is watching my wife butcher an entire pig on our kitchen floor. There was no butcher shop. No processing facility. The pig was sourced locally through informal connections, brought to us because that was how food moved. She worked methodically, following her Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, a wedding gift she had packed without any idea of how useful it would become. Page by page, step by step, she turned the animal into usable food in the only space we had. Nothing was wasted. Every usable portion was processed, preserved, or consumed. This was not a novelty. It was a necessity.
Food, I learned, was not about preference. It was about availability and competence. The ability to recognize what you had, understand what it could become, and act without hesitation mattered far more than ideal menus or stored recipes. That lesson settled quietly, long before I recognized its significance.
Conquering The Cold
Winter did not arrive all at once. It announced itself gradually, with mornings that took longer to warm and evenings that closed in earlier than expected. At first, the cold felt manageable, something you dressed for and worked around. Then it settled into the walls, the floors, the pipes, and eventually into your thinking.
Our apartment, a former Russian military unit, had been designed to house people, not comfort them. Thick concrete walls held heat reluctantly and released it quickly. The building carried the quiet of abandonment, not silence exactly, but the muffled stillness of something built for a purpose it no longer served. When the Soviet army withdrew, thousands of these apartments were left behind, and people like us moved into the shell of someone else’s intentions.
Heat came when it came. Water came when it came. Electricity behaved the same way. You learned to notice small changes. A radiator that cooled sooner than usual. A light that flickered slightly before going out. The sound of the building settling differently at night when temperatures dropped sharply. These were not inconveniences. They were signals.
Laundry was one of the first daily routines to change. There were facilities in theory, but in practice they were unreliable, unavailable, or inoperable. Washing clothes became a manual task. I remember standing in our bathtub, sleeves rolled up, plunging my hands into freezing water to scrub jeans stiff with cold. The water burned, then numbed. The sensation faded, leaving only function. You did not wait for conditions to improve. You worked with what was there.
Cold has a way of stripping life down to essentials. You thought less about comfort and more about sequence. What must be done while there is light. What can wait, and what cannot.
Mongolia’s power grid ran on 230 volts at 50 Hertz and was part of the Central Mongolian system, which relied heavily on coal. In winter, demand surged while reliability weakened. Outages were frequent enough that they became part of the rhythm of life rather than interruptions to it.
Sometimes the power went out briefly, returning before you had fully adjusted. Other times, it stayed out long enough for the apartment to begin changing temperature noticeably. During the coldest periods, outages could stretch into days. You did not panic. Panic was unproductive. You layered clothing, conserved movement, and waited.
Daily life was planned with the assumption that electricity would fail. Lights were not trusted. Heating systems were watched carefully. Meals were adjusted. You learned which tasks required power and which did not, and you reordered your day accordingly.
During winter, even the U.S. Embassy monitored the grid closely. The possibility of a complete system failure was taken seriously enough that commercial flights were placed on twenty-four-hour standby for potential evacuation of official personnel. We were nongovernmental residents. Those plans did not include us. Our planning had to be personal.
Cold changed how time felt. Days stretched and compressed unpredictably. Waiting became a skill. Movement slowed, not from laziness, but from necessity. Mistakes in cold conditions were costly. Dropping something, misjudging exposure, or forgetting a step could mean numb fingers, wasted effort, or worse.
At night, the building sounded different. Pipes knocked and shifted. Wind pressed against the structure. When the power was out, darkness was complete in a way I had not experienced before. There were no ambient glows, no distant streetlights filtering in. You adjusted your movements carefully, counting steps, memorizing layouts.
Cold also reached into transportation. Fuel was rationed, and we carried ration cards that represented access more than ownership. Much of the fuel supply moved through black-market channels, quietly and informally. Even with fuel secured, access was never guaranteed. Gas station queues were long, unpredictable, and often fruitless. You could wait for hours only to be told nothing was coming that day. You learned to plan movement around availability rather than need. Errands were consolidated. Trips were delayed. Distance became something you negotiated rather than assumed.
In extreme cold, gasoline thickened and gelled. Engines that had run the day before refused to start the next morning. Vehicles parked outside simply failed, silently and completely, as if opting out. Our car could not be left outdoors. It had to be stored in a local garage equipped with radiators heated by the Central Mongolian power system. Those radiators were mounted directly in front of the engine grill, warming the compartment just enough to keep the fuel usable. Without that heat source, the vehicle was useless.
Fuel alone did not equal mobility. Mobility depended on heat, power, timing, and access. Each depended on something else. When one failed, the entire chain failed with it.
Cold forced you to see systems as interconnected rather than independent. Heat depended on power. Power depended on fuel. Fuel depended on access. Access depended on information. Information depended on people. When any part of that chain weakened, life narrowed.
Winter also narrowed social life. People stayed home more. Conversations shortened. Movement slowed. Scarcity and cold together encouraged efficiency, not friendliness. You learned to observe quietly, to listen more than speak, to move with purpose.
Living through those winters taught me that preparedness cannot be based on average conditions. Systems are not tested by normal days. They are tested by sustained pressure. Cold applies that pressure patiently, without drama, until weaknesses reveal themselves. By the time spring hinted at returning, the lessons were already ingrained. We moved differently. Planned differently. Assumed differently. The cold did not feel like an enemy by then. It felt like a teacher. It was one that offered no encouragement and no forgiveness, only consequences.
Winter did not arrive all at once. It announced itself gradually, with mornings that took longer to warm and evenings that closed in earlier than expected. At first, the cold felt manageable, something you dressed for and worked around. Then it settled into the walls, the floors, the pipes, and eventually into your thinking.
Our apartment, a former Russian military unit, had been designed to house people, not comfort them. Thick concrete walls held heat reluctantly and released it quickly. The building carried the quiet of abandonment, not silence exactly, but the muffled stillness of something built for a purpose it no longer served. When the Soviet army withdrew, thousands of these apartments were left behind, and people like us moved into the shell of someone else’s intentions.
Heat came when it came. Water came when it came. Electricity behaved the same way. You learned to notice small changes. A radiator that cooled sooner than usual. A light that flickered slightly before going out. The sound of the building settling differently at night when temperatures dropped sharply. These were not inconveniences. They were signals.
Laundry was one of the first daily routines to change. There were facilities in theory, but in practice they were unreliable, unavailable, or inoperable. Washing clothes became a manual task. I remember standing in our bathtub, sleeves rolled up, plunging my hands into freezing water to scrub jeans stiff with cold. The water burned, then numbed. The sensation faded, leaving only function. You did not wait for conditions to improve. You worked with what was there.
Cold has a way of stripping life down to essentials. You thought less about comfort and more about sequence. What must be done while there is light. What can wait. What cannot. Mongolia’s power grid ran on 230 volts at 50 hertz and was part of the Central Mongolian system, which relied heavily on coal. In winter, demand surged while reliability weakened. Outages were frequent enough that they became part of the rhythm of life rather than interruptions to it.
Sometimes the power went out briefly, returning before you had fully adjusted. Other times, it stayed out long enough for the apartment to begin changing temperature noticeably. During the coldest periods, outages could stretch into days. You did not panic. Panic was unproductive. You layered clothing, conserved movement, and waited.
Daily life was planned with the assumption that electricity would fail. Lights were not trusted. Heating systems were watched carefully. Meals were adjusted. You learned which tasks required power and which did not, and you reordered your day, accordingly.
(To be concluded tomorrow, in Part 2.)
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