You see, her mother Itgel was the first person I home-stayed with upon my arrival to Mongolia in August 2006, and I took photographs of all the rooms in the house, Itgel, the foods we ate, etc. and posted them on the site at that time. My intention was to share with people all over the world, particularly those who might never be able to make the trip to see for themselves, the reality of day-to-day life in Mongolia.

Today I removed all the photos of her mother's house and of her mother. However, I have chosen to leave the remaining "Home / Ger" photographs on the blog. This is where you come in, my dear reader.

I was quite surprised that the writer of the aforementioned e-mail felt the posting of these photographs on the Internet showed a lack of respect for Mongolian culture as I haven't heard this response from any other Mongolians and many have visited the site. And, to be sure, my aim was and is respect. To open up dialogue and information between cultures. To enrich the global cultural perspective. If I have achieved the opposite unwittingly I am sincerely sorry for that.

So I need to know what YOU think? Should I remove the remaining photographs in the "Home / Ger" photo album? Is this showing a lack of respect for Mongolian culture? What are your general thoughts on the question of privacy, cultural content and the Internet? Please do post a comment! And forward this post to others if you like.

I've got my cashmere on. Women are wearing stockings and leggings again. The foreigners have felt, wool and cashmere scarves wrapped around their necks. Mongolian women have their scarves wrapped around their middle. The temperature now dips to below 0º C (32º F) at night, and only reaches to around 15º C (60º F) during the day.

I'm no longer counting down the days. I'm leaving with the falling of the leaves, and somehow this seems appropriate.

As I go about meeting friends and colleagues one last time, I too am like a leaf swirling around on the pavement.

Lunner is, you guessed it, a meal that takes place somewhere between lunch and dinner, a la "brunch." A late lunch. Or an early dinner, if you like. The word, as you can see, takes it's first syllable from lunch and it's second from dinner. Mu bagsh, as Munkh-Amgalan is affectionately known by his graduate students, is a linguist; we've spent a lot of time looking at the units, nature, structure, and modification of the Mongolian language and sometimes even of the English language.

The man loves to create new words, and he's really pushing this one with tenacity. I find it a bit hard to force off my tongue, but a google search produces several instances of the use of "lunner" and it appears in a few eclectic dictionaries, such as the urbandictionary.com and thefreedictionary.com.

The next time you forget to eat lunch and have to head out of the office in the middle of the afternoon, inform your colleagues that you'll be going out to lunner. Do it for Mu bagsh.

I've been spending some time with another literary translator who is in Mongolia on holiday for a week from Korea. Stephen Epstein was raised in Boston but has spent fourteen years living in New Zealand as a professor at Victoria University of Wellington. The last seven of these years he has lived between New Zealand and Korea. It has been great to pick his brain on some practical issues of literary translation, particularly because the Korean language bears some important similarities to Mongolian in sentence structure and because he has a lot more experience with literary translation that I do.

Stephen primarily translates short stories and novels. In Korea, he's involved with the Korea Literature Translation Institute, which, among many other activities, offers fellowships to translators of Korean literature who work in a variety of languages. His translation of Yang Gui-ja's Mosun (Contradictions) was recently published as part of the Cornell University's Cornell East Asia Series.

I leave Mongolia in one week's time. Consequently, I am in the process of preparing to re-enter American society. Stephen and I had a good talk about this as he was in the US after a four-year absence to visit his parents this past summer. We considered the aspects of contemporary American culture that are so disheartening: the media, the emptiness of our culture of consumption, the blatant hypocrisy, our unfortunate blackened image across the globe, etc. Though I have more pride than ever in my homeland, that land's liabilities are ever more clear to me now.