Zeborah

The challenge, by @mhoye: OK Twitter. It's late but let's see if we can make this interesting: What is the least plausible story about yourself that's true?

My response: "In my first hour in Ulaan Baatar I chased a pickpocket into an alley to demand my wallet back. In Mongolian."

To contextualise:

I am a language geek. So when I was at the end of my second year contract teaching English in Korea, and decided to see a few more East Asian countries before returning home, and picked Mongolia as one of them, of course I decided to learn some Mongolian before I went. It has vowel harmony, how cool is that! (Pro-tip: vowel harmony is way more cool in theory than practice.) Luckily my plane to Mongolia had some engineering trouble and was delayed almost two days (putting my Korean visa status in jeopardy, but come to think of it that's a whole nother implausible story) so I had extra time to study up my Lonely Planet Mongolian Phrasebook while I waited.

So, I arrive in Ulaan Baatar, I'm delivered to the apartment I'm renting for three weeks in a gritty Soviet-era apartment block, I leave my bags and go out to exchange one of my traveller's cheques and do some grocery shopping.

I achieve both these things. I'm waiting at a traffic light on the walk back home when a local girl taps me on the shoulder and communicates (I forget whether in Mongolian, English, or gesture) that that man over there has just stolen my wallet from my bag. She also convinces me by the same means that we should chase him.

Being confrontation-averse, I naturally go along with this plan.

Our chase ends up with the man ducking into an alley. I pursue. The local girl quite sensibly does not. The alley is a dead-end and the man is therefore forced to turn and face me. It is at this point that I realise that I'm in the position of a cat that has cornered a doberman and now has to decide what to do with it.

But there's a girl back on the safety of the street rooting for me and I'm too embarrassed to disappoint her. So I make like a cat and puff myself up with all the confidence I can muster.

I also attempt to muster some vocabulary. I believe (based on distant memory and my still-treasured Lonely Planet Mongolian Phrasebook) that what I came up with was along the lines of "Minii möng!" (my money) although it may have been closer to "Minii möng???" (It may possibly even have been "Minii ... <perplexed gesture>" but given that I'd just been to the bank I probably remembered the word for money.)

He looked perplexed back. Who, him? he said in the universal language of facial expressions. He was completely innocent! Why, he just ran into this dead-end alley for fun! I attempted, with my aforementioned tremendous eloquence, to press my point, but ultimately he was very convincing. That is to say, ultimately I was convinced that trying to get my money back off him was a really stupid idea.

So I went back out to where the girl was waiting and shamelessly lied to her that something like "Ter yavan" (he goes away) or possibly, if I was really onto the past tense, "Ter yavav".

Then we got to chatting. Her name was Purje, she was 16 and studying English at school. She knew more vocabulary than me, but I was less shy so we mixed languages about equally. She taught me how to wear my bag in front of me (which meant I only got pickpocketed once more during my visit), and for the next week we met every day to visit museums and a local hill and her family's ger. So really it all worked out pretty well for all concerned.

And there you have number 2 on my list of Top Three Most Dangerous Situations Zeborah Used Her Highly Fluent Mongolian In.