What exactly am I doing here?

I think this question deserves a reasonable answer, now that I've been here a month (a month? really? man time flies).

So I'm working for Asia Pacific Investment Partners. This is actually more exciting than it sounds. You can see our nice website if you click that link. One of my jobs is updating the website with up-to-date information and filling in gaps and stuff. The company has a variety of subsidiary companies, all of which we own a controlling or complete share in, which I guess makes us different from most investment companies. This also means that I, as an, intern for the APIP, am an intern for all those companies and have to do stuff for all of them. If you notice, there's sort of a theme going with the company's interests. They started out 7 years ago in real estate and property management, eventually building their own buildings to manage. And because Mongolian construction companies built shoddy buildings, APIP started its own construction copmany. And because the cement was expensive, they started their own cement company. And to fund everything they started up a brokerage firm. And so everything is more or less integrated.

My main task is setting up an NGO, The Mongolian Institute for Sustainable Economic Development. Basically, we're looking for feasible and profitable applications of sustainable technologies for Mongolia and are going to act in an advisory capacity to our own companies and others for a commission. So my job is to do a ton of research and start writing the Institute's founding document, which will be a comprehensive overview of everything environmental going on in Mongolia. It's stuff that's right up my alley. Mongolia has a ton of potential to implement this stuff, but for a variety of reasons ranging from laziness to corruption, very little has been done. I am also in charge of building the Institute's website, which you can see here. I am going for a clean, simple design, with an extraordinarily easy-to-use interface and effortless navigation. Let me know what you think so far.

And I do other various things, like picking up investors from the airport, picking up my boss's dry cleaning, and keeping lecherous Mongolians and lecherous investors away from our new intern, a very nice girl from Sweden who also happens to be a model. This last task, which basically consists of hanging out with a Swedish model, is, as you can imagine, very difficult.

Insider trading tip of the day: The Mongolian government is working on an agreement that will allow the Oyu Tolgoi mine to start production. It's a really freaking huge mine in the Gobi full of copper and gold. Ivanhoe Mines (IVN) is the company with the license. So if you're into the whole stock thing (cough, Fancy), check them out. It might be a little past the prime time to enter, but oh well. And you won't get in trouble for this because it's all over the news.