Intestines, ugly sweaters, and explosives

December 22, 2009

I'm having a terrible day and need to vent. First of all, dinner last night was a plate of plain boiled intestines. Thats it. Just intestines boiled in a pot. This is the first time that I have downright refused to eat something without even tasting it.

Second of all, I have a terrible cold with all the symptoms. This morning I woke everyone in my host family up before dawn with my terrible cough. Luckily, I didn't have class today until late in the morning, so I was able to drink a lot of hot water with jam and get my cough to calm down a bit.

As I got about halfway to school it started to half rain half snow, and of course I hadn't brought my umbrella. I got to school just in time for the weekly teacher meeting that I always attend but never understand, and everyone was asking me where my counterpart was. After the meeting, my counterpart still hadn't shown up, but it was a test day, so I figured that rather than waste time looking for her, I should just get the test started. I walked in the 8th grade classroom, and before I even got past the door a boy told me that all the girls had gone to a meeting, for the whole hour, so we can't have the test. I went to the vice principle to confirm the story, which she did, and also said that she had been trying to call my counterpart, but with no success. Her phone was off. I asked her what I should do, and she just kind of shrugged and said that maybe the girls would be back in time to take the test. I went back to the eighth grade boys and played hangman with them for a while, until it seemed obvious that the girls weren't coming back. To make it worse, my cough came back and I didn't have any cough drops left in my pocket. In the end, I just left. It says in my contract that if my counterpart doesn't teach, I don't teach, and vice versa, so I was in the right, I guess. I still felt bad about it. It was only two classes. I guess thats not that bad.

December 24, 2009

The “where the hell am I” moments that I used to have with such frequency have slowed up a bit, and sometimes I don't have them until someone points out to me how strange something is. Last weekend another volunteer and I were heading out from her apartment to go to a second-hand store in the bazaar to shop for ugly sweaters for our volunteer Christmas party. We had to make a stealthy escape from the building because the pimp who runs the brothel downstairs had been bugging us all weekend to go to his wedding that day, and the train of wedding-bound cars were right outside the door, making it all the easier for someone to kidnap us and drag us there—something that happens to us a lot (I've been to about five weddings of strangers so far, and was dragged to three of them without any advance warning). Luckily neither he nor anyone else we knew happened to be outside at the moment, so we made it through safely.

I honestly didn't think that there was anything strange or even interesting about this at the moment, and wouldn't have even thought to mention it here at all if my friend, once we reached a safe distance from the wedding goers, hadn't mentioned how funny it was that we had just sneaked out the door and run out of sight to avoid going to a pimp's wedding, which we might have agreed to go to (he has actually been a really good neighbor and friend to us volunteers) if we hadn't already made very important plans to go ugly-sweater shopping, which will take all afternoon anyway because we are going to a store that is in the middle of one of the largest bazaars in Central Asia. She's right. Its completely ridiculous.

I had another moment today that I arrived at while I was watching fifth graders wearing kalpaks, tiaras, and tinsel garland ballroom dancing to “My Heart Will Go On” during the New Year's concert. The music was a little bit too quiet because someone was playing the music from their phone plugged into a little portable speaker as the electricity was out, so an 11th grader who was playing Santa helped out by stamping out the beat with his walking stick.

January 2, 2010

Happy New Year!

I'm in Osh now, but I spent New Year's Eve with my family in the village. I'm glad I did, it was a good time. First, the director and vice-directors of my school came over in the morning to bring me a cake and a bottle of champagne and wish me a happy new year. I guess it is a tradition. Apa left for a bit, but made sure that I was prepared to greet my guests with a table full of salads, cookies, and candy and a tea pot all set up to serve them when they came. In the end they only stayed ten minutes, only long enough to kill a small bottle of wine, before they left to go to the next house.

At night, my family celebrated with a kind of progressive dinner, starting at grandma's house for one course, then on to some aunts and uncles' house, before ending up at our house for (ta da!) turkey and some small and tasty quail-like bird, the name of which I have forgotten, but my host dad said it comes from the mountains and costs 150 som at the bazaar. We also had a very small and expensive pineapple that I did the honors of cutting up because no one there had ever cut up a whole pineapple before. At every house we also had a large slice of cake, so by midnight my head and teeth hurt from the sugar and all the kids were bouncing off the walls. At midnight we toasted with my champagne, most of which exploded from the bottle (not a big loss, because it was pretty terrible) and then moved outside to shoot off some fireworks. Kyrgyz fireworks seem to have very loose safety standards, so paired with the five male relatives all in their teens and early twenties, I tried to steer clear. It was still a lot of fun.