March 8, 2010
Happy International Women's Day! Too bad America doesn't celebrate it. My host dad tried to convince me that Americans know about this day and celebrate it, they just don't get a day off work. I told him that I didn't know about it in America, but he says I must have, because the American ambassador said so on TV. But this is coming from the same man who tried to convince me that Abraham Lincoln was the second president after Washington (which he knows because he visited his house in Boston). He also told me that the American flag I have in my room is wrong because it only has 50 stars. He is a veritable expert in all things relating to America.
Today a large group of Osh volunteers celebrated the holiday with a picnic near a gorge about a half-hour ride away from the city. It was absolutely beautiful. The weather was perfect and sunny with a slight breeze. The river was bright blue and the rock formations were magnificent. It felt great. However, today, once again, I was reflecting on how unhealthy my lifestyle has become, despite all of the walking I do and the un-processed food I eat. Not all of these things are strictly a bi-product of living in Kyrgyzstan, so I have made a spring resolution to become healthier. Here is a list of the unhealthy things in my life.
1. On average, I eat about a loaf and a half of heavy Kyrgyz bread a day. It is a staple to the Kyrgyz diet and I am a carb-aholic anyway, but things are getting ridiculous.
2. The soft-serve ice cream stands have opened in Osh. I've had at least one cone for every day that I've been there.
3. Peanut-butter sent from home. I'm addicted. I eat it every day until it runs out.
4. Locally-made chocolate peanut-butter. I just bought some today for the first time to tide me over until the next peanut-butter-bearing package comes. This could be disastrous to me.
5. Some other volunteers were talking about how we're not supposed to swim in rivers because PC won't treat any diseases that you might pick up from the water, but guess where the water comes from that I use every day to wash my hands and face with?
6. Poverty cones. This is the name some volunteer gave to a very cheap kind of ice cream that is especially popular with kids. In warm weather, a lady sells them out of a baby carriage at my school's gates. It is a regular cake cone, filled with ice cream up to the rim, with a circle of paper over the top that doesn't entirely cover all the ice cream. There is no wrapper. Who knows how many snotty nosed kids have touched them, but I eat them anyway.
7. Kids. I don't care what country you're in, kids are gross. Now the winter and lack of vitamin C has caused disgusting open cold sores to pop up all over their faces. Yuck.
8. Poo. There are many very valid reasons why Central Asians never ever wear their shoes in the house. One of those reasons is the outhouse at my school. How much higher are they going to let these piles get above the pit before someone does something about it? In addition, it appears as though several little girls have abandoned the pits entirely in favor of taking a dump or a piss right in the middle of the floor. Its a pain to have to stop and roll up the hem of my pants before I walk in.
Last night we did yet more Osh volunteer bonding over a Kyrgyz pop concert. It was a surprisingly good time! Kyrgyz concerts always tend to be a little long and slow for our American attention spans, but this one was excellent. The singing and dancing was good, and the costumes were great. We were amazed to see the first number by the girl group done in matching traditional Kyrgyz dresses and hats, followed by a solo by one of the girls in a shiny black cat woman suit and stiletto boots. Kyrgyzstan will never cease to surprise me. Of course, one of the performers spotted our row and made some mention about the foreigners. We all stand out on our own, but when there are ten of us in any one place we become a huge disruption.
March 9, 2010
I just got a package in the mail with a few month-old magazines in it (thanks, Mom!) and once again, realized how out of touch with America I am. It gets worse and worse by the month. However, I feel like I have the unique opportunity to look at American pop culture almost from the point of view of an outsider. I figure that I won't have very many more opportunities to do this, even if I do spend more time out of the States, with the rate that globalization is increasing. I thought I would take a moment to comment on my observations:
1. Ellen Degeneres is a judge on American Idol? I am having a hard time just imagining how this is working out.
2. After all that fuss about Leno being replaced by Conan, the change was made and then they switched back again, all in the period of time I have been in K-stan. Who screwed up there?
3. A while ago I was looking through a Kyrgyz magazine and started to skim through an article that was underneath a strange picture of pointy-eared blue people. It was the summary of an American movie called Avatar. I had a vague memory of some people who had been in America over Christmas telling me that it was very popular, so I read on. From what I could tell with my crappy Kyrgyz reading skills, the story takes place in a forest on some planet and is about some guy that falls in love with the chief of the blue people's daughter. I figured I must have had it confused with a different, less-popular movie, but now I see that it is the most expensive and highest-grossing film of all time, in addition to being a nominee for a best picture Oscar. About blue people in space?
4. Who the heck are Taylor and Taylor? And why are there so many references to them?
5. I saw adds for two Love Actually wannabe's, one called Valentine's Day and the other simply called Love. Please tell me at least one of these is a joke. They both look absolutely terrible.
6. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D? Sounds crazy.
7. A movie version of The Lovely Bones came out. The book was so painful to read, I can't imagine how they made a movie of it.
8. Lady Gaga. Need I say more? (This is one aspect of pop culture that we have been able to keep up with, hallelujah)
9. They recorded a new version of We Are The World. Please. Actually, just a few days ago I was watching a DVD with my host sister of Kyrgyz pop star Omar's performances. It included some scenes recorded from a Russian talent contest with singers from all over the world (mostly from Eastern Europe and Central Asia). There were about 20 or 30 singers in all, and they did quite a few group numbers. One of the numbers was (you guessed it) We Are The World. It was sad.
March 20, 2010
The weather is a bit crazy now. Yesterday I was very comfortable outside in just a t-shirt and now it is snowing. Ick. I had some things to do in Uzgen this morning and came home soaked and freezing. Now I am enjoying being all cozy inside the quiet house. My whole family is gone, but they left me a chunk of cold rotisserie chicken and some Russian pancakes with this tasty grass stuff that I forgot the name for. Yum! They also left me a big slice of fat and a piece of what I will call a “sausage” for lack of a better word, but it is really just a bunch of coarsely chopped up parts shoved into an intestine. I don't know why they continue to give these things to me—they know I won't eat it. On the subject of food (one of these days I should calculate the percent of words that talk about food in this blog) I recently tried a new strange food: basil jello. It actually tasted pretty good, but it was so strange to me with the texture and everything, so I didn't eat much. It made me wonder if they would think that our fruity jello is strange? It really makes more sense for it to be a savory dish since the gelatin is an animal product.
Anyway, I am assuming that the special food and the current absence of my family has to do with yet another March holiday—Nooruz, which is tomorrow. Apparently this is the biggie holiday of the year for this part of the world. This week Kyrgyz people have also been celebrating the 5-year anniversary of their revolution. On Tuesday, my school had an assembly to celebrate it, and there was a feature on the news that showed our assembly as well as several students reading essays about the revolution. It was very exciting for our whole community.
Other March celebrations included the Mr. and Ms. competitions that pitted a few boys and girls from each of the villages five schools against each other. I went to both, but my patience didn't last till the end of either show. For the boys' competition, the electricity went off minutes before they were ready to start (which was still an hour later than when it was supposed to start) and after a failed attempt at going on with the show without microphones, everyone waited for the electricity to come back on. My site mate and I were ready to give up and leave at several points, but kept getting convinced to stay. When we finally did leave after waiting for two hours, one student ran out to get us before we even reached the street to tell us that it had come back on. I was surprised to see that the competition included a push-up contest. The girls' show, which happened a few days later, started only 1 ½ hours late and did not include push-ups, but the girls seemed to change into a different traditional Kyrgyz costume every five minutes, so that was fun.
In other news, a new education center opened up in our village offering computer classes and English and Chinese language lessons. It looks like I'll be going there a few times a month to do conversation practice with the English class. We'll see how that goes. Also, I'm on spring break for the next week, or week and a half, or two weeks. Everyone keeps telling me something different. It is perfect timing for a break. I hope the weather gets nice again and this snow and rain goes away!
March 21, 2010
Crazy weather still. It snowed all night and its snowing still. Not flakes now, but light poofy clumps. For New Years, the students had made decorations by tying tiny pieces of cotton to strings and hanging them from the gym ceiling. Thats what it looks like now. I've never seen anything quite like it. It is awfully pretty, but its also warm enough that most of the snow on the ground is melting into slushy puddles, so I'm hanging out inside.
Its the first day of spring break and I'm pretty much bored to death right now. My Apa and sister went to the city yesterday when I was gone and must have decided to stay there because of the bad weather. I saw my Ata and brother outside shoveling a bit when I got up, but they gave up after a few minutes and have been sleeping ever since. The electricity has been out all day so far, and my phone and ipod are dead because I forgot to plug them in last night. I killed my computer's battery before 11 am after typing up some lesson plans and then watching a movie (I'm handwriting this now and will type it later). I can't find my watch, so unless I go into the room where my host dad and brother are sleeping, I can't even tell what time it is. I would just go and hang out with friends in the city, but the combo of the snow and dead phone makes me nervous.
I'm not seeing any of the fun Nooruz stuff that my students have been telling me about. There's a cake in a box sitting out, so I'm assuming there will be some cake-eating later on. And hopefully power too.
Update: the power came on at 7:20 pm! Until that time I managed to sort through all my paperwork and handouts from PC stuff, straighten up the books on my windowsill, clean out my closet, read the first 100 pages of “Absolom, Absolom,” and handwrite five more pages of a story I started writing months ago. Not too shabby! Much more productive than a typical day for me in the village. Also, since the ladies of my family were gone and I don't cook with Kyrgyz cooking equipment, my host dad and brother were forced to make their own food, something I have never seen before. I am still trying to rehydrate myself from the few bites of the extremely oily and salty fried potatoes they made.
March 24, 2010
Another holiday—Tulip Revolution Day! I love March in K-stan. If only it hadn’t suddenly become winter again.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Lists
March 8, 2010
Happy International Women's Day! Too bad America doesn't celebrate it. My host dad tried to convince me that Americans know about this day and celebrate it, they just don't get a day off work. I told him that I didn't know about it in America, but he says I must have, because the American ambassador said so on TV. But this is coming from the same man who tried to convince me that Abraham Lincoln was the second president after Washington (which he knows because he visited his house in Boston). He also told me that the American flag I have in my room is wrong because it only has 50 stars. He is a veritable expert in all things relating to America.
Today a large group of Osh volunteers celebrated the holiday with a picnic near a gorge about a half-hour ride away from the city. It was absolutely beautiful. The weather was perfect and sunny with a slight breeze. The river was bright blue and the rock formations were magnificent. It felt great. However, today, once again, I was reflecting on how unhealthy my lifestyle has become, despite all of the walking I do and the un-processed food I eat. Not all of these things are strictly a bi-product of living in Kyrgyzstan, so I have made a spring resolution to become healthier. Here is a list of the unhealthy things in my life.
1. On average, I eat about a loaf and a half of heavy Kyrgyz bread a day. It is a staple to the Kyrgyz diet and I am a carb-aholic anyway, but things are getting ridiculous.
2. The soft-serve ice cream stands have opened in Osh. I've had at least one cone for every day that I've been there.
3. Peanut-butter sent from home. I'm addicted. I eat it every day until it runs out.
4. Locally-made chocolate peanut-butter. I just bought some today for the first time to tide me over until the next peanut-butter-bearing package comes. This could be disastrous to me.
5. Some other volunteers were talking about how we're not supposed to swim in rivers because PC won't treat any diseases that you might pick up from the water, but guess where the water comes from that I use every day to wash my hands and face with?
6. Poverty cones. This is the name some volunteer gave to a very cheap kind of ice cream that is especially popular with kids. In warm weather, a lady sells them out of a baby carriage at my school's gates. It is a regular cake cone, filled with ice cream up to the rim, with a circle of paper over the top that doesn't entirely cover all the ice cream. There is no wrapper. Who knows how many snotty nosed kids have touched them, but I eat them anyway.
7. Kids. I don't care what country you're in, kids are gross. Now the winter and lack of vitamin C has caused disgusting open cold sores to pop up all over their faces. Yuck.
8. Poo. There are many very valid reasons why Central Asians never ever wear their shoes in the house. One of those reasons is the outhouse at my school. How much higher are they going to let these piles get above the pit before someone does something about it? In addition, it appears as though several little girls have abandoned the pits entirely in favor of taking a dump or a piss right in the middle of the floor. Its a pain to have to stop and roll up the hem of my pants before I walk in.
Last night we did yet more Osh volunteer bonding over a Kyrgyz pop concert. It was a surprisingly good time! Kyrgyz concerts always tend to be a little long and slow for our American attention spans, but this one was excellent. The singing and dancing was good, and the costumes were great. We were amazed to see the first number by the girl group done in matching traditional Kyrgyz dresses and hats, followed by a solo by one of the girls in a shiny black cat woman suit and stiletto boots. Kyrgyzstan will never cease to surprise me. Of course, one of the performers spotted our row and made some mention about the foreigners. We all stand out on our own, but when there are ten of us in any one place we become a huge disruption.
March 9, 2010
I just got a package in the mail with a few month-old magazines in it (thanks, Mom!) and once again, realized how out of touch with America I am. It gets worse and worse by the month. However, I feel like I have the unique opportunity to look at American pop culture almost from the point of view of an outsider. I figure that I won't have very many more opportunities to do this, even if I do spend more time out of the States, with the rate that globalization is increasing. I thought I would take a moment to comment on my observations:
1. Ellen Degeneres is a judge on American Idol? I am having a hard time just imagining how this is working out.
2. After all that fuss about Leno being replaced by Conan, the change was made and then they switched back again, all in the period of time I have been in K-stan. Who screwed up there?
3. A while ago I was looking through a Kyrgyz magazine and started to skim through an article that was underneath a strange picture of pointy-eared blue people. It was the summary of an American movie called Avatar. I had a vague memory of some people who had been in America over Christmas telling me that it was very popular, so I read on. From what I could tell with my crappy Kyrgyz reading skills, the story takes place in a forest on some planet and is about some guy that falls in love with the chief of the blue people's daughter. I figured I must have had it confused with a different, less-popular movie, but now I see that it is the most expensive and highest-grossing film of all time, in addition to being a nominee for a best picture Oscar. About blue people in space?
4. Who the heck are Taylor and Taylor? And why are there so many references to them?
5. I saw adds for two Love Actually wannabe's, one called Valentine's Day and the other simply called Love. Please tell me at least one of these is a joke. They both look absolutely terrible.
6. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D? Sounds crazy.
7. A movie version of The Lovely Bones came out. The book was so painful to read, I can't imagine how they made a movie of it.
8. Lady Gaga. Need I say more? (This is one aspect of pop culture that we have been able to keep up with, hallelujah)
9. They recorded a new version of We Are The World. Please. Actually, just a few days ago I was watching a DVD with my host sister of Kyrgyz pop star Omar's performances. It included some scenes recorded from a Russian talent contest with singers from all over the world (mostly from Eastern Europe and Central Asia). There were about 20 or 30 singers in all, and they did quite a few group numbers. One of the numbers was (you guessed it) We Are The World. It was sad.
March 20, 2010
The weather is a bit crazy now. Yesterday I was very comfortable outside in just a t-shirt and now it is snowing. Ick. I had some things to do in Uzgen this morning and came home soaked and freezing. Now I am enjoying being all cozy inside the quiet house. My whole family is gone, but they left me a chunk of cold rotisserie chicken and some Russian pancakes with this tasty grass stuff that I forgot the name for. Yum! They also left me a big slice of fat and a piece of what I will call a “sausage” for lack of a better word, but it is really just a bunch of coarsely chopped up parts shoved into an intestine. I don't know why they continue to give these things to me—they know I won't eat it. On the subject of food (one of these days I should calculate the percent of words that talk about food in this blog) I recently tried a new strange food: basil jello. It actually tasted pretty good, but it was so strange to me with the texture and everything, so I didn't eat much. It made me wonder if they would think that our fruity jello is strange? It really makes more sense for it to be a savory dish since the gelatin is an animal product.
Anyway, I am assuming that the special food and the current absence of my family has to do with yet another March holiday—Nooruz, which is tomorrow. Apparently this is the biggie holiday of the year for this part of the world. This week Kyrgyz people have also been celebrating the 5-year anniversary of their revolution. On Tuesday, my school had an assembly to celebrate it, and there was a feature on the news that showed our assembly as well as several students reading essays about the revolution. It was very exciting for our whole community.
Other March celebrations included the Mr. and Ms. competitions that pitted a few boys and girls from each of the villages five schools against each other. I went to both, but my patience didn't last till the end of either show. For the boys' competition, the electricity went off minutes before they were ready to start (which was still an hour later than when it was supposed to start) and after a failed attempt at going on with the show without microphones, everyone waited for the electricity to come back on. My site mate and I were ready to give up and leave at several points, but kept getting convinced to stay. When we finally did leave after waiting for two hours, one student ran out to get us before we even reached the street to tell us that it had come back on. I was surprised to see that the competition included a push-up contest. The girls' show, which happened a few days later, started only 1 ½ hours late and did not include push-ups, but the girls seemed to change into a different traditional Kyrgyz costume every five minutes, so that was fun.
In other news, a new education center opened up in our village offering computer classes and English and Chinese language lessons. It looks like I'll be going there a few times a month to do conversation practice with the English class. We'll see how that goes. Also, I'm on spring break for the next week, or week and a half, or two weeks. Everyone keeps telling me something different. It is perfect timing for a break. I hope the weather gets nice again and this snow and rain goes away!
March 21, 2010
Crazy weather still. It snowed all night and its snowing still. Not flakes now, but light poofy clumps. For New Years, the students had made decorations by tying tiny pieces of cotton to strings and hanging them from the gym ceiling. Thats what it looks like now. I've never seen anything quite like it. It is awfully pretty, but its also warm enough that most of the snow on the ground is melting into slushy puddles, so I'm hanging out inside.
Its the first day of spring break and I'm pretty much bored to death right now. My Apa and sister went to the city yesterday when I was gone and must have decided to stay there because of the bad weather. I saw my Ata and brother outside shoveling a bit when I got up, but they gave up after a few minutes and have been sleeping ever since. The electricity has been out all day so far, and my phone and ipod are dead because I forgot to plug them in last night. I killed my computer's battery before 11 am after typing up some lesson plans and then watching a movie (I'm handwriting this now and will type it later). I can't find my watch, so unless I go into the room where my host dad and brother are sleeping, I can't even tell what time it is. I would just go and hang out with friends in the city, but the combo of the snow and dead phone makes me nervous.
I'm not seeing any of the fun Nooruz stuff that my students have been telling me about. There's a cake in a box sitting out, so I'm assuming there will be some cake-eating later on. And hopefully power too.
Update: the power came on at 7:20 pm! Until that time I managed to sort through all my paperwork and handouts from PC stuff, straighten up the books on my windowsill, clean out my closet, read the first 100 pages of “Absolom, Absolom,” and handwrite five more pages of a story I started writing months ago. Not too shabby! Much more productive than a typical day for me in the village. Also, since the ladies of my family were gone and I don't cook with Kyrgyz cooking equipment, my host dad and brother were forced to make their own food, something I have never seen before. I am still trying to rehydrate myself from the few bites of the extremely oily and salty fried potatoes they made.
March 24, 2010
Another holiday—Tulip Revolution Day! I love March in K-stan. If only it hadn’t suddenly become winter again.
Happy International Women's Day! Too bad America doesn't celebrate it. My host dad tried to convince me that Americans know about this day and celebrate it, they just don't get a day off work. I told him that I didn't know about it in America, but he says I must have, because the American ambassador said so on TV. But this is coming from the same man who tried to convince me that Abraham Lincoln was the second president after Washington (which he knows because he visited his house in Boston). He also told me that the American flag I have in my room is wrong because it only has 50 stars. He is a veritable expert in all things relating to America.
Today a large group of Osh volunteers celebrated the holiday with a picnic near a gorge about a half-hour ride away from the city. It was absolutely beautiful. The weather was perfect and sunny with a slight breeze. The river was bright blue and the rock formations were magnificent. It felt great. However, today, once again, I was reflecting on how unhealthy my lifestyle has become, despite all of the walking I do and the un-processed food I eat. Not all of these things are strictly a bi-product of living in Kyrgyzstan, so I have made a spring resolution to become healthier. Here is a list of the unhealthy things in my life.
1. On average, I eat about a loaf and a half of heavy Kyrgyz bread a day. It is a staple to the Kyrgyz diet and I am a carb-aholic anyway, but things are getting ridiculous.
2. The soft-serve ice cream stands have opened in Osh. I've had at least one cone for every day that I've been there.
3. Peanut-butter sent from home. I'm addicted. I eat it every day until it runs out.
4. Locally-made chocolate peanut-butter. I just bought some today for the first time to tide me over until the next peanut-butter-bearing package comes. This could be disastrous to me.
5. Some other volunteers were talking about how we're not supposed to swim in rivers because PC won't treat any diseases that you might pick up from the water, but guess where the water comes from that I use every day to wash my hands and face with?
6. Poverty cones. This is the name some volunteer gave to a very cheap kind of ice cream that is especially popular with kids. In warm weather, a lady sells them out of a baby carriage at my school's gates. It is a regular cake cone, filled with ice cream up to the rim, with a circle of paper over the top that doesn't entirely cover all the ice cream. There is no wrapper. Who knows how many snotty nosed kids have touched them, but I eat them anyway.
7. Kids. I don't care what country you're in, kids are gross. Now the winter and lack of vitamin C has caused disgusting open cold sores to pop up all over their faces. Yuck.
8. Poo. There are many very valid reasons why Central Asians never ever wear their shoes in the house. One of those reasons is the outhouse at my school. How much higher are they going to let these piles get above the pit before someone does something about it? In addition, it appears as though several little girls have abandoned the pits entirely in favor of taking a dump or a piss right in the middle of the floor. Its a pain to have to stop and roll up the hem of my pants before I walk in.
Last night we did yet more Osh volunteer bonding over a Kyrgyz pop concert. It was a surprisingly good time! Kyrgyz concerts always tend to be a little long and slow for our American attention spans, but this one was excellent. The singing and dancing was good, and the costumes were great. We were amazed to see the first number by the girl group done in matching traditional Kyrgyz dresses and hats, followed by a solo by one of the girls in a shiny black cat woman suit and stiletto boots. Kyrgyzstan will never cease to surprise me. Of course, one of the performers spotted our row and made some mention about the foreigners. We all stand out on our own, but when there are ten of us in any one place we become a huge disruption.
March 9, 2010
I just got a package in the mail with a few month-old magazines in it (thanks, Mom!) and once again, realized how out of touch with America I am. It gets worse and worse by the month. However, I feel like I have the unique opportunity to look at American pop culture almost from the point of view of an outsider. I figure that I won't have very many more opportunities to do this, even if I do spend more time out of the States, with the rate that globalization is increasing. I thought I would take a moment to comment on my observations:
1. Ellen Degeneres is a judge on American Idol? I am having a hard time just imagining how this is working out.
2. After all that fuss about Leno being replaced by Conan, the change was made and then they switched back again, all in the period of time I have been in K-stan. Who screwed up there?
3. A while ago I was looking through a Kyrgyz magazine and started to skim through an article that was underneath a strange picture of pointy-eared blue people. It was the summary of an American movie called Avatar. I had a vague memory of some people who had been in America over Christmas telling me that it was very popular, so I read on. From what I could tell with my crappy Kyrgyz reading skills, the story takes place in a forest on some planet and is about some guy that falls in love with the chief of the blue people's daughter. I figured I must have had it confused with a different, less-popular movie, but now I see that it is the most expensive and highest-grossing film of all time, in addition to being a nominee for a best picture Oscar. About blue people in space?
4. Who the heck are Taylor and Taylor? And why are there so many references to them?
5. I saw adds for two Love Actually wannabe's, one called Valentine's Day and the other simply called Love. Please tell me at least one of these is a joke. They both look absolutely terrible.
6. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D? Sounds crazy.
7. A movie version of The Lovely Bones came out. The book was so painful to read, I can't imagine how they made a movie of it.
8. Lady Gaga. Need I say more? (This is one aspect of pop culture that we have been able to keep up with, hallelujah)
9. They recorded a new version of We Are The World. Please. Actually, just a few days ago I was watching a DVD with my host sister of Kyrgyz pop star Omar's performances. It included some scenes recorded from a Russian talent contest with singers from all over the world (mostly from Eastern Europe and Central Asia). There were about 20 or 30 singers in all, and they did quite a few group numbers. One of the numbers was (you guessed it) We Are The World. It was sad.
March 20, 2010
The weather is a bit crazy now. Yesterday I was very comfortable outside in just a t-shirt and now it is snowing. Ick. I had some things to do in Uzgen this morning and came home soaked and freezing. Now I am enjoying being all cozy inside the quiet house. My whole family is gone, but they left me a chunk of cold rotisserie chicken and some Russian pancakes with this tasty grass stuff that I forgot the name for. Yum! They also left me a big slice of fat and a piece of what I will call a “sausage” for lack of a better word, but it is really just a bunch of coarsely chopped up parts shoved into an intestine. I don't know why they continue to give these things to me—they know I won't eat it. On the subject of food (one of these days I should calculate the percent of words that talk about food in this blog) I recently tried a new strange food: basil jello. It actually tasted pretty good, but it was so strange to me with the texture and everything, so I didn't eat much. It made me wonder if they would think that our fruity jello is strange? It really makes more sense for it to be a savory dish since the gelatin is an animal product.
Anyway, I am assuming that the special food and the current absence of my family has to do with yet another March holiday—Nooruz, which is tomorrow. Apparently this is the biggie holiday of the year for this part of the world. This week Kyrgyz people have also been celebrating the 5-year anniversary of their revolution. On Tuesday, my school had an assembly to celebrate it, and there was a feature on the news that showed our assembly as well as several students reading essays about the revolution. It was very exciting for our whole community.
Other March celebrations included the Mr. and Ms. competitions that pitted a few boys and girls from each of the villages five schools against each other. I went to both, but my patience didn't last till the end of either show. For the boys' competition, the electricity went off minutes before they were ready to start (which was still an hour later than when it was supposed to start) and after a failed attempt at going on with the show without microphones, everyone waited for the electricity to come back on. My site mate and I were ready to give up and leave at several points, but kept getting convinced to stay. When we finally did leave after waiting for two hours, one student ran out to get us before we even reached the street to tell us that it had come back on. I was surprised to see that the competition included a push-up contest. The girls' show, which happened a few days later, started only 1 ½ hours late and did not include push-ups, but the girls seemed to change into a different traditional Kyrgyz costume every five minutes, so that was fun.
In other news, a new education center opened up in our village offering computer classes and English and Chinese language lessons. It looks like I'll be going there a few times a month to do conversation practice with the English class. We'll see how that goes. Also, I'm on spring break for the next week, or week and a half, or two weeks. Everyone keeps telling me something different. It is perfect timing for a break. I hope the weather gets nice again and this snow and rain goes away!
March 21, 2010
Crazy weather still. It snowed all night and its snowing still. Not flakes now, but light poofy clumps. For New Years, the students had made decorations by tying tiny pieces of cotton to strings and hanging them from the gym ceiling. Thats what it looks like now. I've never seen anything quite like it. It is awfully pretty, but its also warm enough that most of the snow on the ground is melting into slushy puddles, so I'm hanging out inside.
Its the first day of spring break and I'm pretty much bored to death right now. My Apa and sister went to the city yesterday when I was gone and must have decided to stay there because of the bad weather. I saw my Ata and brother outside shoveling a bit when I got up, but they gave up after a few minutes and have been sleeping ever since. The electricity has been out all day so far, and my phone and ipod are dead because I forgot to plug them in last night. I killed my computer's battery before 11 am after typing up some lesson plans and then watching a movie (I'm handwriting this now and will type it later). I can't find my watch, so unless I go into the room where my host dad and brother are sleeping, I can't even tell what time it is. I would just go and hang out with friends in the city, but the combo of the snow and dead phone makes me nervous.
I'm not seeing any of the fun Nooruz stuff that my students have been telling me about. There's a cake in a box sitting out, so I'm assuming there will be some cake-eating later on. And hopefully power too.
Update: the power came on at 7:20 pm! Until that time I managed to sort through all my paperwork and handouts from PC stuff, straighten up the books on my windowsill, clean out my closet, read the first 100 pages of “Absolom, Absolom,” and handwrite five more pages of a story I started writing months ago. Not too shabby! Much more productive than a typical day for me in the village. Also, since the ladies of my family were gone and I don't cook with Kyrgyz cooking equipment, my host dad and brother were forced to make their own food, something I have never seen before. I am still trying to rehydrate myself from the few bites of the extremely oily and salty fried potatoes they made.
March 24, 2010
Another holiday—Tulip Revolution Day! I love March in K-stan. If only it hadn’t suddenly become winter again.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
My Bloody Valentine
January 25, 2010
I will take the sunshine and warm weather as sign that my streak of bad luck is finally over! I'm still taking it easy, trying to get rid of this cold that seems to be draining all of my energy, so I hope the weather keeps up tomorrow so I can go for a nice long walk and get some exercise and fresh air.
I still can't believe that the electricity was out for my whole neighborhood for a full five days. I sometimes think that nobody really cares about these things all that much—or that they just don't want to be the person responsible for getting something done about it.
I have an analogy: there were a few times during my first few months with my host family when I would spot a mouse inside the house or out in the summer kitchen and point it out to whoever was there at the time. They would always be like, “What? I didn't see a mouse,” even though I thought they probably did. After a while, I realized that they would all look away and pretend not to see it, because if no one knows its there, no one has to do anything about it. If no one make a fuss about the electricity, no one has to do anything about it.
-------------------------
Sometimes I wonder if Kyrgyz people get any kind of thrill out of slasher movies with the way they are always slaughtering sheep and horses. There just seems to be so much blood and severed heads and such, and even though I try to avoid all of the slaughtering and butchering (mostly, to be quite honest, because I am lazy) I still find myself having to move a dripping sheep's head from one side of the kitchen floor to the other because it is underfoot, or going to get a bucket for water only to find that it is full of steaming fresh blood (I try to tell myself that they have blood-specific buckets separate from water buckets and milk buckets, but its a hard lie to sell).
Last night, after dark, I went in search of water to distill because I was out. The water buckets in the house were empty, so I went out to the summer kitchen where there is sometimes a big barrel of water. I couldn't remember where the light switch was in the kitchen, so I was feeling around on the walls. In the dark, I noticed that a low table had been put in the middle of the floor and there were some large piles of something silhouetted on it. I figured it would be some big chunks of meat (they don't heat the summer kitchen in the winter, so they use it like a fridge). I found the light and switched it on. I found myself being stared down by a glassy eye rolled slightly backwards in the disembodied head of a beautiful brown horse. It shot a frozen frantic look right at me backwards over it's ears. It was strange how much more unsettling this horse head was from a sheep head. The eye seemed to have so much life behind it, and so much intelligence, it seemed irreverent for it to be sitting there, uncovered and alone in the dark, grimy kitchen. I stepped around the head and got my water and left, and congratulated myself for not jumping when I saw it. Six or seven months ago I certainly would have.
February 8, 2010
The horse head has finally been removed from the summer kitchen after staring at me through the window for a full two weeks.
Its snowing again—seems like just as soon as the snow melts we get another covering. I won't complain because its so pretty. I just hope we don't get so much that the power lines get knocked out again.
Well, there's not much else to report. I thought I had something else to say, but I guess not.
February 15, 2010
Brrr. We're all waiting for this cold snap to end. Apparently it usually starts getting warmer down here in February, but we've been having temperatures and snowstorms closer to February weather in Iowa. Thankfully we don't have to worry about the windy blizzards like back home or the avalanches I've heard about in the villages a few more kilometers up the mountains. And to be quite honest I actually prefer the below freezing temperatures to the melting snow and slush. Yuck.
Right now the main paved road that I walk down to get to school looks like an impossibly straight frozen river. Kids zoom past me by alternately running and sliding down a trampled smooth strip of packed snow in the middle of the road. Resembling skateboarders, the kids actually have been getting to school earlier than usual. After school they race home again to get their sleds. Besides being a fun toy for kids, the small sleds with runners are very useful for hauling heavy water cans to the canal or spigot. With the surface of the roads made even for once by the packed snow, the heavy cans can be pulled almost effortlessly.
Kids without sleds make do with what they have. As I was walking home one afternoon I witnessed a small boy squatting on a square of aluminum roofing and propelling himself forward on the frozen road with two short sticks. He was making surprisingly good time, but looked so silly, like a cross between cross-country skiing and row boating.
February 18, 2010
Valentine's Day was almost a week ago, but love is still in the air at my school. According to my counterpart, most people around here had never heard of Valentine's Day before two or three years ago, which is hard to believe, looking at the enthusiasm with which my students embraced it. Last week a huge red box sat in the school lobby, steadily filling up with valentines. In our English lessons we assigned all our classes to make valentines in English, and we had the highest number of completed homework assignments of the year. I was amazed. I was also surprised at how bold so many of the kids were in writing to a classmate of the opposite sex and writing “I love you” and such.
The other day in my 10th grade lesson, a boy slipped me a small piece of folded pink paper when my counterpart left the room for a minute. It had “to my Valentine” written in impossibly tiny letters on the front. Inside was a twenty line poem in Kyrgyz. I thanked him, but had no idea what the poem said without looking at it closely. My counterpart came in and I stood up to show it to her, but the boy was shaking his head desperately behind her back, so I kept it to myself. I've been trying to decipher it, but Kyrgyz cursive still just looks like a bunch of “m”s and “n”s to me. As far as I can tell the first lines are something along the lines of “you are the light from the sun” and “I have fallen in love with you,” etc., etc. I showed it to the girls in my advanced club, without saying who it was from (he didn't sign it) but we didn't get much further with the translation. I don't really know what this kid was going for with this.
In a completely unrelated topic, I'm still waiting for the new, indoor bio-toilets to be finished at my school. They were supposed to be done by September 1st. The school's outhouses are worse than ever now as the shit-cicles have grown so that they come out of the hole, and kids have taken to not even trying to hit the hole. I can't tell if things will be better or worse once everything starts to thaw. At least the smell isn't so bad when everything is frozen. However, I am conscious of the fact that I don't smell so great myself. I haven't been in the city for two weeks, and it has been way too cold to take a bucket bath. My host mom and sister either haven't made a trip to the public banya or they haven't offered to take me with, and I am not brave enough to venture to it myself. I'm very much looking forward to a shower tomorrow!
I will take the sunshine and warm weather as sign that my streak of bad luck is finally over! I'm still taking it easy, trying to get rid of this cold that seems to be draining all of my energy, so I hope the weather keeps up tomorrow so I can go for a nice long walk and get some exercise and fresh air.
I still can't believe that the electricity was out for my whole neighborhood for a full five days. I sometimes think that nobody really cares about these things all that much—or that they just don't want to be the person responsible for getting something done about it.
I have an analogy: there were a few times during my first few months with my host family when I would spot a mouse inside the house or out in the summer kitchen and point it out to whoever was there at the time. They would always be like, “What? I didn't see a mouse,” even though I thought they probably did. After a while, I realized that they would all look away and pretend not to see it, because if no one knows its there, no one has to do anything about it. If no one make a fuss about the electricity, no one has to do anything about it.
-------------------------
Sometimes I wonder if Kyrgyz people get any kind of thrill out of slasher movies with the way they are always slaughtering sheep and horses. There just seems to be so much blood and severed heads and such, and even though I try to avoid all of the slaughtering and butchering (mostly, to be quite honest, because I am lazy) I still find myself having to move a dripping sheep's head from one side of the kitchen floor to the other because it is underfoot, or going to get a bucket for water only to find that it is full of steaming fresh blood (I try to tell myself that they have blood-specific buckets separate from water buckets and milk buckets, but its a hard lie to sell).
Last night, after dark, I went in search of water to distill because I was out. The water buckets in the house were empty, so I went out to the summer kitchen where there is sometimes a big barrel of water. I couldn't remember where the light switch was in the kitchen, so I was feeling around on the walls. In the dark, I noticed that a low table had been put in the middle of the floor and there were some large piles of something silhouetted on it. I figured it would be some big chunks of meat (they don't heat the summer kitchen in the winter, so they use it like a fridge). I found the light and switched it on. I found myself being stared down by a glassy eye rolled slightly backwards in the disembodied head of a beautiful brown horse. It shot a frozen frantic look right at me backwards over it's ears. It was strange how much more unsettling this horse head was from a sheep head. The eye seemed to have so much life behind it, and so much intelligence, it seemed irreverent for it to be sitting there, uncovered and alone in the dark, grimy kitchen. I stepped around the head and got my water and left, and congratulated myself for not jumping when I saw it. Six or seven months ago I certainly would have.
February 8, 2010
The horse head has finally been removed from the summer kitchen after staring at me through the window for a full two weeks.
Its snowing again—seems like just as soon as the snow melts we get another covering. I won't complain because its so pretty. I just hope we don't get so much that the power lines get knocked out again.
Well, there's not much else to report. I thought I had something else to say, but I guess not.
February 15, 2010
Brrr. We're all waiting for this cold snap to end. Apparently it usually starts getting warmer down here in February, but we've been having temperatures and snowstorms closer to February weather in Iowa. Thankfully we don't have to worry about the windy blizzards like back home or the avalanches I've heard about in the villages a few more kilometers up the mountains. And to be quite honest I actually prefer the below freezing temperatures to the melting snow and slush. Yuck.
Right now the main paved road that I walk down to get to school looks like an impossibly straight frozen river. Kids zoom past me by alternately running and sliding down a trampled smooth strip of packed snow in the middle of the road. Resembling skateboarders, the kids actually have been getting to school earlier than usual. After school they race home again to get their sleds. Besides being a fun toy for kids, the small sleds with runners are very useful for hauling heavy water cans to the canal or spigot. With the surface of the roads made even for once by the packed snow, the heavy cans can be pulled almost effortlessly.
Kids without sleds make do with what they have. As I was walking home one afternoon I witnessed a small boy squatting on a square of aluminum roofing and propelling himself forward on the frozen road with two short sticks. He was making surprisingly good time, but looked so silly, like a cross between cross-country skiing and row boating.
February 18, 2010
Valentine's Day was almost a week ago, but love is still in the air at my school. According to my counterpart, most people around here had never heard of Valentine's Day before two or three years ago, which is hard to believe, looking at the enthusiasm with which my students embraced it. Last week a huge red box sat in the school lobby, steadily filling up with valentines. In our English lessons we assigned all our classes to make valentines in English, and we had the highest number of completed homework assignments of the year. I was amazed. I was also surprised at how bold so many of the kids were in writing to a classmate of the opposite sex and writing “I love you” and such.
The other day in my 10th grade lesson, a boy slipped me a small piece of folded pink paper when my counterpart left the room for a minute. It had “to my Valentine” written in impossibly tiny letters on the front. Inside was a twenty line poem in Kyrgyz. I thanked him, but had no idea what the poem said without looking at it closely. My counterpart came in and I stood up to show it to her, but the boy was shaking his head desperately behind her back, so I kept it to myself. I've been trying to decipher it, but Kyrgyz cursive still just looks like a bunch of “m”s and “n”s to me. As far as I can tell the first lines are something along the lines of “you are the light from the sun” and “I have fallen in love with you,” etc., etc. I showed it to the girls in my advanced club, without saying who it was from (he didn't sign it) but we didn't get much further with the translation. I don't really know what this kid was going for with this.
In a completely unrelated topic, I'm still waiting for the new, indoor bio-toilets to be finished at my school. They were supposed to be done by September 1st. The school's outhouses are worse than ever now as the shit-cicles have grown so that they come out of the hole, and kids have taken to not even trying to hit the hole. I can't tell if things will be better or worse once everything starts to thaw. At least the smell isn't so bad when everything is frozen. However, I am conscious of the fact that I don't smell so great myself. I haven't been in the city for two weeks, and it has been way too cold to take a bucket bath. My host mom and sister either haven't made a trip to the public banya or they haven't offered to take me with, and I am not brave enough to venture to it myself. I'm very much looking forward to a shower tomorrow!
Friday, January 22, 2010
Ugh.
I hate to be Debbie Downer again, but I need to give some excuse for not posting in a few weeks.
Sunday night we had a huge snowstorm. Knee-high snow. A lot of power lines went down, and as of when I left on Friday afternoon, the electricity still hadn't come back on in my end of the village. I was sick with a nasty cough that was not improved by the cold dry air in the house and the dust from the fire that was constantly going. My cell, computer, and ipod were all dead by Tuesday afternoon. The school schedule changed so that classes were shortened to 30 minutes and we got out at noon (I guess because they couldn't cook in the kitchen) but I had to get ready in the dark every morning that I went to school.
On top of all this, my counterpart teacher quit to take a better job at a bank, completely abandoning the teaching career that she has attended Peace Corps conferences to improve, and leaving me high and dry for the moment.
Well, 2010 can only get better, I guess.
Sunday night we had a huge snowstorm. Knee-high snow. A lot of power lines went down, and as of when I left on Friday afternoon, the electricity still hadn't come back on in my end of the village. I was sick with a nasty cough that was not improved by the cold dry air in the house and the dust from the fire that was constantly going. My cell, computer, and ipod were all dead by Tuesday afternoon. The school schedule changed so that classes were shortened to 30 minutes and we got out at noon (I guess because they couldn't cook in the kitchen) but I had to get ready in the dark every morning that I went to school.
On top of all this, my counterpart teacher quit to take a better job at a bank, completely abandoning the teaching career that she has attended Peace Corps conferences to improve, and leaving me high and dry for the moment.
Well, 2010 can only get better, I guess.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Borsok
Ok, to clear up some confusion regarding the title of the last blog. It was not the date, and it was not a mistake. It only said "Kyrgyz kyz" -- Kyrgyz girl. Nothing too exciting. I just like the way it sounds, and it seemed appropriate, but I forgot to explain it.
I have a new nickname - "Borsok." Borsok is a Kyrgyz donut. I earned this name last night during a dinner with one volunteer's host family in which several bottles of vodka were polished off. I had just come in from the village a little later than usual because I had to help my Apa with a borsok emergency. She had to make a bunch of it for Ata's birthday party the next day, but she threw out her back, so she was having difficulty. So, I rolled out the dough, built the fire, and fried up the borsok. Of course, I brought a huge bag of it to Osh, which I bragged to the family about making myself. Therefore, I was dubbed "Borsok" by the father and I think it will stick forever.
Its almost Christmas! Crazy! Time is going by so fast!
I have a new nickname - "Borsok." Borsok is a Kyrgyz donut. I earned this name last night during a dinner with one volunteer's host family in which several bottles of vodka were polished off. I had just come in from the village a little later than usual because I had to help my Apa with a borsok emergency. She had to make a bunch of it for Ata's birthday party the next day, but she threw out her back, so she was having difficulty. So, I rolled out the dough, built the fire, and fried up the borsok. Of course, I brought a huge bag of it to Osh, which I bragged to the family about making myself. Therefore, I was dubbed "Borsok" by the father and I think it will stick forever.
Its almost Christmas! Crazy! Time is going by so fast!
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