I wrote this a while ago and just haven’t been able to post so there’s like updates in it along the way…..

Ok, so this is like the first real post for all of my loyal readers. So I had orientation in Philly which was fun and I got to meet the whole group and have a fun time. We got 160$ to spend for the 2 days there as our allowance so we all had a good time.(My daily allowance now is about $3.50) Then after a few days I was on a plane to Kazakhstan that was delayed all day in Frankfurt so I actually got there a day late along with the rest of the volunteers. We arrived at dawn in Almaty and met with the Peace Corps and they took us off to our second orientation in the city that was a day and a half long with the country director, staff and the ambassador. Then they separated our group into many tiny groups and my group was off to a small village outside Almaty to learn the Russian language and learn to teach in a school. At the village they just dropped us off at the school and there our host families met us to take us to our new homes. Two boys met me with a handwritten sign in Russian with what I assumed was my name. They took me home and showed me my room so I could unpack my stuff and then gave me tons of food and tea. I got a phone call eventually from my host mom (Indira) who informed me that those were her nephews and that she and her family were at a wedding. The weddings in Kazakhstan last three days, so for the next three days I barely saw the family. The family owns a restaurant slightly outside the village off the highway from Almaty and a horse farm with about 20 horses which just confuses me cause like I don’t know if they actually own it or not but apparently I can ride there for free if I want to.
I live in the backyard, kinda. They have a separate "summer house" in the back that has my bedroom, a bathroom, a sauna/Russian banya and the main living room and kitchen. There's a gazebo between the two houses that we ate at like once and sometimes they take me to the restaurant to eat there, which is mostly a normal restaurant/cafй (its outdoors) and there are three yurtas where people can eat and I end up just usually sleeping in one of them cause I’m incredibly exhausted by 10pm every night. They are rather wealthy and have a bunch of luxuries I wasn't expecting like 2 cars, an empty pool (that has like bones at the bottom and I assume that is where animals go to die), a 40inch widescreen plasma TV (that’s hooked up with Russian MTV and other channels with quality shows like when some girls shirts fall off out of nowhere and they see how guys react, it’s like candid camera with boobs), A/C in the living room that's never turned on, a piano, occasional internet access, a nice dog (Dinka) and cat (Gera) and then a mean dog that's chained up that they told me to never go near or apparently it will eat my soul. The father is named Dunyes and he generally works a lot and may or may not be a professional volleyball player in addition to a restaurant owner and maybe some other job he may do during the day that I don’t know about. I got to fully meet him the second day I was here though, by banya-ing with him. Wiki a Russian banya for a lengthy description, but it's basically three rooms, one is like 10million degrees and burns you and then at one point you get beaten by a bundle of birch sticks from a naked man you just met as you cower there in the scalding heat naked. Oh and the people are Kazakhstani if they are a citizen but Kazakhs look Asian and Russians look like Russians. People separate themselves by their ethnicity, my family is Kazakh. They have two daughters, Zhamilya is 16 and Aigyerim is 19 and studied abroad for a year in Malaysia to learn English and hers is pretty good. The grandparents showed up here for a few days. My village had 12 volunteers at first, in 2 classes of 6 but now it’s 10 and my class has only 4 people because two girls quit already (update its now 9, a guy left too; it only seems to be our group, which has it the best off in living arrangements that seems to be leaving but PC said KZ has like a 12% early termination rate so they’re just filling the status quo, better now during training than after). I have Russian lessons for hours every day and when it's over I just want to not use my brain but I still have to try hard to communicate. The family has told me that Russian is impossible to learn and native speakers don’t even know it perfectly, which means for me not to worry about my level. It has a bunch of letters and sounds that are like a ton of consonants in a row and like it just doesn’t have some sounds and letters like “w””j”. It's pretty exhausting. My teacher is ethnically Russian and from the way north. Her name is Anya and she's 21. She’s a tough teacher but that enables us to learn many things so it’s all good, plus she’s pretty cool, she lived in Michigan for a summer doing the work thing similar to the people in Sleazeside. Her class is pretty intense but she taught us to cook borscht so that makes it worth it.
The village is a decent size and has a bazaar and the equivalent of a mall(update: the mall burnt down like 2 days ago) and an internet cafe. If you look to the north, east or west, the landscape is basically flat until you reach the Arctic Ocean on the other side of Russia, but when you look south; gigantic 20,000 foot mountains tower over the land. There’s all like snow on some of them (more snow everyday) even though it’s like a billion degrees here in the summertime. The food has been pretty good so far (shashlyk is like kebabs and plov is just rice and meat delicious and then their naan is like really good), except for a few things including the shocking taste of horse's milk, dried milk balls and what they call "pizza" because it is definitely not pizza and I'm pretty sure that's what made me sick, which I was. Here’s a hilarious description for those that want to read. So I wake up in the middle of the night and the regular house has Western toilets but by me it's a squat toilet (porcelain and stuff, not an outhouse) so I just use that because it's closer and sometimes the house door is locked and the hidden key is always moved so I’m always trying to find it and just don’t really care anymore. I take some Imodium to make myself feel better but like whatever is in me wants to get out no matter what so now I'm vomiting which is unpleasant and it's like impossible to vomit into a squat toilet but I don't have enough time to get inside so I just use the one by me and the toilet creates a splash zone. So I puked and it ended up just bouncing back at me and soaking me with vomit. In retrospect, I believe it is the most memorable way to start my life here so that makes it totally worth it.
In other news, I have to walk to school every day for about 40 minutes because I live the furthest away, but it’s also a new development so I get all the nice amenities that I mentioned before. I get to wear fancy dress clothes like suits and ties every day. (Peace Corps? More like Posh Corps) The only bad part about the walk is when I don't get to the one main crossing before the herd of cattle and donkeys cross because then I have to wait and it's annoying. And when it’s like 100 degrees out every day I sweat up a storm and most of my clothes are soaked when I get to school so that is annoying too. The best part is how we’re all like “woot, I cant wait for the cold weather” but I know once it’s -40 I’m gonna be like “shit man, why can’t it be like a 100 again.” (update: in the past week the weather has changed from 100 degrees to 60 degrees and at night it’s a solid 35 degrees) What I've seen so far of Kazakhstan was nothing that I ever expected but I think that that reaction is exactly what I expected so I did expect this then (that make any sense?). There are a lot of contradictions among things and archaic practices but then like modern things and stuff, too much to actually write about cause this is getting long enough already. The president’s name is Nazarbaev and he does a lot of good for the country and a lot of other stuff. The goal is to have a trilingual populace by 2030 which is pretty ambitious (Russian, Kazakh, and English: now 97% knows Russian, 60% knows Kazakh and a small minority knows English fluently; everyone is forced to learn all 3 in school and they took other foreign languages like German out of the curriculum). Google/Wiki him for more information which is just easier for everyone to find out more. The people have a high approval rate of America in general and extremely high of the Peace Corps, but the approval rate of the Russian Fed. and China are higher, mostly because those are their neighbors and they are able to effectively have diplomatic relations with both nations. So I hope that’s a decent description of things and stuff. Just ask questions or whatnot and I'll try to respond to them as soon as possible.


Ok that’s all old stuff, here’s an update like a week and a half later; it’s just been aggravating trying to figure out how to log into this blog in Russian cause I haven’t learned the term “sign-in” yet. (update: it’s the one that starts with a B which happens to be a V in Cyrillic) Um from last time things and stuff happened. I have tons of work. I do lessons for a million hours then teach children (kinda, I got to help in gym class this week but I do real things this upcoming week in English class, gym class was fun though) and like I leave home at 7am and get back at like 7pm. The first day of school was on Monday and there was this big ceremony called the first bell ceremony and like there were singers and stuff then we got introduced in front of everyone and I had to pin on a pin to the director and he all like kissed me in front of everyone which was unexpected. Then I got all these bouquets of flowers which was pretty baller. After that I sat in on some classes and in the one this little girl sang a song to me and then gave me more flowers. On the whole it was a ridiculous experience along with everything else that has been happening here. I’m like the coolest person in school (reminds me of my high school days).
I got to go horseback riding at the horse farm on [last] Sunday. That was pretty cool. In no time I expect to be all like Jengiz Khan and pillaging stuff from horseback. And yes he is Jengiz Khan not Genghis cause that’s some bastardized translation the West forces the rest of the world to accept because the western civs wrote the history books. (I mentioned the lack of the letter “j” in the alphabet but that’s like Russian alphabet not like Mongol/Kazakh/Uighur/ Tartar/ Turkmen, etc. you get the point) My family is not around much with working all the time so I like chill and study Russian in my free time and sometimes I find notes on the stove that says “hit me” which I assume means “heat me” and I make myself dinner. I live like a million light-years away from everyone I know which is annoying but now we can like leave our village so we can visit other volunteers in other towns. I went to the bazaar; they have these awesome Kazakhstan Olympic team track suits (in case you don’t know, their team this year kicked ass in wrestling and boxing scoring golds in both, we got to watch the boxing gold medal match here and everyone was all like so stoked when he wiped the floor with the rest of the world). Most people here just wear bootleg Armani shirts with tight jeans and drive in their cars that may be “pimped” out, in which it is just covered in stickers that say NOS but I assume there are no actual upgrades to it. There also happens to be a lot of Lexus SUVs here which I find surprising. My house has internet that finally works so I should be able to be on that more if possible but like every time I used the computer it like crashed within five minutes and I don’t know how to fix it cause it’s all like in Russian so I can’t read the problem. And like the power randomly goes out all the time everywhere because that’s just how things are so that’s always a problem too. I’ll eventually get around to taking pics of the village and home and the horses and mountains and things to upload but the internet and power here is so unreliable that you shouldn’t expect it for a while. When I go to Almaty the internet there should all be like decent so I can use that. Oh and they play this sweet game that I want to go see one day in which there are like 2 armies (really big teams) on horseback that have to take a goat carcass and put it into a goal. It’s like hockey on horses (instead of skates) with a dead goat (instead of a puck). Oh and they have these other sweet sports like chase down the girl on the horse and if you overtake her you get a kiss but at the same time she gets a whip and can whip you away. And there’s also the classic “lets all ride on horses and wrestle each other off” game.

So now that the Russian language has us totally confused (we just learned that there is no proper word order but instead there are 6 cases that give away which part of the sentence the word is so you can understand it through that, which also means that I now know 12 ways to say the color red, and I mean just plain old red, there are another 12 for scarlet, then like another for maroon, etc; we just have to learn how to use all the cases and when to), they decided to start giving us our Kazakh language lessons. Fact: Kazakh and Russian are not similar at all and don’t even make the same sounds. However, I am still not really able to tell the difference when someone is talking to me in one and not the other due to everyone speaking at a million words per minute.

Ok, Almaty entry happened. That means I’ve been in the Peace Corps for like 3 full weeks now. We took the marshrutka to the big city and Peace Corps headquarters. Peace Corps headquarters is pretty sweet. It’s like hidden in an alleyway near which may be a garbage dump on the city outskirts and like it’s this big fenced in area with cameras and barbed wire and we’re like wtf is this. We go inside and it’s like mini-America with our fleet of vehicles and 2 big houses with rooms, tv, internet access, a pretty sweet library with a ride array of books and movies on VHS including both “The Running Man” and “Point Break.” Is there anything else I could have hoped for? Then we saw the big city mosque that had a really cool crystal chandelier in it and a big old orthodox church that is made completely of wood and has no metal in it all, even for the nails. Then in the park there was a monument for the soldiers that died in the Civil War in 1917-1920 and WW2 and it was cool. It’s a solid black background of the USSR with soldiers bursting out of it representing the 15 Soviet republics. I think it’s the Paniflov monument maybe. I took a pic and will post it eventually. I also went to the Green Bazaar and saw what was for sale and walked around a little before coming back home.

Oh I have a cell phone. You can call it and it will be free for me to talk but and only (I think) 18cents a minute for you all in America if you use Skype. My number is +011 7 777 305 8360. The part from the 7 onwards is pretty right, you may have to like try a different code to dial out of the US; I’m not sure. The best times to call are between 8am and 12pm eastern standard time which is 6pm through 10pm time in Kazakhstan part that I’m all up in. And that’s 10hours ahead so like, I’m living in your future. Pretty cool, amirite?

Here’s my address if you want to send me things ever. Just copy this and print it out and tape it on a letter if you need to (note: I’m counting on someone (marc) to send me “LOST” and “The Office” (oh btw, always sunny in philadelphia is hilarious, spiciba william for making me get that before I left) and all of America’s newest hip fads in music, fashion, and other forms of entertainment like next spring when things are done so it’s one cheap package. Most of their music is a little behind but I did see a FOB/John Mayer music video covering Michael Jackson on TV and was all like sad inside, I hope that isn’t being played in America.


Peace Corps Kazakhstan
P.O. Box 257
Almaty 050022
Kazakhstan
ATTN: Kenneth Balla Jr

Корпус Мира Казахстан
а/я 257
050022 Алматы
Казахстан
Кеннет Балла