Yo yo. Here's the second edition of my life. I know that Dennis, Marc and Christine read this so I'm pretty excited that some people know about it. (not excited about reddit knowing it though) I'll try to bullet some things that happened. After I got to hang out in Almaty I've done some good things. I'll start with the bad first because that's what most people find interesting anyway and then you can just stop reading after that. So at one point I got all moody and it wasn't too fun. But then my birthday happened so it's all good. Onto the good stuff... I taught peoples, they learned (maybe). Maybe because most of my class used to study German but now that was taken out of the curriculum so they were thrown into English 6 basically and don't understand anything and during training I can not stray from my curriculum to help them learn so basically it's a lost cause. Only half the class knows some English so that is kind of annoying that I got thrown into that situation and can not do anything to change it. The upside is that I let them have fun in school and they like that and like to take pictures with me. All the bureaucracy and corruption is pretty annoying too but I just have to suck all that up but Peace Corps is all like be flexible, so I am. Anywho, I got past all that, I travel to other villages now and that's good to see different faces. The Peace Corps staff is pretty much amazing and does a lot for us. (Except for my boss's boss's boss and his crew, i.e. Bush and congress, they're all like "let's cut the budget some more and spend more on bullshit that's wasting tax payer dollars instead of programs that people actually approve of")

In other news (the real good stuff), we have an English Club at school and it involves me teaching Kazakh teenagers how to say "what up dude" instead of always saying "hello" so that's a lot of fun too. We had a meeting at headquarters that let us all see most of our group so that was fun and stuff. The topics they had to teach us was kind of not fun: you know, the rape and the muggings, etc, but it’s necessary so we are safe. My Russian is slowly improving. I got to go to the philharmonic in Almaty one evening to see a nice concert because I'm all classy. On my birthday I had dinner at the country director's house which was ballin' and delicious. He had guacamole, the only guac in all of Kaz. And in the past 2 nights I've gone to 3 different parties. One I mentioned, one for breaking the fast for Ramadan in a mansion in Almaty with a friend's family, and one for a birthday on my birthday but not for me but there ended up being three us of there with the same birthday so it was all cool and we did toasts and chilled etc and the one guy whos birthday it was too is the trainer for the Uzbekistan Olympic wrestling team apparently. That's pretty badass. At the Ramadan feast I ate sheep brains, sheep head, its tongue and horse. The horse was delicious and the rest was not delicious. As I was about to bite into the brains, my first flaw was smelling it. It smelled not good. I was all like "whatever, im in kazakhstan" so I bit in and as I did I realized it did not actually taste that bad, it was mostly bland and had a consistency on gnocchi so I was like nice. As I bit down further into the gray matter I noticed that it was filled with bones and was like "dammit" so I was like I don't want some cranium I need to get these pieces out but all 30 people at the dinner table were looking in my direction. So I smoothly use my fork to get rid of the pieces of the skull but failed and ended up just using my fingers. Bad call, now I was so flustered I was like sitting there with brains in my mouth and my fingers poking towards my throat when I was like "shit, I hope I don't throw up now, I'm in full bulimia mode." I recovered from this moment well and continued with my dinner. After I was finished my friend next to me was like "it totally looked like you were gonna vomit all over the feast, it would've been hilarious" so contrary to my thoughts I was actually very noticeable and probably insulted everyone there. I got to meet a bunch of people there and today I met some more on the street and we all traded phone numbers so we can do things (which mostly involve them practicing their English). It got all hot again and then cold, well basically every day is different. My Russian teacher said it's snowing in her hometown already. I told PC I want to go north for my site if possible (they try to accommodate us). This past week has been pretty good. On my bday - my host aunt Shynar, who is absolutely amazing, totally hooked me up with a cake and a chicken (an entire chicken) for lunch to share with the group. On Saturday, I'm having some people over for a joint birthday-America fun time celebration if one of the other birthday peoples makes their way here otherwise it's an only me birthday-America celebration. That’s about all of the new big things that has happened. There has been other stuff but I can’t really think of it right now and I have to stop procrastinating and do my lesson plan for tomorrow’s class. I promise next time's update will be funnier and I'll write things down as the week goes on so it's more hilarious.