This post has been a long time coming. The school is really good at not letting me use the internet. After blocking me from it for a while the modem decided to die; therefore there is no longer internet in my village and I doubt there will be anytime in the near future.

The word “lenivets” is the word for sloth in Russian.
Here are some facts about the Russian Language: 1 – you can never be outside because there is no word for “outside”, you are always hanging out in the street if you are not in a building; the term is “na ulitsa” or “in the street”; literal is “on the street” because we stand on it and are not actually in it. 2 – if you go to another country and express it in Russian you use the Russian preposition “v” which is “to”. Except for Ukraine, you use “na” which means “on”. It’s the Russian’s way of saying they go “on the Ukraine”… as in poop.

The past months have been rather quiet. Village life is generally pretty quiet. I guess I never really wondered where the snow goes when it keeps snowing and never melts until the other day. I was shoveling the driveway and path through the garden when the walls of snow around me were becoming too high for me to shovel onto. I finished my task and didn’t really worry about it. A few days later a “mini-blizzard” hit. It was windy and it snowed for like 3 days straight but like it was like intense downpour of snow so I only refer to it as mini. Well the freshly cleaned pathways needed to be shoveled yet again and I found out that I had to put them onto a sled and move the snow away to a new spot. And there’s still a few months of winter left. Sleds are used here as a normal tool/form of transport. I see like ten every day in the streets. People move things on sleds like it’s a car or something. [UPDATE 1 DAY LATER – we burnt the snow, as in we took wood put it on the snow, then proceeded to light the wood on fire – melting the snow. I assume the yard will be covered in ice tomorrow – 1 DAY AFTER – I don’t think we were melting the snow, cause it wasn’t a big pile melted, I think he was attempting to destroy something instead, there’s still a plethora of snow – 1 WEEK LATER – no we were seriously melting the snow and burning it, it was just done incredibly inefficiently at first, now it’s better, of course it was typical inefficient kaz at first]

I think my counterpart has a Valker like craziness in how she speaks. Only two other people I know and a mysterious Australian of whom I know nothing about will truly understand this. Sometimes when she talks it makes no sense and then it’s like in the wrong language or just totally ridiculous comments. I commented on it with a person I know here that knows her. She said that it’s the same amount of nonsense in Russian too. It’s not just her speaking in English. Besides the confusion that happens sometimes working with her is really laid back and fine. It’s good because there are others that do not have coworkers that are so easily to work with.

I spent a weekend in Astana with my friend Tatyana back in December. It was interesting. While I was taking the train to the city, I received a text message from her about someone she knows that wants to go out with us but she’s a little older. I was like “yeah! the more the merrier!” So I get there and I think “oh shit, will it be my counterpart? now that would be weird…” Then I started to dread it. But it wasn’t. It’s not that I don’t want to hang out with Valentina outside of work but I see her all the time because when I’m not at work she lives across the street and we see each other all the time. It was a Kazakh lady and she was a 36 year old surgeon that recently moved to Astana from Almaty. She kept talking about how great Almaty is and by the end of the night I just wanted to respond with “O RLY?! go back there you obviously want to,” but I didn’t. I can be extraordinarily polite here in just about every situation. Well we went to grab some dinner and then another girl met with us, one that was my age. And then this lady is like “so this guy might be stalking me and coming to meet us.” I’m now I’m like “yeah! the more the merrier!” So after dinner this dude (he’s 26) is all like, “I know this sweet club we can go to!” so off we go. We arrive there around 11 and it’s pretty quiet. He seems to know all the people working there. It’s pretty flashy, that being both expensive and also because the waitress comes up to us without a shirt. My friend turns to me and says “I don’t like the look of the waitress.” I respond with “Pochemu? She seems nice.” (Why in Russian) They inform us that in order to stay each person has to buy 4000 tenge worth of stuff. BOUNCE. So off we go to find a new place. This dude yet again has another sweet place to go to. So off we go into a cab across the city to a new district where many new skyscrapers are being built. In the midst of the construction is one finished building containing a restaurant. We enter it and head into it. It’s a nice restaurant that one would use for a wedding probably. I ordered a MGD which was pretty cool. They had a dance floor and a DJ (it wasn’t a wedding). So we’re hanging out and stuff and this dude then asks me if I have ever seen a Kazakh yurt. I act ignorant to what a yurt is to please the intoxicated Kazakh man even though my previous family had a rather nice yurt where people could dine at their restaurant near Almaty. He tells me to follow him so we leave the girls and out we go to another restaurant hidden in the same building. Inside this room, the ceilings are decorated like those of a yurt and he tries to explain to me that this is an authentic yurt. Not only is it the worst designed yurt I have ever seen, it wasn’t a yurt. It was a ceiling with some decorations on it. He was like “it’s beautiful, right?”and proceeded to slur something in Kazakh which was probably his confession of his love for yurts or something. All I said was “wow, never have I seen anything this nice.” (that was a lie) He seemed pleased. We returned to the other place and went to dance and before I know it this Kazakh girl is asking me to dance, in English, and then I realize that of like the 5 people that I know in the whole city, she is one of them. Confused and surprised, I agree to the dance. Everyone said I dance well, which in fact I don’t, it’s just this past summer I had a dancing revelation thanks to the influence of two girls (Ali and Martha) that changed what I think of the whole concept of dancing in general. Or maybe I am an awesome dancer. Compared to most people here I am at least. That night I go back to my friend’s apartment but she actually rents a room from a family and they won’t allow her to let someone stay there but its late and like I had to sneak through the apartment in which their son was awake when I entered but facing the other direction and wearing head phones so he couldn’t hear me as I tiptoed behind him across the room literally a foot from his back. It was pretty sketchy. There was white noise on the television just sort of keeping the room dimly lit and all the rooms had windows in them that opened on each other, not to the outside. It was strange, but I’m used to that because my bedroom here has a big window on my door. Which at first was strange because then there is no sense of privacy due to the window on my door and I’m like wtf. But then it got replaced with frosted glass, so there’s still a window on the door but now when I’m naked in my room (which is usually the entire time I’m in there) I’m just a blur of humans limbs and flesh. I went to sleep, woke up and headed to the Medical School to conduct a few lectures in English in the morning. I was happy I wasn’t hung over (due to the fact that I didn’t drink anything) so at least I had my wits with me when I awoke in a strange place. I don’t think this really conveys the whole experience as well as I would like to describe it but whatevs. It was really strange. The strangest part being that dude and the yurt. The whole scenario lasted like 45 minutes. After it I just wanted to sleep.

Oh there are always like a million commercials on TV and I asked what the deal was during the USSR and back then there was never commercials. There’s this one for Nestle NUTS – a candy from Nestle. And the candies are in the shape of a scrotum and there are these babes saying in Russian “I want your NUTS” but nuts is in English so no one will understand. I laugh every time. Welcome to capitalism.

I went to Makinka to Chrisconsin’s for Christmas dinner. Chrisconsin is this dude Chris from Wisconsin. He’s a Kaz-19 and a character. We ate a goose and drank eggnog that we made and it was delicious. Yelena Yurievna was there, who was previously mentioned in my wallet incident. I’m way past that and I believe her about not seeing anything. She’s his counterpart. I left at 430 to take the train to work though, I was hoping it would be cancelled to coldness but it wasn’t.

The following weekend I went to Astana again, to the Medical Academy for their New Year’s party. It was like dancing and food and games and stuff. It was fun. I asked Talgat why he wouldn’t dance with all the babes (as a joke – he’s works in the English department; he’s like the head of the faculty for English) and he said “if I went to your school and danced with the girls there it would be fine, but here I can’t because I’m their teacher” or something along those lines. And all I could think was “if you came to my school and danced with the girls you’d probably be the creepiest person ever because I teach small children.” So I had to dance with all the girls for the two of us. The next night I had my own school’s dance for the holiday. It was actually three separate dances interspersed throughout the day. The earliest for the youngest, the middle day one for the middle grades and the night one for the ninth through the eleventh grades. I got to chaperone which involved me dancing with my students which isn’t as creepy as I portrayed it like three sentences ago and I am not a hypocrite. For me it’s cool because I’m the hip American dude and I work here and everyone insisted I must. For the seniors and stuff the other teachers forced me too. I tried to get this one teacher to come with me because she seems young and nice but she was all like no. I have no idea what her name is, her age, or what she teaches. However, I see her every day and I don’t want to be like “hey what’s your name, it’s weird now because I’ve been here for 3 months but I can point out about 150 kids in the school by name but not you.” Here everyone kind of dances like Dennis when he was in his prime of dancing, back when we choreographed our own dance to “sandstorm”.

Then was Novy God (New Years – it’s like the big holiday here, Santa Claus even comes for it and brings the children presents underneath the New Year’s tree). I went to my host sisters’ place in Astana. It is a penthouse apartment right next to the culture museum, downtown, with 3 balconies (3 sides of the building) and a great view of the city. I was kind of shocked by how posh the place was. Then we ate kiwi and salmon and like curry lamb with pomegranates and so many other delicious things. Best meal yet here. Interspersed was wine, vodka, and champagne. Nazarbayev talked for the countdown; he looks similar to Dick Clark – I also didn’t realize how old he is. Ridiculous shows played on TV and then we went out into the street and launched fireworks into the sky. Actually everyone in Astana did this and sometimes fireworks would hit buildings. It was actually similar to total chaos with a city of 500,000 drunken people launching fireworks and drinking vodka in the streets. The grandson – Iskander – got like tons of ridiculous toys, like a PSP and this robot cat that walked around and meowed and stuff. They forgot to turn it off at night and in the morning I heard it meowing and it woke me up and I was like wtf, I forgot all about the robot cat. A lot of fun though. I woke up the next day and headed down to Karaganda for more fun.

Karaganda is a large city in the center of Kazakhstan. It is known for its coal mining industry, gulag, and mass graves located outside the city where Stalin liked to hide millions of victims that died building all the Soviet apartment complexes that the city consists of.
There were like eleven of us there in an apartment. The first day we all showed up throughout the night. I got to see some of the city Jessie K and Christina(OCAP volunteers in Karaganda Oblast) then came back to find everyone either a) passed out or b) about to pass out from their breakfast of vodka and cognac. We proceeded to make arts and crafts while some of them slept or mumbled inanely about things no one could understand. Craft time was very rewarding; it consisted of Christmas reindeer made from our limbs (I learned how to make those from Dani and Ocho) and origami hearts and cranes. Someone was hilarious (due to their breakfast of cognac) but I wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone on the internet, you never know which of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers’ parents read my blog. One person slept soundly enough for me to draw a Gitler (that’s Hitler in Russian; Harry Potter is Garry Potter and Ernest Gemingway is a popular American author here) mustache on them as they slept under the influence of cognac. (I used a Crayola not a Sharpie so it was easy to clean – I’m not a monster) Later we went for dinner and me and Hotard and Christina went to a place and got food while everyone else was too indecisive and ate ramen in the end. They missed out, the hole in the wall looking place we ended up at actually was really nice and had Hoegaarden on tap which is like serious business for Kaz. It was probably the only beer I actually enjoyed the flavor of since I have been in the country. Unfortunately it’s even more expensive here than it is in the States. The next day was the best day of the year. Woke up, the sun was shining. It was also really windy. We went around the city, took some pictures with statues of our heroes, like the coal mining working man that represents the power behind socialism and another with Lenin. We took pictures with cutouts and went to the Ramstore(that’s the imported goods super market in a few major cities) and got Juicy juice which is the best juice in Kazakhstan and maybe the world. It’s not “Juicy Juice” only “Juicy” but it’s better than the former (maybe not, my taste buds just need to have flavor that is not boiled horse entrails for them to think something is the best ever). Only one store in my village sells it so I always go there to buy it and the ladies working there know it’s the number one juice preferred by Americans in Akkol. They have like every fruit juice for sale – single flavors though, no sweet mixtures like V8 Splash or Tropicana Twister. They even have a black currant juice. I now know why it isn’t marketed in the US and A. It tells you how much fruit is required to make one box of juice and whether it has preservatives or added sugar and whatnot. It also won some award in Italy which is legit. Some have little flags on them to represent where the fruit originally came from. For instance, the Orange Juice shows a little Brazilian flag in the corner. I’m using the juice to make my Brazilian Black Bean Soup this week. (with red beans – I couldn’t find any black beans in the village; furthermore I traveled two hours to buy one fresh pepper and two fresh tomatoes at incredibly inflated prices because there are no fresh vegetables in my town for sale) All of this is in Russian and Kazakh but then the most important facts are in English. FACT: 0.5 kg of black currants is in 1 liter of black currant juice. FACT: there are 10 apples in 1 liter of apple juice. FACT: there are 7 oranges in the orange juice FACT: it’s delicious. FACT: there are 50 vitamin tablets in 1 liter of the multivitamin juice (KIDDING, there are 11 fruits though) It’s probably the only juice here that is real juice too, the rest I think is just like flavored water or like 5% fruit drink. We went ice skating on the pond in the park. We got dinner. We sang karaoke at a karaoke bar place. Karaoke was tons of fun. I sang Wham’s Last Christmas first because it was our Christmas celebration and that was the only Christmas song I could find on the thing. Later we went home and made bloody marys and ate all the food because the four people that didn’t want to socialize with the rest of the group were there and passed out already. It was fun. The best part was probably at the end of karaoke when we met these girls and were deciding to go dancing and they tell us this place and then we realize they aren’t coming with us so it’s me and Hotard and we were like “so, yeah, let’s go dancing anyway”. We decided not to because it was getting late and would’ve been a money drain and it would be easier to just go home with the rest of the group. The next day I left back to Akkol and have been there for a few weeks now without leaving. I went x-country skiing; it’s really expensive here which sucks. I can’t really afford to do it more than once a month. I took some videos recently but the internet is too bad to upload them. It’s just normal situations here but from an outsider’s perspective they are funny.

Oh goody, how did I leave out the part when my family butchered a horse! I came home and there were just a lot of horse parts strewn about. They are still there, the uneaten ones. We leave them on the veranda because its cold like outside. Some days it’s so cold that school is cancelled. That’s fun. Yeah but the horse is like pretty delicious. We had the extended family over one day. Lots of people and tons of horse meat and vodka. I have like a host cousin babe that speaks English decently which is pretty cool; she studied international relations at university and graduated like a year or two ago. She also speaks Kazakh, Russian and Arabic which is pretty impressive. After talking for like five minutes she introduced me to her husband and child (1 year old). She’s now a stay at home mom. When I asked about her job because she has all these skills and such she explained that after university she got married then had a baby and now she won’t work. And I was like, but what about like in the future, what will you do when the baby is older, you can do a lot with a degree and being able to speak three of the most widespread languages on earth. She said she would be a mother. The way she said it made me confused, and I didn’t know whether I should be happy for her or pity her. Maybe something was lost in translation or the culture gap. The only way I could get a straight answer is if I went into the future to find out. But yeah, when they kill the horse, they tie all four legs together so it can’t move and then they slit its throat. Blood is everywhere. There are still ribs sitting out in the veranda, each like a meter long. Jessie P came over one weekend and I just had to show her because she’s a vegetarian. She did not approve.

On one day I went to work, came home and my host dad – I know his name now (Kairgeldy – first time I heard that one here UPDATE IT MAY BE KERIMBEK or something along that line even though I read it off the card my host mom does not say that when she talks to him, she says something different, it’s so aggravating – I think I’ll stick to like K-bone or something like that – so strange I think it could be a nickname cause I read it off a legal document)– was all like stoked about something and I’m like what? and he’s like something about his license and it now lasts til 2019, another ten years. So he’s stoked cause its renewed. I asked if he had to take a new test, the answer is no, I don’t really understand what the big deal was, but anyway we had to celebrate 10 more years of him on the roads! So pre-lunch consisted of three shots of vodka and baursaki (super awesome bread). At lunch we had like 2 more and he went to take a nap which resulted in my late banya but not bad cause I got to like pass out afterwards that night. But yeah, it was a reason to celebrate, therefore vodka.

After an entire month without leaving my village once, I went to a seminar about grant writing and raising money for books and things for my school. It was informative. At night we made pizza and went dancing at two clubs in Kokshetau. That part I would rate as halfway between meh and okay. The pizza was the highlight I guess. The partying thing here isn’t really my thing when it’s a bunch of drunken Americans and just a waste of time– I would’ve preferred to hang out and watch “The Dark Knight” because the copy was there at the time but due to some unfortunate circumstances I did not get to watch it and went to the club instead with the team. Fortunately, I didn’t really spend much money which is good and everyone made it home in one piece (which apparently doesn’t happen much over here when you’re a foreigner). Anywho, soon I will be able to ask my readership to directly help Kazakh people at the grassroots level. However, these plans are nowhere near finalized or decided upon yet so I won’t mention anything definite. Instead I give you passages from my text books so everyone can see the quality of the text books over here that I need to teach from the Ministry of Education’s curriculum:

Here’s a reading from my 9th grade text book:
BOLAT: “I live in a small flat with my parents and a sister. My father is a teacher. He doesn’t earn much. My mother is a housewife. She can’t find a job. I have a granny who looks after us. My sister and I go to ordinary school. We usually get there by bus. At school we wear a uniform. At home we have a small cat “Blacky”. My life is boring.”
HIS DREAM: “If my father were a millionaire we would live in a big house. My father would earn much money. My mother would have an interesting job. My sister and I wouldn’t go to ordinary school. We would go to private school, where we wouldn’t wear a uniform. We would wear fashionable clothes. My granny would travel all over the world. We would have “gold fish” at home. My life would be interesting.”
Okay so what are the problems with this passage? First of all, this is probably the most grammatically correct thing in the book and it uses the second conditional better than my rating of “absolutely terrible” (that entire thing on the 2nd conditional for only 1 sentence in the beginning, they could’ve made the rest of the sentences in the same way so students can see what the structure is) plus there aren’t really any spelling mistakes in it (for the first time ever). But the content? Seriously? I just laughed in class as the kids read it. I think they think gold fish are actual gold and they don’t realize that they would wear uniforms in private school and just because his mom is a millionaire it wouldn’t entitle her to an interesting job. Who would watch the kids if granny was traveling all over the world? Why is the cat named ‘Blacky’? I can just go on and on.
Next year they will all be wearing uniforms in my school district. I got to break the news to the 9th grade, it was satisfying, they weren’t too happy.

In the 11th grade I had to teach Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics as fact to the students according to the book. So I did.

THIS IS NOT FROM A BOOK: I had one class make brochures for a travel themed class… this one is for the Black Sea coast.
“We invite you to visit coast of Black sea!!! kound-the clock cafes, shops and clubs here work. On a beach you can get without problems, at any time. Having a rest on a beach you receive good sunburn. We suggest you to wisit a underwater empire with its inhabitants. This travel becomes unforgettable for you!!!” – I loved it. I don’t know where he got the ideas of the underwater empires in the Black Sea but that is gold. I gave him the second highest score for originality – which is something that lacks in the classroom here.

Then in another class the students had to act out a doctor visit and the boy asked the girl to “strip to the waist” not knowing what it meant and I started laughing and my counterpart is still trying to get them to continue with the dialogue and have them act it and I’m waving my arms telling everyone to stop and sit down, we’ll do something else. Strange that a vocabulary word for the section was ‘strip to the waist’. Especially when the word strip tease is a cognate in Russian. Should’ve used undress.

I also found an excellent (sarcasm) text in the 8th grade book about Husky Yellowhair, a Native American, that can’t visit a doctor because he is poor and his family doesn’t own a car and they live on a reservation in Arizona.

Most of the books’ passages are taken from other books I think. Most of these one’s I wrote here are probably under some copyright so I want to give a shout out to the Ministry of Education publishing and Ayapova the editor of the books.

One of the three English teachers at my school is seven months pregnant and expecting twins. She left at the end of January. I aksed her how long she would be gone and she said for 3 years! I was like, uh what? and yeah not next Fall. That’s an old Soviet policy, in those days they’d pay for all three years too; now I don’t think so but I know it’s a long time. Maybe half of it. Now I teach her 11th and 10th grade classes by myself and it is okay. Galina asked if it was “a horror” and I said no way because it could’ve been worse. Tenth is pretty good because the class is real small and they listen and aren’t rude and they work with me and my poor Russian skills and I with their English skills. They wait for me to translate things in the dictionary and stuff so it goes smoothly. The 11th grade though, that’s a different story. I think because it was just the first few classes but I introduced a different grading scale that they have never seen before. I call it my “no bullshit” grading scale. I taught them the beauty of grading based not on the old system they are used to but one based on performance and their behavior in class. So it should work out better now. I taught about politics to both 11th grade classes and had this one activity in which they had a list of 10 qualities of a political candidate and they had to work as separate groups to number them in order from best to worst. Many said honesty, party membership and ideas weren’t important and instead chose to list family background as the most important and then said the most important quality to add is whether that person is Nursultan Nazarbayev. I directed the class towards the recent American election soon afterwards. I needed to stop there or I’d break some PC policies about not talking about Kazakhstani politics because my first amendment rights don’t work when I’m not in the country even though I am still subject to the laws of the United States while I am living in Kazakhstan and also subject to Kazakhstani laws simultaneously.

So the family had another get together yesterday and this time they had a horse’s head with the beshbarmak. FACT: horse brains are slightly not as terrible as sheep brains. FACT: they didn’t realize that since I come from such a guido infested area that a horse’s head is in fact an omen of death, at least according to the godfather FACT: it was still not good, and the liver was even worse. Then Aigul was all like do you want some juice and I was like “no, only vodka can wash down the taste of brains in the afternoon” but in actuality my Russian was more like “not tasty, I need vodka, brains was that? yes? yeah only vodka”.

Yeah, that’s about it. I only recounted like a few things because most of the time I just like work, sleep, eat, shiver, read (David Remnick’s “Lenin’s Tomb” is an excellent oral history on the last years of the CCCP, it’s not dry or slow and it’s occasionally funny)etc. On Feb 6th, hurricane Katrina force winds decimated my walk to school. It was terrifying. And then once I got there no students came and I had to walk back home another 30 minutes in it after waiting around. I can’t afford to ski and ice skating in my village is also expensive but not as expensive, I can afford to do that like twice a month in addition to the one skiing trip in a month. My computer is basically dead so that’s a bummer. MS Word works though so I use it to write this and read ebooks that are .rtf format. foobar works too but iTunes isn’t cutting it anymore along with VLC that likes to die. Teaching is fine. It’s not hard; I think I do it pretty well. The eleventh graders (team teach class not alone class) actually pay attention and do their work when I teach compared to when my counterpart is in front of the class. I found out about baseball camp for the summer. I’m pretty stoked. 2 weeks of teaching Kazakhstani children to play baseball is now officially a part of my job. My Russian is getting better, I changed my learning style to just memorizing words in bulk, however it’s not helping me with some tricky things like modal verbs and gerunds, bummer. And I usually need to reword my sentences in my head so I don’t have to use tricky grammar like passive voice or anything like that ever. Yeah that’s the end. If you’re still bored read other PC blogs which can be reached through here apparently if you just like click buttons or something; I dunno they all say they read this and so do their parents so I guess they just clicked things so you can too if you’re so inclined. But yeah then most of the time its cold, there’s snow, I teach, my boss visited a few weeks ago to watch my magic. I’m a ballin’ teacher apparently. Other things she informed me was that I should like do more and told my supervisor to use me as much as possible “he is a free worker, make him do whatever you want” is basically what she told her. It’s good to know that I’m needed. That day I taught the second conditional grammar. I played Pink Floyd’s “If” in class cause it does the grammar very well and slow and clear for all to understand. My boss thought it would be “if I had a million dollars…” by Barenaked Ladies and asked why I didn’t do that one, all volunteers do. I told her I’m not all volunteers.
BOUNCE