Tuesday, March 16, 2010

"Hey, here comes that frog! All right!"

Our banya—which is actually my host aunt’s banya, since ours is broken—is infested with frogs. I spotted the first one a few weeks ago, when it crawled out from under the planks and nearly caused me to scald myself. (The banya is a really bad place to be startled—between the giant furnace, the slippery surfaces, and the gaping spaces between the rickety floorboards, there are countless opportunities to do yourself serious damage). But the frog clearly had no more interest in harassing me than I did it, and, as Mitch Hedberg put it, frogs are always cool. So the frog and I were co-existing in relative peace—until last Sunday, when I noticed the frog seemed to be sitting atop a weirdly lumpy pile of rocks behind the furnace. The pile was weirdly lumpy, I soon realized, because it was not made of rocks, but in fact of other frogs. Seven, actually, all just chilling out in their bug-eyed manner. Occasionally a couple of them would head under the floorboards—I guess there was something cooler happening down there—but they mostly stayed out of my way, and seemed content to just pulsate in their frog pile. I’ve decided that if I ever start a Moscow-based punk band—weirder things have happened in my life—I’m definitely calling it “Frogs in the Banya.” (Imagine that screamed over and over again at top volume, and I think you’ll see why). My biggest concern is the three kittens and their mom currently bunking in a box just outside the banya door—if there’s anything creepier than unexpectedly seeing a live frog while naked in a steamy confined space, it’s stumbling on a messily dead one under the same circumstances.

The end of winter is bringing out a lot of wildlife in Zhetysai, mostly of the insect and avian variety. I’m glad the bitterest of the bitter cold has passed, but the blanket of snow was starting to grow on me, especially when I realized walking through a wonderland of slightly dirty snow could, with some imagination, feel like walking on an endless plain of Oreo ice cream. (I feel an acid trip mentality improves most things in life, as long as it doesn’t lead to terrible decisions—like trying to eat all that delicious-looking but actually disease-filled snow-cream). I was all ready to declare the season officially over a week ago, when the days were hot and sunny and we moved all our dish and face-washing activities outside. But we had a crazy rainstorm on Thursday that, sometime during the night, turned into snow. The snow was gone by the end of the day, but I’m a little more wary of the weather here now. Still, it’s pretty warm for March— which makes me dread the summer a little, since will apparently involve 100+ heat, countless mosquitoes, and an annual infestation of giant bats. I’ve been through plenty of sweltering Southern summers, but I usually spent them immersed in water or A/C while wearing as little clothing as possible, which isn’t really an option in Zhetysai. Luckily I’ll be traveling for at least some of that time, so maybe I’ll avoid the peak of giant bat season.

March can be a fairly awful month in any part of the world, but Kazakhstan has made it a little more bearable by throwing in a couple of holidays to break it up. There was International Women’s Day, on March 8th, which was an official school holiday and a three-day extravaganza of gift giving, chocolate eating, and an insane amount of fake flowers. I now have a whole bouquet of fake roses, countless chocolates, various cosmetics, and a shampoo/conditioner set with the following instructions:

“Use method: after cleaning the hair, wipes the hair does, right amount this will trace evenly on the hair, the light canadian massage retains 1-3 minutes, finally strips with water cleanly then. Notice: avoid contacting the eye, if carelessly pleasant, please namely thoroughly flush with the clear water.”

I’m not really sure what a Canadian massage is, but if I attempt it I’ll try my best not to be carelessly pleasant, as that always leads to danger. Women’s Day here basically combines all the elements of Mother and Valentine’s Day, except that there are no relationship or child-related requirements for getting gifts. There were also a lot of concerts, and flowery greeting cards, and—as with pretty much any occasion over here—a lot of sparkles. Sparkles and exaggeratedly cute decorations are a big thing in K-Stan—Lisa Frank would be huge over here. I’m not what you’d call a “sparkles” person (if someone had to come up with 850,000 word combinations to describe me, “sparkles person” would not make the list), but I now own more sparkly, pink school-related items than I have since the third grade, due to the fact that those are pretty much the only kind you can buy at my school’s canteen. I’ve filled up all the notebooks I brought me, so I mostly write lesson plans in the exercise books the kids here use—my current one, a gift from a student, has Cinderella on a white horse against a bubblegum background, which is a pretty good representation of my life and interests. I found out about the sparkle fever pretty immediately upon arriving in Kazakhstan: our first day in Orientation, the Peace Corps gave each of us glittery exercise books with obnoxiously cherubic children praying over the golden, curlicue-adorned words “Valley of Angels.” During one of the more boring Orientation sessions (which will probably turn out to have contained some vital information that could save my life, at some point), I turned the valley of angels into a valley of horned, vaguely androgynous demon creatures, which has been a little awkward to try to explain anytime anyone’s caught a glimpse of it.

The other big March holiday is, of course, Nauryz, the South’s biggest celebration, which happens a week from yesterday. It’s also the end of our third term at school, which means there’s just one more until the summer. I’m trying to hit up both Turkey and Uzbekistan this summer, along with some in-Kazakhstan travel, so I’m pumped for the vacay. And yeah, I just said vacay—clearly my English degenerating far more rapidly than I suspected. Don’t judge, guys, don’t judge.

IMPORTANT: Because of mysterious Blogger-blocking on this side of the world, I'm moving this blog here: http://katharinedoeskazakhstan.wordpress.com/. See you there whenever my Internet works (so for about fifteen minutes every couple of weeks)!

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Five Ways the Peace Corps is Better than College

Now, don’t get me wrong—I loved college. In fact, I wrote a couple of blogs for Hampshire’s Admissions office, which despite never really mentioning academics or much else directly related to the school somehow still interested people in attending. But let’s be real: in terms of overall health, hygiene, and sanity, college is basically the worst environment imaginable. Though I now live in a developing country, my life has actually improved in a number of essential areas:

1. Food. Namely, having it. I was off the meal plan for my last three years at school, and trips to the grocery store only happened about once a month, if we were lucky. I pretty much survived on cereal and delivery food, which may actually be worse for you than eating nothing at all. Here I get my three square a day, plus some: Kazakhs are serious about their hospitality, and any time you’re a guest in anyone’s house you’ll find a full spread of snacks, jams, and salads in addition to the meal, which you’ll be pressured into having at least two servings of. My school also has a pretty good canteen, with hot food, samsas, and Kit Kats and Snickers for any American candy cravings that might hit. The bazaar is a lot easier to get to—not to mention cheaper—than the Hadley Stop N’ Stop was, so groceries won’t be a problem when I move into my own place (I think I’m going to go vegetarian as far as my home cooking is concerned, though—the severed cow heads and limbs in the bazaar’s meat section aren’t that appetizing). That said, there are three meals I would kill for right now: a BBQ chicken sandwich from Baoguette in New York City, a pork stuffed chile relleno empanada from Salsa’s in Asheville, and a No. 1 from The Lady Killigrew in Montague, Massachusetts—man, I guess I never realized how much I love sandwiches and sandwich-like things. This, along with our penchant for hot dogs and fast food, is apparently a stereotype about Americans held by many Kazakhs: when I find myself discussing food and “national dishes” (which happens a lot), there’s a lot of confusion over the concept of toasters and the fact that we don’t have one specific, traditional dish we always serve to guests. Kitchen set-ups here tend to vary—some people have microwaves and fridges while others just have an oven and stove. My host family has a fridge, but they store a lot of leftover food and preserves outside or in the pantry when it’s cold enough.

2. Shelter. College is pretty terrible, as far as housing goes. You’re either subjected to the claustrophobic squalor of a dorm or the slightly less claustrophobic squalor of a shared house, which despite the best intentions almost always end up looking like a particularly ill-kept drug den and smelling of PBR, dirty socks, and old pizza. The structures rarely exceed their most basic function of keeping you mildly warm and alive, and the furniture is usually stained, broken—or in at least one case I know of, no kidding—infested with flesh-eating bacteria. My third year, our main piece of living room furniture was known as “The Death Couch,” due to the fact that it had a jagged piece of metal sticking out of its frame. It ripped jeans, stabbed people, and was only slightly more comfortable than sitting on an actual pile of twisted metal. Our other furniture comprised a poppazon chair (also broken, and prone to dumping occupants to the floor in sudden fits of rage) and a stolen Wal-Mart wheelchair, which sadly may have been the most functional and comfy part of the collection. (This wheelchair famously led to the invention of a winter sport known as “wheelchairing”—I’m not sure how that event didn’t make it into the Olympics, but I’m guessing it’s because no conceivable amount of insurance would cover it).

Despite not having some American amenities, my apartment in Kazakhstan is unarguably more hygienic and livable than my college set-up. You always take off your shoes before entering a Kazakhstani house, because tracking in dirt is totally unacceptable. My host family does a thorough house cleaning at least once a week, and my room here is immaculate (especially compared to my room in college, which looked like a thrift store, a toy shop, and Neil Gaiman's library got into a deadly brawl). It’s quieter, too—even when my host family stays up late watching Russian serials, it’s a vast improvement over having the bright ringing drone of Super Mario Galaxy as the soundtrack to pretty much all of my dreams. People aren’t as apt to stumble in and out all the time, and so far no semi-homeless man named Freddy has come to live on our couch, like at Hampshire—but I’m not entirely ruling the possibility of that happening out. Other improvements: none of the furniture seems inherently lethal, my bed is not made of green plastic, and there are never dishes in the sink—mostly because there is no sink, but also because we eat most things family platter-style and washing up is pretty painless.

3. Clothing. Yes, Hampshire had free washing machines. Yes, they were at one point conveniently located right across from my house. Did this mean I did laundry weekly? No. Did this mean I did laundry monthly? Not always. Did this mean I did it yearly? …I’m almost certain. I’d like to defend this grossness by noting that the laundry room itself was pretty disgusting—even though I knew, theoretically, that my clothes were getting cleaner, the stale stench of abandoned sheets and underwear and pools of unidentified liquid on the floor made them seemed somehow tainted. Because there were only three or four washers and dryers for Enfield—the suburbs of Hampshire—the laundry room was also a battleground. Finding an open machine was hard enough, and once you did you couldn’t be sure that someone else wouldn’t just pull your clothes out early and stuff them in a dryer or just leave them in a wet pile somewhere. Although my laundry situation wasn’t great during training—I had one terrible, day-long experience with washing all my clothes by hand that I hope to never relive—here my host family has an automatic machine and does laundry every weekend.

4. Transportation. While the Five Colleges have a great free bus system, it couldn’t always compensate for the fact that Hampshire was fairly isolated. You could ride a bike into Amherst, but when it was freezing and icy—as it was for a good part of the school year—this was a less than an ideal way to get around, and the busses stopped or ran reduced schedules during holidays and Jan Term. Getting to the aforementioned Stop n’ Shop required a bus transfer that never quite worked out, time-wise, and usually wasn’t worth the trouble. There’s no bus system in my town, but getting anywhere at a moment’s notice is never a problem, due to Zhetysai’s overabundance of gypsy cabs. Gypsy cabs (called “dolmuş” in Turkish, which literally means “stuffed”) are unofficial taxis—which isn’t that important of a distinction in Z-Sai, since there are no official taxis. Basically anyone in a car can be a cab driver—some cars actually have “TAXI” signs on their hood, but these can be bought for cheap at the bazaar. You might think the lack of markings would make these cabs hard to identify, but since most people don’t have their own cars and most cars on the road here are, in fact, gypsy cabs, you don’t really need to search them out. They’re usually older, beat-up cars—Opels seem to be a particularly popular gypsy cab brand. You wave them down and they’ll take you anywhere in town for 50 tenge (about 30 cents), though they may stop to pick up other passengers, which can get cramped. I’ve never had to wait more than two minutes for a taxi, even in severely bad weather. Actually, even when I don’t need one, there’s always a taxi around—if I’m walking along the road, I’ll always get the horn beep and headlight flash from someone who thinks I’d rather take a cab. An all-cab system is, of course, not the most desirable transportation system environment-wise, but I can’t say I don’t appreciate it when I’m rushing around or rainstorms make it impossible to get across town without a vehicle.

5. Money. Like most students, I was broke for more or less my entire college career. The income from a work-study job just can’t cover the costs of a student lifestyle, which involves a lot of poor and costly late-night decisions. One of the Peace Corps’ main draws is they say you can make it through the entire two years without spending any of your own money, which I think—if you’re not planning to travel outside the country—is probably true. My monthly stipend more than covers rent and necessities, with plenty left over that I mostly save, because there’s not much to spend it on. While there are cafes and shops here, people rarely go out to eat and there’s not much I need in terms of clothes and other items. Internet time is probably my biggest money-sucker, but even that costs less than a dollar an hour. Zhetysai is particularly cheap—Almaty and Shymkent are pricey (though still not as bad as the States), so it’s probably good I’m banking a lot of my tenge for trips to the city.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

kaz and effect

Okay, I know that based on the end of my last post, it kind of looks like I was in a sugar-and-vodka coma for over a month, but I swear I have been legitimately busy and not just massively hung-over and stuffing myself with stale holiday pastries. Mmmm…stale holiday pastries…Anyway, if you read any other Kaz blogs, you may have heard that Blogger was down here for a while, due to some mysterious government censorship. I also haven’t been getting to Komfort Kafé (our least sketchy Internet establishment) as often lately, since I have more classes this term and I’m also pretty lazy. But barring being bridenapped (there’s a tongue twister I should teach my kids), I promise to be more vigilant about updating, since I know how you, the hungry, anonymous Internet masses, crave your weekly dose of obscure news from southern Kazakhstan.

So I left off pre-holidays, which means you may want to make yourself some popcorn before reading this post, because it’s gonna be epic. December was pretty packed, what with Christmas, the New Year, and the most important internationally recognized holiday of all: my birthday. My host mother totally brought it, as far as my birthday banquet: she baked no less than 100 little frosted cakes, in addition to the full-sized cake, chocolates, and various other cavity-causing snacks on the table. She also made a ton of manti, salad, and these delicious cheese-covered potato and tomato things that I’m sure have a real name but I have no idea what it is. I had gone out with friends for shashlyk (barbecued meat on a stick) and a walk up Zhetysai’s only hill (no—really—the only hill) earlier in the day, but for dinner my host mom’s friends and various host aunts came over to have an all-night birthday extravaganza (which was not so much fun the next day, Monday, when I had to power through four classes on two hours’ sleep). There’s nothing that special about turning 23 in the States, but here it’s one of the last birthdays you can still celebrate without shame for not being married yet. Most of the toasts—and there were a lot of them—were wishes for me to find a rich husband by this time next year, which unless Neil Patrick Harris decides he wants to get gay-married so he can come live with me in Kazakhstan for some inexplicable but amazing reason, is probably not going to happen.

I thought the Christmastime might be a little weird here, what with the general lack of Christmas, but since the New Year celebrations in Kazakhstan basically appropriate all the traditional Christmas stuff—Santa, Christmas trees, presents, tinsel, et cetera—it was definitely festive. My students decorated the school gym with gorgeous wintertime murals and put on various New Year’s concerts, which mostly involved dancing and lip-syncing to pop music and dressing up in random costumes (they also throw a lot of Halloween into the New Year mix). Pretty much all my students already knew at least the chorus of “Jingle Bells,” though “Rudolph” was a revelation—that’s what my sixth-graders sang for our Christmas concert. The eighth grade put on a severely stripped down version of “A Christmas Carol” (penned by yours truly in about 10 minutes—suck it, Dickens) and sang “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” while the ninth grade performed a jitterbugging version of “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.” The whole production was pretty cute, though it relied pretty heavily on a Christmas CD I’d received in a package a week before, without which there probably would have been a lot more awkward silence and public embarrassment. But hey, isn’t that what middle school is all about?
I spent Christmas Day in Shymkent, where Tes and I joined up with the Kaz-21s in the city and feasted on Becca and Philip’s “Chinese plov,” a roast teriyaki chicken, and heartbreakingly delicious chocolate chip and gingerbread cookies. We did a White Elephant gift exchange, which did not end in tears, gratuitous backstabbing, or any of the other things I’ve witnessed White Elephany gift exchanges ending in—I guess it’d sort of go against the whole “peace” idea if we started fist-fighting with fellow volunteers over a miniature yurt replica. The day after Christmas we recovered from our gluttony and hit up the Megacenter, which has a giant skating rink at its center that some other volunteers ventured out on—due to my longstanding conviction that wearing razor shoes in a confined, slippery space filled with fast-moving children and adolescents is asking for disaster, I opted out and spent most of my time in Ramstore. Ramstore is a giant supermarket that basically has everything you need but can’t find in your local magazine—endless varieties of snacks, fruits, and beverages, pens that actually work and colored pencils that really draw, certain hygiene products not in evidence at your local bazaar—but the problem is that once you get in there, it’s so overwhelming that all you can really do is wander around slack-jawed and try to remind yourself that this is not the last time you will be in the supermarket, and you do not in fact have to grab everything you can carry and bolt for the exit. For dinner we met up with some Kaz-20s at Madlen’s, a French bakery with club sandwiches, spinach quiche, and “holy-crap-that’s-good” lava cake. (Man, I can’t even type the words “spinach quiche” without wanting to cry a little—I cannot remember the last time I ate a truly green vegetable…) Thanks to the awesome Russian skills of a fellow volunteer, we got a ridiculously cheap apartment in the city for the night and, thanks to this being Kazakhstan, some ridiculously cheap vodka. The next morning we got wireless at a nearby café, which was great, since the only other time I’ve managed to get wireless in Kazakhstan was when Philip and I accidentally discovered it in the Almaty train station 20 minutes before our train left. There are a couple of Internet cafés in Shymkent, both of which serve Turkish food—double awesome.

After Christmas, I still had classes, but all the kids had tests and all the teachers had a huge party (at which I won a plastic comb for my sweet dance moves—yeah, you’re jealous), so not a whole lot got done between then and the 31st. I rang in the New Year in Z-Sai with my host brother and mom, since my host sister was discothèque-hopping with her cousin. We prepared a huge feast—yes, I actually helped, most notably with the assembling the cold, slimy fish rolls and the artistically arranging the cow stomach/brains. There’s no better omen for the New Year than your hands smelling like fish and cow parts, I always say. Luckily there was also Snickers cake and champagne, so I just went heavy on booze and dessert, which is of course the traditional American way to celebrate New Year’s Eve. We set up a banquet table in the living room and watched the Russian concerts, which start around the New Year and go on for at least three weeks. I’m not really sure what the point of them is: there are a lot of these kind of specials on TV, and they’re—as Tes accurately described them—kind of like middle school talent shows put on by adults. Actually, they’re more like middle school talent shows in the 80s put on by adults, since that’s where the costumes, hair, and musical sensibility appear to be from. Moscow was already a couple of hours into 2010 so we didn’t have a countdown, but it turned out we did not really need one, due to the violently loud explosions that started at midnight. There are no fireworks laws in Zhetysai, so ringing in the New Year was kind of like being caught in a war zone. Seriously, we went outside and there were fireworks in every direction—it appeared that everyone on our street was setting off rockets, and they were not aiming them so much skyward as at each other. My host brother had to run inside after awhile, but I was paralyzed by the shininess: clearly I would not make a great soldier, for this and pretty much every other conceivable reason.

Post-holidays, most of my time has been occupied by teaching, English clubs, and NPH (thanks to a lot of Dr. Horrible re-watching and Lizz sending me Season 1 of How I Met Your Mother). Winter in Zhetysai has proven to be considerably better than in Massachusetts, where I spent my last five winters, in that the sun does not go down at 4 p.m. and every walkable surface does not transform into an icy deathtrap. This New Year’s Eve, I stood outside in a t-shirt and open hoodie—last New Year’s Eve in Boston, I lost feeling in my face after about 10 seconds, despite my heavy jacket and scarf. For most of January the weather here was unsettlingly spring-like: Monday, though, we got an all-day snowfall that actually stuck. It’s still pretty frigid and the snow has made its inevitable transition from being pretty and fresh to gritty and depressing, but if this is the worst weather we get this winter, I really can’t complain. Spring will apparently have started, for real-real, by the time Nayruz (the Kazakh New Year) occurs on March 22nd. I’m pretty pumped about the last two weeks in March: first there’s Nayruz in Shymkent, which involves a huge celebration and a game of kokpar (which is sort of a combination of soccer and polo, played with a goat’s carcass instead of a ball—I might have enjoyed watching my sisters’ soccer games more if AYSO did it that way), then there’s IST, when all the Kaz-21s get to head back to the lap of luxury that is the Kök Töbe sanitarium in Almaty and take real showers, drink real coffee, and speak real English. I’m not so sure how that last one is going to go, but at least other volunteers will be having the same difficulty with their native language. I’m more worried about when I get back to the States: I’m either going to come off as really condescending, since I now slow down and usually repeat all of my words while smiling and nodding a lot, or as really stoned, for pretty much the same reasons.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

"Who's Josh Groban? Kill yourself!"

One of the many ways in which living in Kazakhstan is a bit of a paradox: I don’t have running water in my home, but I do have satellite television. And while no form of entertainment can possibly make up for missing the current season of Mad Men, it’s a nice amenity. Mostly, if I choose to watch TV, I watch it on my computer—thanks to the kids in Shymkent, I now have a bunch of new stuff, including several episodes of Glee, which I have been burning through at an alarming rate—but hanging out with my host siblings, especially over school holidays, involves a lot of television. Here are some important facts I’ve gleaned from prolonged exposure to Kazakhstani TV:

1. Zach Braff has sold his soul to the devil. That’s the only explanation for why, in addition to being on American television 36/7 (36, you know, because of that one network that has programming from parallel universes), Scrubs is on Russian MTV all the time when I flip through the channels here. And it’s not even the episodes from way back, when Scrubs was kind of good (or at least tolerable)—these are the ones where Zach Braff grew stubble and apparently finally got together with Elliott, which caused her to affix some kind of shiny, impenetrable shield of make-up to her face and attempt to escape him by starring in terrible Lifetime original movies (which is really an oxymoron). This is what I assume happened, anyway—since it’s all dubbed over in Russian, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on. I can’t really figure out the logic of what shows make it onto TV over here—there’s some newer, pretty good stuff, like Ugly Betty, and then there are super-old and inexplicable choices, like Hercules and Andromeda (Kevin Sorbo, like Enrique Inglesias, apparently does much better in Kazakhstan). I keep hoping that having Hercules means they’ll also air Xena at some point, but so far this wish has gone unfulfilled.

2. Kazakhstan is where bad American movies go when they die. All those movies you forgot existed, because they bombed so utterly that even their creators swore, on pain of execution by a Hollywood death squad, never again to mention their names? Those movies you’re not even in danger of accidentally catching part of on TV, because no self-respecting network will air them? All those movies are here. Meet Dave, Drillbit Taylor, The Love Guru, The Spirit, Catwoman, several horrible Christian Slater movies I’ve never even heard of—I’ve seen a number of American movies here you couldn’t have paid me to sit through in the States. In Russian, though, they’re weirdly fascinating, and at the beginning of my time here, I was homesick enough that any glimpse of Americana—even the absolute worst of it—was comforting. Now that I’ve loaded up my hard drive with movies I actually want to watch, though, I hope to minimize my contact with Christan Slater for awhile (unless THT decides to air Heathers, which—much like the chances of them airing the Xena episode where Lucy Lawless feeds strawberries to Marc Anthony while Natalie Merchant’s“Carnival” plays in the background—is highly improbable.)

3. Cartoons are awesome, in any language. I have discovered—or maybe just decided to admit publicly—that I have pretty much exactly the same taste in entertainment as a 12-year-old boy. Which is sweet, since I live with a 12-year-old boy, but awkward, because I also live with a 15-year-old girl, who seems pretty nonplussed when I choose to watch Clone High over Project Runway. (Oh yes, they have Clone High, a fact I discovered on November 22, which is a little weird, since the show stars a clone of JFK and features a diner called “The Grassy Knoll.” Coincidence? Or is Kazakhstan a key part of the Kennedy conspiracy...?) The best network here, in my opinion, is definitely 2x2, which is a lot like Adult Swim—including the black and white bumps, King of the Hill, The Oblongs, Futurama, and Home Movies. I have not seen some of the weirder stuff on yet—I don’t think Aqua Teen Hunger Force would make even a mild amount of sense in Kazakhstan, but Metalocalypse might appeal to a post-Soviet sensibility. The humor doesn’t always translate—if you watched King of the Hill here, for instance, you would think Boomhauer is a mute, since they don’t even attempt to dub his lines, and the Texas accents don’t so much come through when attempted in Russian. You can still sort of hear them, though, since they don’t actually erase the original track: they just dub over it, so you can still hear (faintly) the English dialogue. It makes it a little easier for me to catch what’s going on—I get the beginning and the end of every other sentence, and make up everything in between.

4. Russian TV is like American TV, only…Russian. The whole dub-over thing is kind of a taxing way to watch television, so sometimes I prefer to watch the straight-up Russian shows, where there’s no hope of me understanding the dialogue and I can sort of zone out and pretend the whole thing is an absurdist art film. Sitcoms here are like sitcoms everywhere: zany, family-oriented antics accompanied by laugh tracks, where you don’t really have to pay that much attention to get the gist of what’s going on. My host family’s favorite—"Papa and Daughters”—is about pretty much exactly what you’d guess: five daughters and their father’s attempts to manage their various dramas and mishaps (although there’s also a mother on the show—I’m not really sure why she doesn’t make it into the title). There’s another one about two video game-playing stoners that’s pretty hilarious, and a "Little Russia" skit show (with the same logo design and set-up as Little Britain). A lot of the sitcoms here appear to be blantant rip-offs of American shows—there’s a Russian version of Married With Children that I can understand perfectly, because the characters and plotlines are pretty much exactly the same as in the original. There’s another that seems pretty close to Everybody Loves Raymond, but my host family seems to hate it as much as everyone I know in the States hates Everybody Loves Raymond, so I’ve never watched it long enough to confirm this.

Like in the States, reality television is big here. There’s this epic show called Dom 2 that’s on seven times a week, and appears to be about absolutely nothing. It looks to me a lot like the British Big Brother, where people are filmed just sitting, laying, or sleeping around, with no editing or attempts to make the material in the least bit interesting. My sitemate Tes, who has watched the show more than me and actually did some research into it, says it started out as a contest, where couples were competing to live in the house they were all building together. But the show has been on for five years now, and everyone is still just hanging out—and people still love it. I would think this was weird, but then I remember that there was more than one season of Flavor of Love, and that I watched more than one season of Flavor of Love, and I realize I probably can’t judge anyone for their reality TV choices.

5. Jesus loves you…even in Kazakhstan. On my first day with my new host family, they graciously asked if I’d like to watch English television. I said yes, of course, thinking that maybe I’d lucked out and would have access to CNN or BBC. So my host brother showed me the three English channels—two of which were filled with shouting, sweating, Southern-accented televangelists, and the third with an Australian park ranger puppet singing a song about all the happy children in the world who had made Jesus their best friend by being born again. I had a brief, Truman Show kind of moment, where I thought perhaps I hadn’t left East Tennessee at all and the entire country of Kazakhstan had been constructed as part of someone’s elaborate plan to totally eff with me, but then I remembered that NBC aired the Left Behind movie several times when I was living in Turkey, and the world is just crazy all over. If televangelical television seems absurd in the States, where the only people I ever knew who watched it with real interest were my friends and me, at 3 a.m. (due to some very poor life choices, I still get occasional automated phone calls from a faith healer trying to sell me Miracle Manna), it’s beyond bizarre here in Kazakhstan. First of all, most people don’t speak English well enough to understand any of it, and even if they did, I sort of doubt a hysterical, Muslim-hating old white man in a bad suit or a stuffed bear that sings endless, tinny rounds of “Jesus Loves You” (for only $19.99, you guys!) is going to convey a Christian message of peace and love to them. America and Australia, however, are not the only ones sending out Jesus-y waves—there are also several Chinese and Korean channels that seem to have pretty much the same aim, with huge revivals and frequent appeals for cash.

I’ll do a blog post about the holidays once I’ve recovered from the sugar-and-vodka coma that my New Year’s Eve celebrations are sure to induce. Until then, enjoy the last, fleeting hours of 2009!

Friday, December 11, 2009

"Horsin' Around:" A Disney Channel Kazakhstan Original Movie

Being in Kazakhstan is kind of like being pregnant, what with the frequent morning sickness, inevitable weight gain, and sudden, insatiable cravings for normally unappetizing foods. This morning, for example, I was struck with an overwhelming and inexplicable desire for Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which I don’t think I’ve eaten since childhood. (Actually, that’s a total lie—the last time I ate it was probably during the sugar-crazed all-nighters of my last semester at college, when a 2 a.m. bowl was ritual). Other vaguely gross foods I’ve experienced powerful hankerings for lately: Waffle House waffles (with enough butter and syrup to drown an Olympic athlete), Little Debbie Christmas tree cakes, sweet n’ sour chicken, movie popcorn, and Wendy’s fries dipped in a Frosty. (There’s just something about that oily chemical aftertaste...) I’m not sure these are even things I would enjoy eating—I’d probably prefer something leafy and Mexican right now, if I truly had a choice—but I think the withdrawal from a lifetime of eating preservative and additives-laden American food is starting to kick in with a vengeance. It’s like how you never really want McDonald’s fries until you smell them, then some latent switch activates in your brain and you black out, only to come to minutes later with salty lips, grease-smeared hands, and a terrible sense of regret.

Kazakhstan’s major food groups are basically bread, meat, and candy. There’s a lot of fruit in my region, but outside of “tois” (parties held for weddings, birthdays, or, as far as I can tell, the hell of it), it’s not really on most people’s tables. I keep a stash of bananas, apples, and persimmons in my room, since all these items are ridiculously cheap (way less than a dollar a kilo) at the bazaar. I’ve sort of given up on vegetables for the time being—when I move into my own place it’ll probably be worth seeking them out, but for now I just have to consider the sandwiches at my school (which, though they also contain sausage, eggs, ketchup and mayonnaise, do include shredded carrots—sometimes) a healthy life choice. Besides the lack of balanced nutrition, I eat pretty well here. My favorite dish is manti, which are these giant, meat or vegetable-filled dumplings you top with beets, a red pepper-garlic sauce, or sour cream and eat with your hands. They were a hugely popular dish in my training village, where they were usually stuffed with fresh pumpkin and pure magic. The big thing here—besides beshbarmak, which I’ll get to in a second—is plov, which is rice with bits of meat and carrots. It’s actually an Uzbek dish—same with samca, which are these delicious, meat or cheese-filled pastries (think Hot Pockets, except three thousand times better and made with real food)—but we’re only an hour from the border of Uzbekistan, so it’s especially popular and tasty here.

And then there’s beshbarmak. It’s the national dish of Kazakhstan, and consists of huge pieces of meat, fat, carrots, and potatoes, set atop a giant platter of noodles. You eat it with your hands, which—for me, at least—gets out of hand (get it? GET IT?) pretty quickly. The noodles are slippery, the fat is, well, fat, and there usually isn’t a napkin in sight: it’s pretty much impossible to eat in a dignified fashion—which is unfortunate, since the whole time you’re eating it, people are watching you to determine how much you like it and urging you to eat more any time you stop chewing. While the meat—which includes parts of the animal I can’t and probably shouldn’t try to identify—is usually sheep, I have, in fact, had horse meat beshbarmak. (Horse meat is pretty expensive, though, so I haven’t had it too often.) It doesn’t weird me out that much, since I have pretty much the same amount of attachment to horses as I do to cows, and I figure if I choose to eat meat at all, I can’t make too much of a fuss about what animal it’s from. One of my good friends from training loves horses, though: she’s been riding since she was a kid, and had her own horse up until she went into the Peace Corps. So she was really excited to discover her host family had two horses—until I pointed out, in a Debbie Downer does Kazakhstan kind of way, that if these horses hadn’t been mentioned or seen during her two months of living there, they probably weren’t so much pets as…dinner. I’d like to say there was a happy ending to that story, and we freed the horses in some kind of hilarious, climactic sequence involving clever misdirection, a series of increasingly outlandish disguises, and a Miley Cyrus song about girl power, but as we are in the Peace Corps and not a live-action Disney film, that is not so much what happened.

Besides my weird cereal fantasies, I guess the most important news from the last week is that winter has officially arrived. We got our first snow two days ago—it happened during the night, so I didn’t realize it until I was halfway to the outhouse and thought, “I know I don’t have my contacts in, but is the world usually so…fluffy?” It was really pretty—for a couple of hours. Then the sun came out, and Zhetisay became a mud wrestling arena, without any of the fun parts (which really just leaves the mud). We don’t have any sewers, and sidewalks, if they exist, usually run out after twenty or so feet, so the ground more or less liquefies whenever there’s a storm. I can’t decide which is worse—ice or mud—when it comes to slipping, though I kind of feel like the psychological stakes are higher with mud. I’ve taken plenty of spills on the ice, but if I fell into one of these giant, trash and animal feces-filled mud puddles—especially if it was a Monday, and a whole week to get through before my next banya—the emotional damage might be severe. (Maybe the mud here has some kind of healing properties, though—a Kazakhstani mud bath could be yet another service included as part of my post-Peace Corps banya business…) My school is only five minutes away, but with the newly-formed mud rivers blocking my path, getting there is a bit of an adventure. Walking anywhere in Zhetysai really is, though, since roads are not so much rules as suggestions here. You may think, “Oh hey, I’m safe from those speeding cars because I am not on the pavement and am in fact several dozen feet from where the pavement ends,” but you would be wrong about that. Unless you are actually inside a building—preferably a solid iron one—you’re in probably in danger. This is not a phenomenon particular to my site, however: even in Almaty, where there are, allegedly, real and working pedestrian crosswalks, you will find yourself playing the most stressful game of Frogger ever any time you try to get across the street, even if you have legit right-of-way. That little flashing green walking man will not protect you. My strategy is to wait until a bunch of other people are crossing and use them as human shields—I kind of doubt this would be effective were a car really to plow into us, but at least it keeps me from seeing how close to death we’re coming and going into some kind of deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.

So, in summation: the Peace Corps is a two-year pregnancy; I’m already shipping home mud for use in my McBanya franchises; and there's a good chance I'll sacrifice you to the gods of traffic if you cross the road with me--less because I’m concerned for my own survival, and more because I really hate to lose at Frogger.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

turkey day, k-style

Here’s the thing: the Peace Corps is kind of hardcore. You may have already figured this out based on the fact that it’s called the Peace “Corps,” and not the Peace “Glee Club,” or the Peace “Naked Water Slide Fun Collective.” (The medical screening for the Peace Naked Water Slide Fun Collective is, incidentally, even more intensive than the one for the Peace Corps--with good reason, I guess). Theoretically, I knew the Peace Corps would be intense, but it wasn’t until my first few weeks at my new site, when I’d gone ten days without banya-ing, a month without doing laundry, and a month totally without running water, that I realized—and smelled—what “intense” truly is. My town has some definite upsides—you can actually get fruit and vegetables year-round here, which means I won’t be on the beets, potato, and vodka diet that most people survive on in the winter, and the winter itself will be pretty mild, compared with the Siberian Christmas a lot of other volunteers are facing—but it’s apparently one of the rougher sites in the country. It’s at the southernmost tip of what is known as “the Texas of Kazakhstan” (which is not necessarily a name that inspires confidence) and its economy relies pretty heavily around the cotton industry, which in turn relies pretty heavily on child labor and illegal immigration. I definitely went through a second wave of culture shock during my first few weeks here, and while I’m sure there will be continuing ripples (and possibly tsunamis) of “Seriously, Kazakhstan? Seriously?” throughout my service, I’ve feeling more settled in and at ease here now. I have a very chill host family, and my counterpart (the local teacher I’ll be working with over the next two years) is amazing, and has been a huge help with my adjustment—and my bazaar shopping trips. So now that I’m armed with a shiny, shiny teacher’s purse, shiny, shiny teacher’s boots, and a stylish, light blue swine flu mask, I feel more like a true Kazakhstani schoolteacher than ever. (I’m going to guess that no Kazakhstani schoolteacher has ever rapped 2pac’s “Changes” for her 9 a.m. class before, though—I’m not sure if that’s the Peace Corps’ precise vision of a cultural ambassador, but I keep it real).

This past week has been pretty sweet—not just because I finally got to do laundry, though that has certainly improved my mood (and the mood of everyone I come into contact with). Thursday was, of course, Thanksgiving, which didn’t mean too much for me on the actual day—I mostly made a lot of mournful Facebook posts, telling my friends and family to gorge themselves with extra zestful abandon for me—but the weekend was excellent. Friday was Kurban Ait, a Muslim holiday wherein people make awkward visits to all of their extended family members and devour huge amounts of unhealthy food (sound familiar, anyone?). I went out Thursday night to help my host brother deliver freshly baked bread to our neighbors—which mostly involved me lurking behind him in unlit apartment building hallways while he balanced a huge platter of bread, so “help” might be too strong a word. You’re supposed to distribute seven loaves to friends on the eve of the holiday, then visit seven different tables during the three days of Kurban Ait. My host family didn’t really go in for the guesting, though—they mostly just napped, watched TV, and ate cake at home, which is my kind of party.

Saturday morning I went to Shymkent to celebrate Thanksgiving with the other volunteers in the South Kazakhstan oblast. This involved a three-hour ride in a packed minivan, which made me sort of nostalgic for the Thanksgivings of yore, when my family would make the eighteen-hour trip to Massachusetts in our beloved Chevy Astro. Granted, the person I was squashed next to during those trips was usually my four-year-old sister, and not a large, sweaty Kazakh man with a chest cold, but I’ve become adept at replacing my current reality with fond memories from the States whenever necessary. (Though sometimes I just replace it with mental reruns of Pee Wee’s Playhouse—I think it freaks my students out a little when I start screaming because they’ve said the secret word, but they probably just write it off as another weird American thing).

It was pouring rain when I got to the city, so I pulled on my electric blue, oversized raincoat—which may be practical, but is about the most inconspicuous thing you can wear in Kazakhstan, where raincoats are either black, gray, or umbrellas. Combined with my giant Land’s End backpack and a general sense of confusion, I embodied pretty much every one of the Peace Corps’ anecdotes about volunteers who got into some kind of horrible, horrible trouble by standing out as foreigners, but the raincoat did help another volunteer locate me from across four lanes of traffic and a crowded sidewalk—and kept me extremely dry—so I guess it served its purpose. Because of the rain, I ended up spending most of the weekend hanging out at another volunteer’s apartment—which, because it was such a sweet place, was totally fine with me. I’m not even going to mention the toilet and shower (I guess I just did, but I’m going to stop there, because I could wax poetic about those for quite awhile), but the apartment was spacious, comfy, and filled with dance music and Americans capable of making ridiculously delicious food. If you had given me one wish, two weeks again, that might have been precisely what I would have asked for (well, that and some kind of odor-repellent reptilian skin, so I could just slough it when it got dirty and never have to wear clothes again. I guess the first wish was slightly more manageable…) We had a kind of Thanksgiving picnic on the living room floor, though I’ve definitely never been to a picnic this bountiful or artfully arranged in my life. There was a real turkey, mashed potatoes, salad (with actual lettuce and without mayonnaise—I’d forgotten such a thing could be), corn, Stove Top stuffing, homemade cornbread, fresh salsa, and two apple and one pumpkin pies with delectably artificial whipped cream. Needless to say, we pretty much went into a coma after dinner—by 8 o’clock, we were all slumped over the couches and floor, groaning in pain and satisfaction, and it took a couple of hours before we had the energy to do much but watch Robert Pattison reenact Britney Spears’ infamously misadvised VMA routine. Oh, yes—I forgot to mention that it was also a costume party, since we hadn’t all gotten to celebrate Halloween together: my costume was pretty much “these are my last semi-clean clothes,” but some people went all out. We had a Judy Funny (if you’re not a child of the 90s, you’re probably confused right now—but if you are, let me tell you, this costume was an inspired time warp), a Mexican wrestler, a Peace Corps Thailand volunteer (which involved wearing a sarong and complaining a lot about how hard it is to get sunburns on the beach while drinking Mai Tais every day), and a creepily accurate Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen (minus that distilled-sweat-of-homeless-people-scent Robert Pattinson apparently has from his weird refusal to wash—hey, he’d probably do really well in the Peace Corps).

When I roused myself the next day, I found that a bunch of people were already engaged in making yet another mouth-watering meal—I’m sort of glad I don’t live closer to the Shymkent volunteers, since I think I’d soon weigh around 400 pounds and they’d eventually figure out I can’t make anything more complicated than an omelette (and, despite the fact that I successfully translated the recipe into Kazakh for my language test, not a very good omelette). For breakfast, we had expertly prepared French toast and fancy home fries—the fact that there had been a “Top Chef” marathon the night before influenced the preparation of both dishes, to our benefit. We officially kicked off the Christmas season by listening to some X-Mas music, then Joe (whose apartment we were in) showed me the Megacenter, Shymkent’s mall (which is way nicer than both malls in my hometown, by the way—though that’s not hard to pull off). He sent Tes (the other volunteer from my site) and I on our way with two leftover packs of cheap local crack muffins, which we wolfed down while attempting to find any comfortable position in which to endure the insanely bumpy ride home in the backseat of the van. That position, I quickly realized, does not exist, but I don’t think the inconvenience of the commute is going to stop me from visting Shymkent as often as humanly possible. I know at the end of two years, when I’ve stopped regretting the fact that I didn’t pass the final medical screening for the Peace Naked Water Slide Fun Collective (damn my chlorine allergy!), I’ll be glad I ended up with an authentic Peace Corps experience, but right now I’m just grateful that wireless internet, outdoor heated swimming pools, and large, friendly groups of Americans exist somewhere within a four-hour radius of my current location.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

coping mechanisms (or how i learned to stop worrying and love the squat)

So I’ve been here nearly three months, and while there aremany things I’m thrilled to have left behind in the States (student loans, Fox News, the Jonas Brothers), there are a few key elements of American life that I’m seriously missing. But the Peace Corps Kazakhstan experience is, I guess, all about realizing there are two sides to every tenge—for every thing I’m missing about the U.S., there’s usually a Kazakhstani equivalent or substitute with its own perks.

What I miss: Coffee. Instant coffee is to real coffee as Lady Gaga is to Freddie Mercury—it’s an abominable insult. I gave it a shot during some of those early mornings in Pre-Service training, but I basically had to turn it into mud-colored sugar milk to choke it down. Naturally, one of my favorite places in Almaty is 4A Coffee, where not only can you get actual coffee (and the most deliciously melt-y hot chocolate you will ever taste), you can order it in English and play Scrabble while listening to Elton John and chatting with fellow ex-pats. I’d almost consider making the two-hour taxi and twelve-hour train ride back there for one of their chocolate chip mocchachinos, but there's supposedly pretty decent coffee in Shymkent, so I should probably check that out first.

What I’ve Got: Tea. I’ve gotten to the point where, if I don’t have my 6-8 cups of tea a day, I feel slightly unwell—just as my host mom told me I would during training. There's nothing quite as comforting as a hot cup of tea, especially with bread, jam, and a bowl of candy and cookies, which is pretty much how it’s always served here. During training, I drank black tea with the fresh milk from our cow (a mildly terrifying creature that would often block my path and stare me down during early-morning trips to the outhouse), but people in Zhetysai mostly drink green tea, of which I’m a much bigger fan.
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What I Miss: Grocery stores. All the bourgy, Whole Foods-worthy items on my weekly shopping list—like almond butter, free-range chicken, and Maine blueberry jam—are, not surprisingly, not so much findable here (at least, not in a readymade form). And things like expiration dates, grocery carts, and clearly marked prices do, I find, kind of make my shopping trips easier.

What I’ve Got: The bazaar. The bazaar is like your local farmer’s market on some high-grade crack. It’s loud, sprawling, and filled with pretty much anything you could ever want, if you’re willing to seek it out and haggle for it. Someone with ambition could, technically, obtain all the items mentioned above—you can make almond butter with a meat grinder, and you can buy live birds for later consumption, so you could guarantee your meat was free-range. Unless Maine has a way bigger export market than I realized, the jam might be harder to make, but you don’t really need it, since you can find pretty much any other kind of homemade jam—raspberry, strawberry, apricot—on most kitchen tables here.

What I Miss: Toilets. ‘Nuff said.

What I’ve Got: Squat toilets. Not actually the worst thing in the world. I mean, you’re getting a workout, you’re not wasting the three gallons of water you would with flushing, and…no, that’s pretty much all I can come up with. However, I actually ended up choosing a family with a squat toilet over a family with a real, indoor toilet—I sometimes regret this choice when it’s raining/freezing/3 a.m., but it’s tolerable.

What I Miss: Showers. Convenient, quick, and luxurious. Definitely missing being able to hop into the shower whenever I want and get clean in 15 minutes or less—Herbal Essences commercials now fill me with envious rage.

What I’ve Got: The banya. The banya is awesome. It might be more awesome if used more than once or twice a week, but since it actually seems to get you cleaner than the shower, you don’t need to use it quite as often. It's refreshing and, as I'm told every time I use it, extremely good for you. My host dad in training wanted me and another volunteer to start a business building banyas in the States--I'm not sure we could convince Americans to give up their showers, but there might be some kind of luxury, home sauna market.

What I Miss: Bookshops, indie cinemas, Mexican restaurants, Thai restaurants, Japanese restaurants, et cetera. There are no hipster hotspots in Zhetysai, though you can find a lot of this stuff in Almaty. Another slightly disorienting expat hangout in Almaty is the Guinness Bar, where you can drink creamy, creamy Bailey’s, listen to a Kazakh cover band sing Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley hits, and generally wonder if you've stumbled out of Kazakhstan and into some kind of parallel universe.

What I’ve Got: Creative forms of entertainment. My training took place in a village, where a big day out basically consisted of visiting every single magazine in town (we had six), ogling the baby donkey behind school for a while, and making conversation with this one kid on a bike who always followed us home and wanted to talk about sharks. Zhetysai definitely has more to offer—there are a bunch of cafés, a movie theater (though it’s run by the university and only shows a new movie ever few months), a bazaar, a theater, plenty of shops, a few Internet cafés, and a couple of dance clubs. Compared to my training village, it’s New York City—or at least...Pittsburgh.