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.