Happy Thanksgiving!!

What I wouldn’t give to be eating turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie today instead of Plov. Nothing against plov, of course, it’s actually one of my favorite foods here – it’s just not Thanksgiving food. I hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful day of family togetherness. And football – oh, how I miss football….


Tomorrow we are off school for the Muslim holiday –Kyrman Ait (or at least that is what it is called in Russian).Four of us are heading to Naryn, which my trusty guidebook calls the coldest city in Kyrgyzstan. I’m pretty excited and will be packing all of my long-johns. One of our coolest teachers’ parents live there and we are going to celebrate the holiday with them. I’m hoping to see a goat slaughtering, but my teacher keeps laughing when I ask about it and asking how I can want to see a goat die. But it’s cultural – might as well get see as much of the Muslim traditions as possible, as I’m pretty sure there will be no ritual goat slaughtering in our church back home in the near future.

Talking club at the pub last night was great – we ended up talking yesterday from 4pm-9pm all in Russian. I even explained the meaning of Thanksgiving as I was the token American in attendance. I was pretty impressed at my ability to follow and participate in conversations for hours.

Enjoy the holiday weekend! I’ll take lots of pictures this weekend and get them up next week.

TGIW. (Thank Goodness it’s Wednesday).

As I’ve mentioned before, Wednesdays are our day off from class (with the exception of an “optional” – aka: not optional – talking class at 4pm). I live for Wednesdays. Monday and Tuesday were disasters in school. On Monday the heaters were cranked up so high thanks to government kindness that I couldn’t concentrate on my first 2 hours of lessons. My teacher rewarded my lack of enthusiasm with an unprecedented amount of homework – 2 essays, a long grammar exercise (and it isn’t even grammar class!), and memorizing about 25 new words. My grammar class greeted me with superlative adjectives – which I neither understand nor really care to at this time. Honestly, when you start adding a prefix and a suffix to an adjective, plus “really” before it – I think you need some perspective on how great you think that something is. It probably isn’t.


And while I’m on adjectives (such an exciting topic) – the only one you really need to learn here is “clean”. They say it about absolutely everything – clean culture, clean food, clean city. It isn’t. Perhaps they are being ironic – I know we are when we say it. (They aren’t.)

I finished Monday with my new conversation teacher. My last one was horrible and I had to ask to change teachers one week before I was supposed to. She was fired. And before you go thinking I’m mean – she was new, a lot of teachers go through trial periods and are fired quickly here, and she taught me things incorrectly and would argue with me when I pointed out really large mistakes. Though I’m afraid teachers won’t want to teach me conversation – as technically I haven’t seen my first conversation teacher since I stopped having lessons with her (also a terrible teacher). Though now they’ve given me a veteran teacher and she’s great – however, she also gave me an essay to write! So Monday I had 3 essays, 4 grammar exercises, and new words to memorize.

And I managed to do all of it (very surprisingly). However, after going through all my homework with my morning teacher, she was quite perturbed that I did not memorize the reading on top of the other homework and kept bringing that up in class as if I somehow slacked off by only writing 2 essays plus her other homework. So I started the day in a bit of a bad mood. Plus she tore apart my essay on vacuuming (it was thrilling…I’m going for a Pulitzer) on the fact that apparently in Russian “I” cannot vacuum. Only “he or she” can vacuum. Honestly – which such a ridiculous rule, one would think you’d mention it before I do the essay on vacuuming.

When I mentioned the vacuuming debacle to another student he said that he had a whole page in a grammar book dedicated to the controversy over saying “I vacuum”. It is epic apparently, and I have reason to believe at least one major civil war was begun over the issue (it has now fizzled into low-intensity civil conflict). My teacher simply explained that “it sounds weird” to say I vacuum. So instead, I am supposed to say “I do vacuum cleaner”. She was right – much less weird to say that….

So after struggling through 2 days of class, it is finally Wednesday…thank goodness. My only major plan today is to trek up to the big grocery store in town and get another jar of peanut butter (why yes, it is worth 1.5 hours of walking). Then we have our talking class at 4pm and somehow the guys in the advanced talking class at 5:30 arranged for their class to be at the pub tonight. So we are all going to the pub for another round of class, but with the added benefit of beer.

Pictures!!

I've finally uploaded pictures to the blogs for: 10/20, 10/21, 10/24, 10/25, 10/30, 10/31, 11/1.

Haven't taken many other pictures, but we'll be traveling again next weekend so i'll get more then.

Enjoy :)

Quick Week

Not much to report this week. The week was mostly filled with school and studying and went by quickly. I’ve learned an incredible amount of Russian, but it’s exhausting – I’m looking forward to Christmas break!


We went to the pizza place in the little mall by our house for dinner last Sunday, which at night has a DJ and is apparently the place to be and be seen. There are tons of nightclubs around here, so one wouldn’t think that going to the pizza place in the food court would be so cool (it isn’t). But the funniest part of the night was that the DJ had re-mixed Obama speeches to techno music. They will put anything to a techno beat here. It was hilarious listening to “Yes we Can”.

The girls and I went back to the Banya (Russian baths) yesterday – very relaxing. We met this nice Kyrgyz lady who is the principle of the International School here and gave our friend quite the beating with a birch branch.

In weather news, it has turned warmer again. Regardless, the radiators in our rooms are still on full blast and will be for the whole season, as there is no way to regulate them. So we all have our windows open because our bedrooms are oppressively hot. Yay communism.

Me and a friend may try to go to the American pub in town later today to catch some football. They are kinda pricey but I’ve heard the food is amazing. Real hamburgers and onion rings – yummy :)

Then it’s back to making more flashcards – fun…..

What a weekend.

Well in true Kyrgyz fashion, i'm on another computer that won't let me upload the Word format of entries I write on my home computer. So I can't upload the absolutely ridiculous events of Friday night. But I can sum it all up: we went out with locals and the English teachers, the night deteriorated into drunken douchebaggery, and my 3 close friends and I ended up being the sober ones that had to cover a large chunk of the bill and talk to the cops. I was displeased. Greatly.

I have no idea what it is about some men (particularly Kyrgyz men) that feel the need to get completely wasted, then become agressive, start fights, and break things. One of the Kyrgyz guys tried to get handsy with me and i knocked him across the room (it felt great too!). And one of the English teachers got his hand really cut up by broken glass and had to go to the hospital (though i've since found out that he actually started the fight - so no sympathy there).

But in the end, you can really judge the character of the people I prefer to associate with by how we acted. I mainly hang out with 3 other people. One of the guys took the teacher to the hospital, and me and the other 2 had to talk to the cops after everyone actally involved in the fight ran away. I wasn't really afraid of talking with the cops - I was sober and the staff clearly saw that we were the ones trying to break up the fight. We talked about the night yesterday and all agreed that we felt like the parents of the group and also agreed that we would not be hanging out with that group again. Good grief.

So now i'm off to a marathon of vocab studying! woohoo!

11/13 Friday – Blog goes live (hopefully)

So today I’m finally getting my entries off my computer and onto a blog for everyone to enjoy. I know it has taken a few weeks but the internet here is pretty sparse and slow. I’ve been trying to upload for a week, but the city keeps having internet blackouts any chance I get to head to the cafe. And there is that whole going to school for an obscene amount of time every day. And the flu. Feel free to make up your own Kyrgyz excuse and write it in – it can be like an at-home version of the game. Winner gets all the fatty mutton he/she can eat!

11/9 – Sneg!! (Snow!!)

Today is the first day of snow for the season – it is beautiful :) We’ve all been waiting impatiently for snow to come for one very important reason – we want the government to turn on the heating in the city. Apparently in communist wisdom, the central government has to come turn the heat on in our buildings. Rumor had it that it would be Nov 1st, but they decreed it to be too warm and that we would wait until snow came. Snow is here – I want some heat in my bedroom!! But alas – no word on when the government will turn our radiators on – local teachers think it will be awhile still. So my room is probably in the 50s and the classes are just as cold. My sleeping bag is very warm and I have a hot water bottle – but that doesn’t help in getting out of bed in the mornings! Painful I tell you.