A Very M-Azeri Christmas and a Happy Bak-New Year

I know, my title for this post is just so clever I have to congratulate myself on it to start haha.

I spent Christmas at my site in Tovuz. I sewed stockings for myself and everyone in my host family, so we hung those up the night before Christmas next to our New Years tree which we put up early so it could also be my Christmas tree. Explaining the concept of stockings is difficult, I'm just going to throw that out there. I told my family that Santa was going to come and fill them while we slept, but, as I said in my last post, Santa doesn't do that stuff here. Everyone kept telling me basically that's nice, but since he's not going to come, what happens? My neighbor even said to me "But what if Santa died?" I think my heart stopped on that one and I was like oh my god you just killed Christmas! No matter how many times I told them that I would play Santa and fill the stockings (which at one point I think my mother thought I was going to actually dress up like Santa haha), they wouldn't let it go and wanted to put stuff in too and were very concerned that you wouldn't know who gave you what and that you would see what people are giving you. Finally, I told them that I wasn't going to open my stocking because why would I put presents in for myself, so they could safely put their presents in without worrying that I would see. But the best part was that one of my co-English teachers really wanted to put something in my stocking too, so she got driven over to my house at like 10:30 at night so she could put a pair of socks in my stocking. Incidentally, I think socks are a really big gift item around here because I have received like 4 pairs of socks from Azeris. Either that or I just look like I have cold feet.

After we opened our stockings in the morning, my family all went off to school while I stayed home and made stewed apples to bring to another volunteer's house where everyone from nearby was getting together for Christmas. But before I could go over there, I had to stop by the school because my students had a surprise for me. They gave me a gigantic cake and wouldn't eat any of it! I had to carry it home and then to the other volunteer's house and let me tell you, that thing was heavy. My arms were literally sore the next day from the effort! But it was so sweet of my students and all the other volunteers were really impressed with how great my kids are.

At our volunteer party, we sat around and cooked and ate food all day. Our spread included cookies, fruit, candy, deviled eggs, potato salad, and jambalaya. Not really what I usually eat for Christmas, but it was really good. It was nice to see everyone and be with other Americans for Christmas (so they won't ask questions like what will happen if Santa dies haha).

The day after Christmas was my birthday party (my real birthday is a religious holiday here that marks a day when a lot of people were killed so it wasn't really the best day for a party). My party was about 7 hours of a constant stream of guests coming and eating with me. Let me tell you, I ate an awful lot of dolma that day. My mother also baked me a cake and I used the exploding candle that Mike gave me, which made the evening way more exciting! I also scored some really qəşənq (one of my favorite Azeri words that can mean everything from nice to beautiful to tasty but is really frequently used to call something cool, and frequently that cool thing is bedazzled in some way) presents from people in my community. It was really sweet of them and now I have a ton of little statues/figurines to put around my room!

Then came New Years for which I traveled down to Baku to meet up with a ton of other Peace Corps volunteers. My throat hurts and one night I almost froze to death sleeping on a really disgusting floor in a cheap hotel, but it was so worth it. This little vacation was just what I needed! I got to eat food like McDonalds (yes, we have 3 McDonalds in Baku) and nachos and we celebrated at this Irish pub place. And I got to see all my friends, which was great because after seeing so many of them every day during training, to now be at site without them is sad. And I got to meet a lot more of the AZ6's (the group of volunteers that swore in last year).

Alright, that's all I've got for now. In a few hours I'm going to take the night train back up to Tovuz. On my night train down, I ended up in a different compartment than all my friends and woke up to have a creepy guy sitting on the bed across from me staring at me. Nice. But a conductor came along and gave him an earful about how he shouldn't be sitting there and made him go away, so no harm done! So here's hoping that this night will be creeper free!