This Week We Started Jumping Fires

The biggest holiday in Azerbaijan is called Novruz. It is coming up on the 21st of March, so I'll write more about that when it actually happens (although I get told about it pretty much every day by just about every person in the village, so I think by now I could narrate you the whole day without having experienced it), but leading up to the holiday we have 4 weekly mini-holidays. Every Tuesday starting this week, we get to eat lots of sweets and desserts and all that normal holiday stuff, but we also get to jump over bonfires. Yep, that's right, I actually jumped over a fire three times the other night (I don't know why 3, but it has to be in sets of 3 they told me) and I didn't fall, light myself on fire, burn myself, or any other assorted disasters you might be envisioning knowing my history of being extremely coordinated. Thank you, I know, I'm incredibly impressive. This week's holiday was also our neighbor's birthday, so I don't know how typical it was of the pre-holidays, but I spent the night sitting with him and about 10 other young guys in their 20's while they drank vodka shots and told me to stop speaking English to my friend Beth (who ended up celebrating the holiday at my house because the marşrutka - van, bringing us from town broke down on the road so my students' father saw us walking down the road, took pity on us, gave us each an orange for the holiday, and brought us to my house, where the bonfire was already blazing, so she just stuck around and showed me up by jumping the fire before me - and when it was blazing much stronger than when I jumped haha). Every one of these Tuesdays is devoted to a different element: water, fire, air, and earth, in that order. I'm not sure how that changes the holiday though, because there wasn't anything water-y about the other night. I'll have to investigate this further. Good thing I have 4 weeks of holidays!

I've been realizing recently that I drink a lot of çay (pronounced the same as chai but in Azerbaijan that is just the word for any tea). And I mean a lot. For a while I was able to convince myself that while some days I certainly imbibed an excessive amount, there HAD to be days when I didn't have any, so it evened out. But then I tried to think of days when I didn't drink any...and I couldn't think of any. So I started keeping track of how much çay I have (yeah, I made a list, it was a very me thing to do I know). Get this - over the course of 7 days:
Maximum cups in a day: 9
Minimum cups in a day: 3
Average daily cups: 5.4
It was a very scientific study of course, and now I've officially concluded that I'm constantly hopped up on çay and I will eventually drink myself to death. Stage and intervention if you will, because even though I have realized how much I am drinking, it hasn't even slowed me down...I've even started craving the stuff, which is just strange because in the states I never drank coffee and only drank tea when I was sick, so this is really new for me.

Moment of the week: Taking a shower. Put a ton of shampoo in my hair. The motor for the water breaks...which means no more water from the shower. Please imagine me standing in my towel, my hair completely sudsy, yelling out the door of the hamam (shower building/room) across the yard to the house for someone to come and rescue me. And please know that my yard is just off the village center where there is a computer club where all the young boys of the town hang out...and they like to stand outside. I don't know that they saw me, but I can tell you there is a decent chance they heard me yelling and glanced over. My mom and sister eventually heard me (when I got up the guts to yell loud enough) and, after they laughed at me, gave me two buckets of water to finish my shower. Luckily it wasn't a very cold day, so standing around waiting to finish showering wasn't the hell it could have been!

I Love Letters!

I got a letter this week, and I think it's a great example of the interesting postal situation I find myself in. For one thing, it's a joke around my village that the post office didn't have to work until I arrived. I guess no one else has a mom in America who likes to send them fluoride mouthwash and hand sanitizer. Go figure. Maybe that also explains the prevalence of gold teeth. Anyway, now that the post office has sprung to life, and I mean that in the sense of a sluggish existence, I can get letters and packages all the way from that distant land called America brought straight to my village center! It's actually really great when I think about it, especially because a lot of other volunteers have to go into the cities to get their things. But perhaps my favorite part of the process is how I find out that I have mail. It's usually something like a student coming to my classroom, interrupting my class, asking me to come into the hall, and telling me that there is something for me at the post office. It's a very urgent process, you see. As the letter has already taken a million years traveling to me, those extra seconds matter! After that though, it's a game of cat and mouse between the postal staff and me.I think they quickly dead bolt the door to the building whenever they think I might be coming. Even the meat business that someone runs from the post office suddenly disappears (and yes, I mean like a butcher shop...well just a table of meat...in the post office...because "mail" and "meat" both start with m? I don't know). SO this particular letter was from the ever wonderful Heather. It was a birthday card. For those of you who have forgotten in my prolonged absence, my birthday is December 27th. Now, I will admit that Heather was a bit late in mailing it, as it was sent out on January 4th, but that doesn't really change the fact that it came into my possession on the 17th of February, over 6 weeks later haha. But, always trying to look for the bright side, I just thought it was great that I could basically have a second birthday! Because really, opening the card and seeing that it said Happy Birthday, even I took a second to ask myself when my birthday is! Now, you may be reading this and thinking "well then I'm never going to send you anything as it's going to take so long to reach you that it'll be outdated," but to add to your confusion, and mine, about how this system works, you should know that on the 9th of February I received a Valentine's Day card from my mom...sent from the same state as Heather's card, but sent 18 days after Heather's. Hmm. And then there is the other mystery that when my mom decides to send me a big box of goodies, those can miraculously make the journey faster than any small envelopes. The only thing I can think of is that the postal gods here in Azerbaijan are real jokesters who like to play games with my mail. So, in conclusions, I think you should all get out there and see if you are in the favor of the Azerbaijani postal gods. I promise to always write back, so you can join in the fun of seeing how long this process really takes! Plus (added bonus!) I'll put your letter on my wall of mail and then you'll be famous here in my village because not only does the whole village seem to know when a letter arrives for me, but they afterward find out who it was from and all visitors to my room ask who wrote each card (Heather, your card with the shoes on it is a big hit, as is yours Jane with the cakes). If you want to be guilt tripped into writing to me, you should know that at one point my sisters laughed ab me because they said that my friends don't love me since the majority of the cards are from my mom (don't worry Mom, I still love everything you send me, keep it coming!). Clearly this means you guys need to help me out, my reputation is suffering. My family also has a tendency to compare people's handwriting, probably because they can't actually read what any of it says, so make sure you write neatly! Happy writing!

My mail wall. If you don't see your letter, the postal system either really hates you and it never arrived, or you really hate me and you never sent one haha.

A Winter Wonderland

Fountain Square in the snow!

A view from the train

So I was sitting here, thinking to myself that my life is boring and I have nothing to write about...and then I realized that I mean, well for one, I live in Azerbaijan - how is that not always exciting? And two, I just spent my weekend in Baku!

I was coming into town because we had a meeting this weekend about our summer camp for girls. The meeting was supposed to be on Friday afternoon, so those of us from Tovuz jumped on the Thursday night train. Now, usually the night train takes 12 hours, which is already long for the fact that you are only going about 250 miles, but we won't get into that. Instead, we'll talk about the fact that this time, the ride took 20 hours! It started snowing during the night and that meant that instead of arriving at 9:30AM, we spent the day just stopped in the middle of nowhere! And then we'd go a bit further...and stop again. There were a bunch of us traveling together and between a group of 5 of us I think we had only 2 apples, 2 packs of peanut butter crackers, a package of twizzlers, and 10 peanut butter patty Girl Scout cookies. I'm just saying, we were a bit hungry. And a bit bored. And maybe you are saying to yourself that we should have been more prepared, but usually you arrive bright and early in the morning with just a bit of hunger that makes you even more excited to run right over to some coffee shop and to begin to enjoy the wonders of Baku! But no. We didn't arrive, which meant no wonders.

We eventually made it into Baku, the meeting having been canceled because no one was there for it. The roads were treacherous because the snow was just melting and then freezing, so we were told we weren't allowed to go anywhere outside the city. I've managed not to fall as I've run around town all weekend (I know you're impressed), but I can tell you that many people have not been so lucky and we've had a number of people wipe out (including my sitemate Beth who, while we were literally just standing and talking while waiting for a bus, suddenly just disappeared as she fell on her butt!). I also have to say that I wrote this sentence about not falling and then went outside to the store and had my closest call all weekend, go me.

I got to watch the Superbowl! We all went over the Hyatt, which is way too expensive for us to actually stay there, but great for us to use as our late night football watching spot (and I mean late, kickoff for us was 3:30AM...I got home just before 7 haha). I was cheering for the Saints, so I really enjoyed the game, despite the extreme exhaustion.

Well, I'm going to be getting on the night train home in only about an hour now (my concentration today is just gone, maybe it's the lack of sleep, but this post has taken me forever to write!). Let's hope this one isn't another 20 hours...it did just start to snow. Again.

I'm going to add some pictures to this post when I get back to site, so check back to see the pretty, pretty snow!