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!