The Easter Bunny Found Azerbaijan!

Ok, so maybe this "Easter Bunny" was a bit more like me running around my house in the middle of the night hiding Easter eggs my mom sent to me, but I think it still counts. My mom was great an sent me all kinds of Easter stuff, so I was able to create my typical Easter morning (only this time I wasn’t the one running around trying to find the East eggs...I felt really old an kind of like a mom hiding them myself I won’t lie). My host family was really excited about it. I had been telling them for days that Sunday morning I would have a surprise and they were not disappointed. First they found the Easter eggs I had hid around the dining room sort of room in our house. This was hilarious as they had never done it before and at first didn’t know how to tactically accomplish the task of stealing eggs out of their sisters hands, something my family has been training me for since before I can remember (I’ll tell you, Kim can be pretty ruthless, Naima is more sneaky, and then there’s Little Jimmy who we try to be nice older sisters too...but we’re a bit competitive about Easter egg hunts). In the end, of the 57 eggs I hid, my little host sister Gülnar came away the sure winner with 27 eggs, kicking her sisters butts. And she was very proud of this fact. I also even hid 3 eggs with qəpik (the Azerbaijani coins) like my mom does with quarters (well, she hides more than 3 eggs with money, but I’m on a volunteer salary here). Of course Gülnar found 2 of them and Raminə found none haha. I figure I did my part, 3 sisters, 3 money eggs. It’s their job to do the finding! Then after the hunt was over (they needed a little help at the end, but we got it done), we went to my room where I had put down trails of jellybeans for each of them like my mom always does leading to a communal Easter basket (read Easter box, I had no basket). Over breakfast they sampled the various forms of Easter candies and are really big fans of the M&M peanuts and regular M&Ms as well. People also seem to really like jellybeans, and I say people because basically everyone who has come to our house the past few days has been allowed to taste test with their çay. Although we have yet to use the Easter egg dyeing kit my mom sent me, we did build the foam bunnies/chicks/etc that she sent and our house is now festively decorated, so I think I have successfully shared Easter.

The other day, because the weather was really beautiful, we took a drive down to the Kur River. Even though it is only like a half an hour drive (and only that long because the roads are bad), I had never been out there yet. It is farther along the road that I typically use when I go out for a walk though, so I have been out of the village in that direction. In fact, I found out that if I had gone only about a minute farther on my longest walks, I would have seen the water, albeit from a distance. The Kur was really pretty and I was happy that I went, seeing as I was exhausted and considered staying home to nap. We just walked around and took a whole bunch of pictures and my sisters played a bit with a ball that they brought...until it went into the river and we had to say goodbye to it (they actually turned to me and were like “Jess!” and pointed as though I could do something like jump down the 3 ft bank into the swiftly moving current and retrieve the ball. I’m good, but I’m not that good haha). So now my new goal is to take a day with Beth (my closest sitemate) to walk all the way to the river and have a picnic. Beth and I also found a road we like better for walking the day after my trip to the Kur, so I don’t know which road I’ll want to use for my day long excursion, we’ll see.