Novruz Holiday Finally Arrives

I feel like I have to start out by talking about Novruz as I built it up for weeks talking about the pre-holidays, but honestly there isn't much to say that I didn't say already about the pre-holidays (they are kind of like spoilers because you do everything before the main event...). We spent days cooking food and baking sweets like I said. Then we had our bonfire and my sisters and I did our jumping. We went inside for our big meal that we'd slaved over, except that my sisters were really excited to get to the party our street was throwing, so they wolfed down their food and scampered off. This left my mother and I sitting and eating alone, until our local shopkeeper came over and then my host grandmother stopped by. So I stayed with them and helped my mom serve food, pour çay, and slice fruit. I also got to give sweets to the little kids that came by for their hat throwing (although, these kids just held out bags for me to put stuff in, more like Halloween, so I don't know, maybe if you wait a week and don't do your trick-or-treating on the pre-holiday you don't have to let them put food in your hat? And can get it in a more "normal" way...like in a plastic bag?). I did eventually make it to the party in the street where I did a bit of dancing, but not much. The neighbors had hired someone to video tape the party (they do this for all Azeri weddings and big parties) so that they can have a keepsake. I'm really not a big fan of this because Americans are apparently really interesting for these cameramen and if I do anything remotely worth watching, they don't take the camera off me. Dancing is certainly considered something remotely worth watching. It makes dancing really awkward. (Heather - fyi it's really hard for me to even follow my own dancing advice in these situations haha)

Having a long vacation from school, I took one trip away from site and went to Ağdaş for my friend Beca's birthday. It was really nice to see everyone, especially because some of the people from my training language cluster I haven't really seen since December when we moved out of Ceyranbatan. And I think that a lot of the construction that has been happening on the one main road that I have to use to go anywhere is getting better, because the trip went surprisingly quickly. A good sign!

We are now back in school and I have started new conversation clubs. I decided that I would restructure my clubs after Novruz because before I just let any students come who wanted to and, as a result, I was teaching 10 clubs a week, which is way too much. I've downsized to 6, assigning students to groups based on their level and their willingness to try to speak English etc, so I'm hoping that will work well. I've also started having 2 basically office hours a week so that any student who wants to come and ask me questions, speak to me in English, use my Azeri-English dictionaries, etc can come. I think it is going to devolve into me just playing games with students though, and I'm pretty ok with that.

I've also been especially busy this week because tomorrow is an English writing competition put on by Peace Corps Volunteers in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. There are prizes for the best compositions at the regional, national, and international level. I've been helping my students prepare for a few weeks now, but we've really kicked it up a notch this week and I've had extra activities every night! I won't lie, I'm pretty excited for it to be over tomorrow. Well, over until I go to Baku next weekend to help with the judging.