Thanksgiving!

Even though I wasn't lucky enough to be home this Thanksgiving (it doesn't sound like my house could have fit me anyway since they said they had 23 people...), I did get the pleasure of celebrating it twice here in Azerbaijan!

The first was at my house with my host family.  I cooked chickens (there has been a lot of fowl death in the village so a turkey wasn't available) with stuffing, mashed potatoes, apple crisp, and garlic bread.  And then my mom sent me canned cranberry sauce from America.  And my host mom made a cake-ish thing and bought another cake thing from the store.  It was delicious.  My whole host family got really into everything, helping to decorate the table, wanting to know what I was making and how, etc.  And 2 of my co-English teachers and my neighbors came over too, which was so much fun.  My host mom asked me to translate for her "your daughter cooks very well" so that I could put her on the phone with my real mom, but we had calling difficulties that day.  Unrelated to the holiday except that this happened to my poor family several times as they tried to call me that day, a word of warning to anyone who tries to call me: frequently it will sound like someone answers the phone...and then you are listening to a porno!  No, this is not me, as many of my family members have apparently thought... This has happened to people trying to call my friend Beth too, and her number is nowhere close to mine so we don't really know what is happening.  Just an extra little surprise delight of calling Azerbaijan!


The second Thanksgiving I had was in Baku at the Ambassador's residence (we don't currently have an ambassador) for all the Peace Corps volunteers with our staff and some embassy staff, including the current stand-in for the ambassador.  It was awesome.  We did it like a pot-luck, so every volunteer brought in some food and we had like 10 turkeys and we ate a lot and were very happy!  And, as an added bonus (as if it wasn't fabulous enough already), Peace Corps arranges for us to stay with embassy families.  My sitemate Beth and I stayed with this amazingly sweet and wonderful couple.  We couldn't have been luckier!  They were so warm and welcoming and gave us such AMAZING food (french toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, blueberry scones...and that's all only what they made for us...they also took us to another embassy apartment to have Thanksgiving left-overs which was like a 3rd Thanksgiving with delicious pumpkin and buttermilk pies...mm).  Can you tell that coming home after the weekend was a little tough??  I didn't even tell you how jealous I was of all the gorgeous apartments I saw!  Foreign service here I come??  Tempting.

I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings!!

Winter Has Come to Azerbaijan

I guess technically it is still “fall.”  But really, even months ago, people kept telling me that winter had arrived.  At first I would respond by saying it was fall, mostly because I didn’t want winter to be here yet!  But by now I’ve given up.  It is winter.  Yes, for a few hours in the afternoon, most days it warms up a bit and the weather is nice, but the rest of the day/night is just so cold!  Plus we have all the other tell-tale signs of an Azerbaijani winter:

1) Needing to keep your peç (gas stove) on all day: Inside the buildings, it just doesn’t warm up like it does outside during the day.  If you don’t leave your peç on, you’re freezing.  I hate returning from school or whatever because I turn it off when I leave and that means returning to a cold, cold room!  In our house, November 1^st was peç set up day, but a lot of other people had started using theirs a lot earlier in October, and trust me, they had the right idea.  October was FREEZING and before we even started using the peç, I could see my breath while lying in bed in the morning!

2) Getting dark early: It is completely dark by like 6:30 now.  This severely limits what you can do in a day, let me tell you.  I have one conversation club that goes until 6:00 and by the time it ended this week I couldn’t see my students’ faces!

3) No late marşrutkas: I was in Gəncə last weekend and caught the last bus home at 4:30!  In the summer I could get to the bus station at 7:00 and still catch one.

4) Bundling up to teach: My school hasn’t put the peç in my classroom yet, so it is pretty darn cold in there.  I teach wearing my coat and my fingerless gloves (so I can write on the chalkboard) and I’m still freezing.  I’m hoping they give my room a good strong peç this year because our electric one last year just didn’t cut it.

5) The return of weekly showers: Who needs to shower more than once a week anyway right?  The other week I literally had this thought: “Geez, why is my hair looking so dirty? It’s only been 5 days since I showered.  That’s not even a week!”  Gross.

But, on the brighter side:
   -  Winter makes you very appreciative of the Azeri love for hot tea.
   -  All this cold gives me an excuse to lie in my bed and watch movies on my computer.
   -  I get to wear my very large collection of scarves.
   -  The rain/mud of winter hasn’t set in yet!
   -  The cold and darkness means that my whole family spends more time at home hanging out together.
   -  Our garden looks all pretty with the leaves turning yellow.

In other news, my home has been a cesspool of chicken pox for almost 3 weeks now.  My oldest host sister came home from where she goes to school in Gəncə just before Halloween with the chicken pox (she had kissed a baby that had chicken pox on the mouth having never had chicken pox herself...go figure she got sick!) and has been home ever since (yes, she has been better for about a week, don't worry, she doesn't still have it).  And then, because my 2 younger sisters hadn't had it, they got it too.  Their pox started last weekend, so they are still nice and spotty.  In Azerbaijan instead of pink calamine lotion, they use this green/teal stuff, the result being that my sisters have looked like swamp things for a few weeks.  And now there are green smears all over things in our house from them touching them.  The Azerbaijani fear of cold and showers also means that the doctors tell them that they cannot shower while they are ill or even as they are getting better because it will come back/get worse/whatever.  I'm sure I've painted a lovely picture of my house for you and now you really all want to come and visit don't you?  I'm just thankful that I had chicken pox in 2nd grade so I don't have to worry about getting it from them!

Coming at You Straight from Qədirli!

Well, I finally did it.  I finally bought an internet card to use the dial-up internet at my house.  I have always predicted that if I got it I would become addicted and then I would spend countless hours in my cold, slightly funky smelling kitchen at night on the internet when I won't disturb my family's phone line too much.  We will see how accurate this is.  What finally made me break down, you may be asking?  When I was in helping for training I was staying with my friend Emily and her family bought her an internet card but we couldn't use it on her computer but realized we could on mine and, as I knew would happen, once I saw how easy it was (regardless of how slow and painstaking), I had to buy one for myself.  It isn't fast enough for anything besides basic html gmail and my facebook chat won't even load (it did when I was in Sumqayıt though...), so don't get super excited that now I have so much more internet access.  False.

Yesterday was Halloween (as you all know, duh) and thus Beth and I put on a big Halloween party at my school.  It was nuts.  We had at least 70 kids and 6 teachers all running around and doing things like making masks, getting their faces painted, playing pin the tail on the black cat and musical broomsticks, etc.  Pandemonium.  In the end Beth and I declared it a success because our kids had fun, but man was it stressful!  My throat hurt so much afterward from having to yell over the din of 70 students at a party.  Ouch.  One special party surprise (even for us party planners) was that my new friends from our local (and by local I think I mean like 1/2 of Azerbaijan) TV station came and filmed our party!  I had mentioned it to them when we were filming my new TV show (have I mentioned this before? The TV station approached my Azeri teacher Nuranə and me and asked us to teach a televised English class and now we are doing that with the help of 2 other TEFL volunteers in Tovuz) but I didn't think that meant they were going to come...and then all of the sudden my school was calling my house to say my "guests" had arrived...2 hours early for the party b/c they thought I said 12 not 2.  But they stayed around the village and waited for us, which was really nice and exciting!

On a sadder note, we had a death in the village this weekend.  Not that that is really uncommon, but this time I actually knew the person for the first time.  It was the mother of our shopkeeper (and the shopkeeper also happens to be my mom's best friend and really, really likes me).  I went to the 3rd day after the death funeral ceremony today and heard the shopkeeper telling everyone how much her mother loved me and how I was like her granddaughter.  It's a custom here that at every funeral ceremony, the women sit in a room crying around a big photo of the deceased and, although I haven't seen it yet, I have been told that for hers they are using a photo I took of her a few months back.  We did a little photo shoot so that I could send the photos to her son's family who lives in Germany.  Apparently it was the only photo of her with good quality because it wasn't taken on a cell phone.  Anyway, just pretty sad.  And I feel especially bad because she didn't start getting really sick until I was in Sumqayıt for training so I didn't know it was happening and by the time I came back, she had died the day before.  It hasn't really hit me yet.  I don't know when it will.