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.