Photos of Summer

As I settle into my normal school-year life, I was taking a few minutes to look back over pictures from the summer and thought I would put up some of my favourite summer moments for your viewing pleasure.

June: Kim came to visit and found out just how much she loves outhouses.

June: Another delicious cherry season in Azerbaijan.  Don't let that inviting dish fool you, they are chock full of worms.  And as I was discussing the other day with some other volunteers, I can measure my growth here in Azerbaijan by how little that grosses me out anymore haha.

June: Welcome to Turkey and my first real vacation since coming to Azerbaijan.

June: I fell in love with all the beautiful tiles in Turkey.

July: Noticing the "Stalker Internet Club" in Tovuz for the first time made my day.

July: At summer camp we learned about countries and holidays from around the world one week.  The kids were all talking about it when they came back to school last week.

July: Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) summer camp, a collaborative project for volunteers all across the country and our awesome counterparts.  This year my host sister went and had a great time.  We are actually getting together with some of her GLOW friends this weekend!

August: I loved seeing all these little guys guarding the construction areas in Fountain Square.

August: One of my favourite places in Baku is the front of this museum.

August: My last trip to Qobustan? (our outdoor museum with petroglyphs)  I only went four times...for Naima and Jessica's visit the guy working there was trying to have me give the tour!

August: Matching pj's for girlie sleepover nights with Naima and Jessica.

August: So many beautiful tomatoes!  My mom was preserving them for winter for days.

August: Proud volunteers as our Close of Service Conference in their sweet shirts! (Thanks to Alex and Beth!)

August: Getting ready for a hot air balloon ride over Göreme in Cappadocia on my 2nd trip to Turkey this summer.

August: Some of the cool (and less phallic) rock formations in Cappadocia.  Do a google image search and you'll see what I mean about the phallic ones, it was pretty ridiculous!

August: Sunrise from a hot air balloon.  Does it get much better than that?

I got a bit carried away so there were a lot of pictures!  Hope you liked them!

Another School Year Begins

School has officially begun!  Today I taught my first real classes of the year because last week was mostly going over classroom rules and getting the kids to talk about summer.  I was very proud to see how many kids talked about coming to my summer camp and how they were still excited about it 2 months later.  And then I didn't have to teach on Friday (I was supposed to have Fridays off but today I just added another class so now I have one lesson...of course).  Today Tamilə müəllim (my counterpart) and I also opened the resource room for the first time this year and we already had 4 kids come to borrow books!  At least now they'll have something to read because my school seems to be having an extreme shortage of textbooks (which doesn't seem to be worrying anyone but my counterparts and I) so the vast majority of my kids aren't getting books so far!  As you may suspect, yes, this makes it very difficult to teach!  But my counterparts and I are powering through.  Tamilə müəllim and I have an adorable 5th form class (this is the youngest that Azerbaijani kids start seriously learning English, before that it is only once a week and they start fresh in 5th anyway) that I'm really excited about.  We started the alphabet today!  For some reason the Azerbaijani textbook doesn't teach the letters in order, so today was E, B, D, N, P, and T.  I also found it very interesting that my kids couldn't say the Azerbaijani alphabet.  When we were planning for the lesson I saw that Tamilə müəllim didn't know it because every time she tried to say it she said the Russian alphabet not Azerbaijani (which makes sense as she grew up in Soviet times).  I guess that's what happens when you change your lettering system like a million times, but I hadn't really thought about it.  I knew that my kids were really bad at using dictionaries, but I just thought it was lack of knowledge of the English alphabet.  I guess not!

This weekend I went to two weddings and I believe that I have now officially attended 20 weddings in Azerbaijan (which really just means I remember going to 20 weddings but there could be some less memorable ones in there somewhere haha, by the time you get to 20 that is highly possible).  My host mom is already stressing out about having to go to weddings alone after I go home (I finish here December 14th!) so now I really have to go to all the weddings with her (although it may not seem like it seeing as I have gone to 20, I have managed to get out of several more).

The First Day of School is Quickly Approaching!

School starts here every year on September 15th which means this Thursday I will be starting my last school year in Azerbaijan!  (For those of you who don't know yet, my close of service date is December 14, 2011!).  I'm excited for school to begin because it will put me back on a normal schedule, but not looking forward to losing the freedom of being able to stay up until 2AM watching Mad Men or whatever TV show I'm addicted to (and I take way too much advantage of that freedom haha).  I'm busily working to try to get all the lesson plans my counterparts and I have developed over the past year and a half compiled into big, complete sets.  It is quite a monumental task! To give you an idea of how big these sets of plans will be, I'm closest to finishing the 7th form book where I am on Unit 6 of 8 and the plans are already 51 pages long.  Yikes.  And I'm doing this for 5 textbooks, with hopes to do 2 more this fall.  I have no hope of getting it finished by the start of school (which had been the plan, unfortunately I like to procrastinate and do other things with my summer time!) but I will have at least the first lesson for each book done, inşallah! 

Other than the textbooks, I spent most of my day yesterday helping Tamilə müəllim, my counterpart, prepare jars of food for winter.  I cut about a million peppers, tomatoes, carrots, and potatoes and in the process made a lot of little cuts on my thumbs!  Here the knives are super dull so we just cut things into our hands instead of using a cutting board, which is fine when you are only cutting for one meal but mass production takes its toll!