Happy Rooster Day!

Yesterday I celebrated my third and final Thanksgiving here in Azerbaijan.  My host mom slaughtered my rooster (for those of you who didn't know, in the spring I got a gift of two roosters - the other one we ate a month or so ago for my sister's birthday) to serve as our turkey, so we had Snow White (when I named him I thought he was a hen) for dinner.  I also made garlic mashed potatoes, stuffing, garlic bread, apple crisp, and opened cans of cranberry sauce (I can't really take credit for "making" that).  Plus my host mom made cutlets (ground meat patties - my mom makes them better than anyone else) and gave us kompot (really sweet, AWESOME juice that she made) and turşu (pickled cabbage) and she cracked a bunch of nuts.  One of my counterparts and two of my best students came over to join my family and another volunteer, Connie (you've heard about her before, she is the one with the bike club in Qazax where I took my sisters to learn to ride) came down to my house too.  Connie helped me with some of my cooking and helped to keep me from stressing out cooking for so many people.  And my students and sisters helped to decorate our table with the various decorations and crafts sent by my mom and the ever wonderful Mrs. Collins.  It was a really nice, delicious night!

Cold FREEZING Cold

I am currently wearing boots, 2 pairs of socks, a pair of leggings, a pair of sweatpants, a sweater, a fleece jacket, a wool jacket, a thin scarf, a knit hat, and finger-less gloves.  I am also shivering cold.  Why, you might ask?  Because we have a policy here of not putting the heaters into the schools until November 15th and, unfortunately, this November is ridiculously cold (we've even had snow!).  I've only been at school for 2 hours because we have a random school break this week (we've never had it off before so I don't know why) but I had to come in and open the resource room this afternoon.  I'm trying to think warm thoughts.  Wish me luck!

Coming Full Circle

This week I began the final stage of my Peace Corps service, observations of my counterparts.  When I first arrived at my school I spent a few weeks observing classes to get a feel for how my soon-to-be counterparts taught.  Now, here I am, almost 2 years later, repeating the process to see how far they've come.  I'm pleased to say that after only a few days, I can definitely say improvements have been made.  I unfortunately also must say that this process is going to be the death of me.  Why?  Because this is really the beginning of the end.  I've given up my classes!  I'm a teacher with no classes to teach :(  And I have to sit and watch all the classes that only last week I was teaching be taught by my counterparts.  Not that we haven't been sharing the classes all along because we have, as "team teachers," but now I just sit there, unable to help with anything or jump in with a random comment (although I still do...and I need to stop!).  I think this is going to be Azerbaijan's ultimate test of my patience!  Good thing I've had 2 years of training in building up my patience to prepare me!

And FYI I wrote a draft of this post while observing a lesson.  I can't just sit there!

Happy Halloween - Azerbaijan Style

I'm happy to report that even though I'm overseas where we technically don't celebrate Halloween, I was able to have a pretty awesome Halloween celebration anyway!

First was my friend Eric's birthday party (if you don't remember, he is my friend who works at the US Embassy in Baku).  The party was a costume party where we were all encouraged to wear 70's outfits because Eric was born in the 70's.  Realizing that we couldn't find 70's outfits very easily in Azerbaijan, Beth and I decided to get creative.  We made a little harmless joke at Eric's expense by dressing as cave women and saying that, as neither of us were alive in the 70's and it was just SO long ago, we could only imagine that this was how people dressed!  He loved it.  And we were the hit of the party, winning "spicy-est" costume (our prize was a thing of spices from America!).

Beth and I with our spicy prizes!

Then I came home just in time to celebrate the real holiday with my host family.  It was a nice change from the crazy Halloween party that Beth and I had last year at my school.  This time I stayed home and my host sisters and I carved three pumpkins, with the help of my counterpart Tamilə müəllim.  And thanks to my mom sending an awesome pumpkin carving kit, we had all these sweet little carving knives that worked wayyy better than our big kitchen knives did last year.  Our jack-o-lanterns were pretty sweet, if I do say so myself!