From 10/26

Well I just got back from counterpart conference and my site visit, which have had me travelling all over the place for the past couple of weeks. First of all, I am finally done with my teaching in my training site so now all I have left to complete are language classes and a teacher training seminar until I go off to my site for the next two years. I was so relieved to be done with teaching/training and our community project, so now it feels like most of the nagging obligations have been lifted and I can relax to some extent. Two Thursdays ago we went to the city to meet with our counterparts (the teacher with whom we team-teach and serves as our go-to gal/guy for problems at site). After a couple days of introductions/more redundant training/a slew of scheduling problems that made me incredibly frustrated with PC, I headed out to my site, Zhezkazgan, with my counterpart. She is really nice and motivated and basically provided all the information I needed regarding riding on trains, the city, and the school I’ll be teaching at.
We left on Friday night for a 37 hour train ride on which I learned the true meaning of discomfort. The rooms are incredibly small and are shared by 4 people and the trains are insanely grungy post-Soviet leftovers. Consequently I broke the nasty childhood habit of biting my fingernails (after the things I’ve seen and touched I can no longer bring my hands anywhere near my faces without cringing). On Sunday morning we arrived in Zhez which is a city of about 100 thousand people that is a known for its copper mining. I actually really like it. It puts my training site to shame with its theatres, bowling alley, ice-skating rink, and night-clubs. I think I will really like it there. I am also teaching secondary school and not college due to a typo on my site information form (thanks Peace Corps, not like I need to know what job I’ll be doing for the next two years). I teach at a secondary Kazakh school which means that while most everyone speaks Russian, the classes are taught in Kazakh, so the fact that I have been trained in Russian makes me looks a little culturally insensitive (thanks again PC). Looking on the bright side, as I am wont to do, this also means I will have more training in Kaz and Russian so I might have a pretty decent grasp on both languages by the time I’m done. Also, (and I don’t want to stereotype, but everyone agrees this is the case) students at Kaz schools are more well-behaved than at mixed Russian-Kaz schools. Judging by the 17 classes I taught this week after coming from a mixed school, I would say this is definitely the case. These kids were angels.
Also, the school treats me very well. They are proud to have me and vice-versa and the director of the school (who looks oddly enough like a Kazakh Barry Manilow) drove me around to my prospective host families where we had three different feasts of my favorite Kazakh foods. All three families were amazing and it was incredibly hard to decide who to move in with. I put off the decision until the very last minute due to indecision and chose a family with a boy of 12 and girl of 14 and a very nice apartment. They were so nice to me and said “I had a good energy” so I couldn’t turn them down. The father also offered to take me ice-fishing so that sweetened the deal as well. I don’t know if they will be as amazing as my current host family, but I am thinking how much I will miss this household now and it is probably skewing my judgment. I also met the current volunteers in Zhez and they are really cool and we all get along. They invited me over for tacos on Wed night and it was delicious.
So much else happened over the past two week that I’m just going to nutshell it: I bought an insanely warm fur-lined coat for less than 60 bucks, I got a new wallet (I got pick-pocketed a couple of weeks ago), I got slippers for the train ride (disgusting floors made this a necessity) , I saw a building with a hammer and sickle painted on it, I taught a ton of classes grades 5-11 with little to no preparation, I fell in love with Bon Iver even further, I spent a total of 3 days on a train, I taught American card games to two Russian hockey refs, I felt like a celebrity, I felt like a child, I made friends with a 2 year-old Kaz boy named Nuras, I became an honorary “brother” of Nuras’s father and the captain of police in Zhez after drinking some cognac with them, I learned how flat the steppe is, I saw two wild camels, I saw a café called Burger King that sells “sandwishes,” I ate my body weight in horse, I got told I look like Lenin so my counterpart made me shave off the stache, I finished King’s Bag of Bones (not his best in my opinion) and I watched Failure to Launch at our city’s English movie night (that matt mcconahey is a dreamboat). Hopefully the next couple of weeks will be semi-relaxing before I go back on the crazy train and begin the final two year countdown. Love you all.