A Saint by the Sea

When I’ve got a lot of time on my hands I like to look at some of my old pictures. Lately, I’ve really only been looking at pictures from my time in Peace Corps Kazakhstan (1 & 2) and from my short, but amazing, vacation in India (1, 2, & 3.)

Today, sparked by the arrival of my copy of “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin” I decided to take another look at some of the pictures from one of my two most favorite cities in the world, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Home to Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, the Mariinsky Theater, and countless other amazing people, sights, and historical moments, visting Saint Petersburg has always been a dream of mine. Sadly, while in Petersburg, I was obtaining my TEFL certification, so I spent most of my time in a class or face down in an English grammar book and needless to say this was not a schedule that was very conducive to sightseeing and photo snapping. Before I left, I did manage to get a few shots of the major sights along the main road in the city center, Nevsky Propsect (Не́вский проспе́кт,) and from inside The Hermitage. Because there are so many photos I want to show from the inside of The Hermitage I’m going to write a second post in the near future, dedicated solely to my Hermitage pictures. This post will be everything else from around Saint Petersburg.

My second night I, and a few of my TEFL classmates, decided to walk around the city and explore a little bit during our dinner break. After walking for about 20 minutes we decided to grab a quick bite to eat and then head back to our classes. None of us really had any preference as to where we at, so on our way back to our language school we decided to stop at the first place that looked clean enough. Below is what greeted use when we walked through the door, a wax figure of one Alexander Pushkin (Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин.) I really never figured out why the wax statue was there, I just assumed it was a theme/tribute restaurant and left it at that. By the way, between you, me, and the internet, someone in our party tried talking to the wax statue for a few seconds before realizing it was a fake.

 

A few days later, I was a little bit early and had the chance to take the scenic route to school and decided to stop and take a picture of The Lutheran Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (Лютеранская церковь Святых Петра и Павла.) One of the biggest and oldest Protestant churches in Russia, it’s still called the German Church due to the fact that sermons used to be and still are given in German.

 

Because it was built on the Gulf of Finland and the mouth of the Neva River, parts of Petersburg are criss-crossed by canals that reminded me of Amsterdam. I was there in the beginning of winter so I was not able to experience it firsthand, but I was told that during the summer most of the small boats you can see in the picture are used as water taxis.

 

One block over at the end of another canal is one of the most famous sites in all of Petersburg, The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (Храм Спаса на Крови) or Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ. The spilled blood part of the name refers to the fact that it was built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. First is a picture of the Church during the morning hours.

 

Below is a picture of the Church at night.

 

FInally we have some pictures of what is possible the most famous part of Petersburg, Palace Square (Дворцовая площадь.) With a great view of the Neva River and the presence of the Winter Palace, this was favorite part of Petersburg. This first shot shows, both, The Winter Palace (Зимний дворец) and The Alexander Column (Алекса́ндровская коло́нна.) The Hermitage is located inside the Winter Palace.

 

Lastly, one more shot or the Palace Square, from a different angle that shows the Admiralty Building (furthest away yellow building,) in the back of which, our language school was located.

 

That’s it for this late night post. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll have another update full of pictures of some of the beautiful works of art throughout the Hermitage.

You Call That an Ending!?!?!

When I write I usually I pick an overarching theme for my post. An emotion, a current event, sometimes an anecdote. This time that’s been almost impossible. While it took me only a day or so to write about the first post about my egress from Kazkahstan, I’ve been trying to write this piece for over a month now. Before tonight every time I began to write I only got, at best, a few lines before I got frustrated and stopped. This was always followed, the next day or sometimes a few days later, by an attempted rereading of the previous draft, inevitable hatred of said draft, and another whack at a new draft.

Each time I failed to write anything that I thought was any good, I became more and more frustrated. I wanted so bad to write about how I had not felt sad on the train from Shymkent to Almaty. I wanted so bad to write that while I was lying in that cramped little train car, littered with food and luggage, that I had time to be introspective and had some epiphany about how everything would end up being okay. I wanted so bad to ascribe some profound meaning to what had happened. I didn’t want my last few days in Peace Corps to be a haze of bureaucratic procedure, airplanes, and exhaustion. I didn’t want such an ordinary ending for such an extraordinary collection of memories.

But after 15+ deleted drafts and a far greater number of swear words, I realized, that this post wouldn’t provide me any type of catharsis or do anything to change how the last few days of my time in Kazakhstan played out. So, like the end of my time in Kaz, this blog post isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I got.

And the further away I get from my inglorious ( <— Tarantino reference!!) exodus ( <— not a Tarantino reference) from Kazakhstan, the more I realize that I’m really damn happy with my Peace Corps story (and accompanying blog posts,) bathetic ending and all.

A Rear View: Looking Back at the Work side of my time in Peace Corps Kazakhstan

I’m still trying to write about the last part of my exit from Kazakhstan but lately I’ve been having trouble finding the right words. Instead I will post some pictures from when I started  in Peace Corps Kazakhstan through the time that I left. We ended up landing in Kazakhstan at about 1 A.M and spent the first day or so in in Almaty. The way Peace Corps Kazakhstan worked was that volunteers would spend 3 months in a handful of villages around Almaty before being assigned a site around the country for our 24 month service.

Our time in the villages when we first arrived in country was called Pre-Service Training (PST.) One of the main purposes of PST is to help volunteers learn the local languages (volunteers are also given money for language tutoring after arriving at site) before we start training in the local schools. During our training volunteers either learned Kazakh or Russian. The first few weeks before we started practice teaching we spent about 6-8 hours a day learning a language. Here is a picture of one of our PST Kazakh lessons with our teacher Askar Aidarula.

P.S if you can see the green lined poster above his head, that is the Kazakh alphabet. It has 42 letters!!!

All schools in Kazakhstan start on September 1st (First Bell/Первый звонок.) During PST each teaching volunteer would have to teach lessons in tandem (or solo, depending on preference and previous experience) with a local teacher while being evaluated by other volunteers and local teacher that worked for PC Kazakhstan. Towards the end of PST each teaching volunteer would pick one of their classes and designs a week-long curriculum which culminates in a themed project i.e Travel (my theme.) Here is my 11th form/grade class that I worked with.

Here are some of the girls working on a poster for their final project.

At the end of PST, after being assigned our sites around Kazakhstan, volunteer returned to Almaty for a two day conference where we met the local counterparts that each of us would be working with during our time at our sites. On the November 7th, 2010 we were officially sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers. Along with speechs from a few volunteers and the director of PC Kazakhstan, a Kazakh official came and wished us luck in our future PC Kazakhstan endeavors.

Here we are after being sworn in as the 22nd group of Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteers.

After this ceremony all of us boarded trains with our counterparts and headed out to the four corners of Kazakhstan. For those of us going to Shymkent we were met at the train station by the volunteers who were already serving in the city. After dropping off our bags they showed us around the city and we spent the next few days going to visit all the possible host family options and visting our new work sites. While I worked at two sites I spent the majority of my time working at the local 1st Daryn school. In his Kazakhstan 2030 plan, President Nazarbayev wants more young people to learn English along side Kazakh and Russian, as you can see by the (KZ RU EN.)

For the first few days at a school volunteers do not usually teach, we spend time getting familiar with the teachers and students.  I started teaching after about three days and here is the first class I was given. I taught this class two lessons a week in my first year and three lessons a week in my second year.

Another important part of a teaching volunteers service are our English clubs, both school and community-wide. To me, the main purpose of these clubs was to give the students a place to practice their English where they did not have to worry about grades or anything else. One of my clubs favorite activities was playing “Jeopardy” on the interactive boards with categories such as famous people (pictured below,) famous writers, Enlish grammar, etc.

In Shymkent I also gave seminars to local teachers at the Oblast/область (region) training center. This was a place where teachers from around the region would come every so often to take two week courses (basically in-service training) where they would learn about topics such as using multimedia in your lessons, teaching English language idioms, and so on. About once a week, sometimes twice a week, I would give interactive presentations to groups of about 30 teachers at a time.

There you have it, a brief retrospect of the professional side of my service in Peace Corps Kazakhstan. While it’s far from comprehensive I tried my best to highlight the main points or my time working in PC Kazakhstan and I hope this gives anyone who reads it a better insight to my life while I was serving in Kazakhstan.

GO BIG BLUE

On a bit of a lighter note here is a video of my 11th grade class during my last day in Shymkent.

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The Long Goodbye: Part 1 of my departure from Kazakhstan

While I’m waiting until after I’ve left Kazakhstan to post this I’m actually writing on the 28^th of November (last day in Kaz) while sitting around a coffee shop and trying to get my thoughts together after what has been one of the most hectic and tumultuous 10 days of my life. At this point I’m sure a few of you are a bit confused as to what this post is about. Well the Peace Corps Kazakhstan program has been indefinitely suspended, meaning that all volunteers are being evacuated from Kazakhstan. After 18 years of operation in Kazakhstan the program will be shut down until further notice, and while it may be re-opened in the future it does not seem likely at the moment. While I’m sure many of you are curious about why Peace Corps (PC) is leaving Kazakhstan let me tell you now that I’m not going to address the reasons why we are leaving in this post. There were too many factors and frankly mentioning only a few of them will undoubtedly paint a skewed portrait of the lives of Peace Corps Volunteers during our service in Kazakhstan and of Kazakhstan itself. I will provide some background information about what happened over the last 10 days or so but this post will be about my reactions and feelings after I got the news, no more. This first part will only be half the story because to fit all of my thoughts and feelings into one post is just not possible without turning it into a tome that will bore everyone about 5 minutes into reading. So like any good storyteller I will just start on Wednesday the 16^th of November and take it from there. This will be from the day I found out to the train station the day I left to go to Almaty, the rest will come in the next post.

While this whole time has been very emotional, I think the day I found out was easily the most emotionally schizophrenic. Wednesday is usually one of the longest days of the week for me due to the fact that I start my day at about 7:30 in the morning and am running around and working until about 8 at night; though this particular Wednesday actually seemed like it was going to be one hell of a good day. On Wednesdays, around 9 AM, I usually give English methodology seminars to teachers at the government pedagogical institute, though on this day I was told I could sleep in and come and give my seminar at noon. This made me really happy, not because I could sleep in but rather because it allowed me to enjoy one of my favorite things in life, that being University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball. After mentally preparing myself to be without UK basketball for 27 months I was ecstatic when I checked the schedule for ESPN America on my local cable package and saw that to my surprise UK would be playing the University of Kansas in basketball at 8 am local time. Needless to say, like a kid at Christmas, I woke up at the crack of dawn out of sheer excitement. I made a pot of coffee and proceeded to watch the game and after UK won, I showered and left my apartment to give my seminar. While the content of my seminar was not particularly exciting I actually enjoyed it more than pretty much all the other seminars I had given so far in Kazakhstan. After my seminar I walked a block to the secondary school (High School) where I teach and sat to have another cup of coffee and prepare for lessons. At this point, because of the game and the seminar, I was in a really good mood when I answered the call from a PC staff member, though as you can probably guess that changed very, very quickly.

Before I even got the message that Peace Corps was closing this phone call filled me with worry. The tone of the speaker’s voice and the phrase “can you sit down and listen for to me for a few minutes because I have something to tell you” immediately made me think that I was about to be told that someone back in the USA had died. So I sat there and listened, and after a few words I realized that no one important had died but that something intimately important to me had. While I am usually very good at analyzing and finding the right words to describe my emotions, when I look back at that moment I simply can’t sum it up. I wasn’t numb, sad, angry, happy, or anything like that, there was just something visceral that I really cannot describe.

We were asked not to tell anyone until the next day while other volunteers were being told and PC prepared to break it to our schools and organizations in the best way they could. While this was, in my opinion, for the best it did, somehow, manage to make an already emotionally trying day even harder to handle. Because, after I found out I still had to conduct my two favorite English clubs and somehow cancel them without giving a concrete reason why. I pretended nothing was wrong and at the end of each club made the announcement that all volunteers would be in Almaty for a conference for a little while and that all clubs were cancelled until further notice. While this allowed myself and fellow volunteer Katie Whitmore time to prepare a statement to all our club participants about our departure and the permanent cancellation of all volunteer run clubs in Shymkent; seeing their smiling faces and hearing their goodbyes was basically just turning the knife that already felt like it was lodged in my stomach.

Even though I couldn’t focus on anything and my mind would not stop racing, after clubs being able to go back to my apartment and shut myself off from the world gave me a small bit of respite. I finally fell asleep later that night after dreading walking into school the next day after Peace Corps broke the news to them. Needless to say I didn’t sleep that well at all, I managed a few hours of fitful sleep but that was about it. I rolled around and constantly woke up until I finally gave up trying to sleep and made some coffee and took a shower while trying to mentally prepare myself for what I was about to have to deal with at school. After just sitting in my apartment listening to music for a while I eventually forced myself to leave and head to school. I had turned my phone off already because I did not want to answer any of these questions over the phone; I thought it too impersonal a way to handle such a difficult subject with people to whom I had become really close. So after I took a lot of time walking from the bus stop to my school I felt like I was mentally prepared to deal with everything. I was wrong.

Why was I wrong? Well because when I walked in there were no sad faces, no tears, no evidence that anything was out of the ordinary. At this point I honestly did know what was happening, so many different questions went through my mind, do they not care, has Peace Corps not told them yet, am I dreaming? After a few seconds of bewilderment I realized that they must not know yet, or at least I was hoping that was the case, so I went outside and called my regional manager to ask if she had called and told them yet, she told me she hadn’t been able to reach them yet and that if I was okay with it that I should just go ahead and tell them myself because I was there. This was a bit bittersweet for me, on one hand I had to break the news to them, but on the other hand I was going to be able to break the news to them personally. So I stood outside for a second and took a few deep breaths to brace myself and went inside and found all the teachers I could and asked them to meet me in the teacher’s lounge for a moment because I had something really important to tell them. When I pulled them out of their classes I think it was pretty obvious to them that something was up, so I just decided that I would just get to the point as quick as possible and basically acted like I was ripping off a band-aid and told them that Peace Corp was closing. When I looked around after I told them I saw pretty much exactly what I had expected to, that being sadness, disbelief, incomprehension; in other words, I saw on their faces all the different emotions I had felt in the last 24 hours.

Now I wish I could remember the next few days as vividly as I did the first few but looking back I honestly cannot. My life became a blur of packing and saying an endless amount of goodbyes to people at clubs, acquaintances, and students at my school. I honestly do not know if it was the best idea but before I started all of these later goodbyes I decided to memorize what I was going to say about my leaving and all that because, looking back, I do not think that I could have handled putting myself out there emotionally with every goodbye, I fell that I would have been too emotionally and mentally spent to focus on all the things I needed to get done, i.e. packing and buying train tickets to get me to Almaty on the necessary date.

So after an emotionally and mentally grueling few days Tuesday night finally came and it was time for me to meet the other volunteers in the city and board the train to Almaty. I had tried all day to prepare myself because I knew this was going to be hard in every way possible; between getting all of my bags to the station on the train, to see all the people that came to see us off, and to know that this could be the last time that I would ever see any of them, after spending a year and a half getting to know them and build relationships with them, was something I dreaded.

When I got to the station it was pretty much everything I expected it to be, namely sad. The weather was cold and dreary, even though I know it is not true, it felt like Mother Nature knew how all of us there were feeling and decided to set the weather accordingly. The further I get away from the whole situation, the more I realize those fifteen minutes at the train station were probably the hardest fifteen minutes of all of my service. Breaking the news to everyone that I was leaving was hard but seeing all these people huddled together against the cold, some with teary eyes wanting a hug or picture every five seconds was just too surreal. It was like a sad scene in a movie that tugs at your heartstrings but that you think in the back of your mind seems too much like a movie to every really happen, and at times while I was standing on the train platform I honestly thought it was too surreal to be real. Though with the final kisses, photos, and hugs I snapped back to reality and knew that it was time for me to step on the train and end so many of the relationships I had spent the last year and a half creating and strengthening.

So after what seemed like the longest fifteen minutes of my life I was sitting in my train cabin with the other three volunteers from Shymkent, and in their eyes I saw the truth in the saying by British-American novelist Amelia Barr, that being:

“All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.”

Because for all of us sitting in that train cabin, as we pulled away from the platform, we were pulling away from all the little parts of ourselves we had left with the amazing people we had met and grown to love over the past year and a half of our lives.

India Part 1

First and foremost I would like to thank fellow blogger Renxkyoko for reminding me how neglectful I’ve been towards my blog lately. I’ve had a pretty intense summer that included travelling around Kazakhstan and India and is wrapping up with me face down in a stack of GRE prep books, but now that I’m back it’s time to start blogging again.  So now it’s time to kick back with some Buena Vista Social Club and get to it! First post up on the docket is pictures from the first leg of my Indian Adventure which included Delhi and Agra.

We will start our fantastic Indian Voyage in a spectacularly bland fashion with a pic of the hostel we ended up staying at our one and only night in Delhi,

After meeting in the airport and taking a quick rest in the room we ventured out to have our first meal in India, and let me just say it was AMAZING. Some simple Tandoor Chicken and a Kingfisher never tasted so good! FYI Dan just looks drunk but he hadn’t even had a sip yet, I’m just a master of taking pictures at the worst possible/most embarrassing times, haha.

We spent only the one night in Delhi and set out on our way to Agra to kick off our trip and we saw some cool things on the way out of town. The first being a giant statue of the monkey god Karl Bagh.

The second things were the iconic Indian taxis called “Tuk Tuks.”

Later that day we sat out for Agra, and even though it was a pretty long car trip, I think that, from this picture, you can tell we had some fun along the way! Btw all I could thing when taking this picture was that I needed to look him in the eyes and pull by best Indiana Jones face and tell him “You Betrayed Shiva, Kalim Na, Kalim Na!!”

Now, while I personally hate doing touristy things when I’m travelling, I would have kicked myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t take the chance to see the Taj Mahal, and I am so glad I did because it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

This is the entrance gate to the Taj

Here is how I first saw the Taj, it was framed in the doorway of the entrance gate.

After we stopped for a second to take in everything, our guide suggested that we take a picture so this is Daniel and I before walking up to the Taj itself.

I’ve always prided myself on my ability to find and use the right word in almost every situation, but like the moment I stepped out off the airport shuttle into down town Delhi, seeing the Taj Mahal up close was an experience that I’m not sure I can really put into words, and to be honest I’m not really sure I want to. I don’t want to add some fancy words that don’t really do justice to the feelings from those times and end up doing nothing more than sounding like a prattling ass and cheapening my memories.

So that pretty much wraps up the first two days of my Indian adventure, but stay tuned for part two which will feature Fatipur Sikri, the Water and Amber Forts in Jaipur, and the Rat Temple (yes I said RAT TEMPLE) in Bikaner. Ohh, and here’s a small parting gift for all my readers out there.

An Unwelcome Guest

“You want?” That’s a rough translation of a question I had asked to me the other day, a question that lead to this post today but for different reasons than it might seem.

But first, I think a little background to that question is necessary. I was working a English language camp with a fellow volunteer named Jesse and we’d gone to town to shoot some billiards and relax and were waiting to catch a taxi when two young drunk Kazakh men approached us and started talking. They were being belligerent but we just kept waiting for a taxi and tried to not address them, because talking to people who are drunk is almost always a waste of time. Though this convo turned out a bit different, because at one point one of the men asked me in Russian “ты хочешь(you want)?” This confused the hell out of me and I guess he could tell I didn’t understand because he asked again but this time he did something to drive his question home, he ran his hand across my throat, indicting that he was asking me if I wanted him to cut my throat.

My friend and I both really started paying a lot more attention at this point but were still actively not trying to engage them in conversation, so over the next two or three minutes we kept waiting for the taxi, while he proceeded to ask other question like “боксер(boxer)” while holding his hands up in front of his face. Eventually he started asking what I was doing in Kazakhstan because I look very not-Kazakh. I told him I was a guest working in the country and he started talking about how I was a guest that wasn’t welcome. A taxi came soon enough and we got in leaving those two in the street, in the end the whole things lasted maybe 4 or 5 minutes and I went back to the family I was staying with and didn’t really give it much if any thought that night.

Though, the next day I did begin to think about something, but it wasn’t the death threat, it was about him calling me an unwelcome guest. It probably sounds crazy that this was what I was thinking about rather than the death threat, but to be honest the threats of a drunken man in the middle of a public street don’t really seem all that threatening.

Now it’s obvious that I’m a guest here, no denying that, and there is also no denying that a lot of the people in Kazakhstan have been very friendly and have made me feel very welcome the time I’ve been in Kazakhstan. Though I believe in the end it made me think about something that I was trying to deny in my own mind about why I joined the Peace Corps.

Let me be clear, I don’t think any volunteer joins the Peace Corps for any one, two, or even three reasons. To spend two years of your life in a foreign country away from all your family and friends is a very tough decision to make, for anyone. Though I know for me, and maybe some other volunteers, there are reasons we’d rather emphasize and reasons we may not want to acknowledge. For me this reason was I didn’t really feel like I was a place where I belonged before I came to Kazakhstan. Not in the sense of feeling like and outsider, because I was with family and friends, but more to the point that that was a place where I still felt like a guest. For me everyplace that I have lived in has always felt like a place in which I was just spending time until I left for my next destination, no matter where I’ve been I’ve never felt like that was somewhere I could settle or see myself spending my life. No matter how much family, how many friends, or how much fun I had in those places I always felt, temporary.

I’ve always said that I like traveling so much because there are so many things to see and I don’t want to die and regret not having done everything I can to see all the wonderful things the world has to offer, and all of that is true. Though the older I get and the more places I go I feel like that maybe I’m also looking for that place where I don’t feel like a guest anymore, where I don’t feel like I’m just passing through, a place where I can see an old version of myself happily settling. I don’t guess I’ll know until I get to that place, if I ever do.

I’ve Made A Huge Mistake!

One show that I’ve always enjoyed watching and have found to stand-up to repeated viewings is the tragically short lived Arrested Development. Every time I watch it I can find something new to laugh at or notice a connection between a joke in one episode that I never knew was a subtle reference to something in a previous episode. Though the more I watch, the more I realize that my favorite joke is one of the most simple in the whole show. This joke being when one of the characters does something, whether for spite or general ignorance, they think is a good idea but later comes to realize is a stupid idea and end up uttering the phrase “I’ve made a huge mistake.” I think I really loved these because even though they were part of a running joke, you never really saw them coming and yesterday I had my very own “I’ve made a huge mistake” moment.

A few weeks ago I was going to a friend’s apartment to watch some American television on his computer and eat dinner, but I also decided I wanted to treat myself that night. One of my favorite things in this country is mango yogurt, I buy it at least two times a week. Now the yogurt in this country is delicious and good quality, but just to be safe I check the cap and expiration date whenever I buy one, and for this yogurt everything looked fine, so I figured I was good to go. Then I started drinking the yogurt and was a lot less sure of how good to go I actually was. The odd thing is the yogurt didn’t taste like it had gone sour or that it was too old, it tasted like yogurt, except for one very noticeable problem, this yogurt tasted carbonated. At this point I didn’t know what was going on so I had another volunteer give it a taste, she agreed that it didn’t taste bad, just like normal yogurt with carbonation. At this point I was faced with a decision, be on the safe side and just toss the yogurt, or say “to hell with it” and drink the yogurt and risk any food borne illness that may come.

Well if you’ve not figured it out by now, I said to hell with it and chugged that yogurt. Probably not the smartest move on my part but at the time it seemed like a good enough idea. I thought hell this is Kazakhstan, they love carbonated water and I’ve only ever tried one flavor of this companies yogurt, so how am I to know that it it’s not supposed to be carbonated, right? After a minute or two of the carbonation settling I felt no ill effects and enjoyed the rest of my night. Then the next days came. Now, this is the part where you expect me to tell you how horribly bad things went for me, but nothing did happen. Not the day after, or the day after that, or even the day after that, I didn’t get sick from the yogurt. Now at this point you’re probably asking how I made a huge mistake.

Well about 9 o’clock my host brother brought me a yogurt he had just bought because he had drunken mine earlier and was replacing it. It happened to be the carbonated flavored one, I wasn’t necessarily in the mood for carbonated wild berry yogurt but I decided to drink it anyways because I was being lazy and didn’t want to get up and put it in the fridge. The yogurt tasted the exact same as before, though with one noticeable exception. This yogurt wasn’t carbonated. At this point I could only pull a stupid face and think to myself “I’ve made a huge mistake.”

In hindsight I don’t view the drinking of the carbonated yogurt as the huge mistake, this is really only because I didn’t actually get sick from it. In this case I see the mistake as ignoring my common sense. I thought that because I was in strange country that I’m still not all that familiar with that maybe something I had always held as common sense, for whatever reason, didn’t apply. I thought that maybe what was common sense back home might not be common sense here, I was wrong, very very wrong, though unlike the show I didn’t have something go horribly wrong for me to realize my mistake. This time I got off lucky and didn’t get sick or anything, I was able to walk away from this whole thing no worse for the wear and I actually learned two very important lessons. Firstly that just because I am in a country where it feels like common sense doesn’t exist, and sometimes it really feels like common sense doesn’t exists here, that I shouldn’t just say to hell with it do whatever. Secondly that yogurt isn’t ever carbonated.

Straight Outta Kazakhstan/Take U to the Coffeeshop!!

Generally when I write something for my blog I try to think of something that I’ve experienced lately that had some sort of impact on my life, but that isn’t so serious that I can’t try and add a bit of humor and wit to it. Though today something happened that had no great meaning or didn’t lead to me learning some Boy Meets World like life lesson, but was so, to me at least, impossibly hilarious that I needed to tell others. In short, I was witness to the making of a Kazakh rap video.

Now at this point I’m sure you’re saying to yourself “what did he just say?” Honestly, that’s something I would ask too if I had just read the phrase “I was witness to the making of a Kazakh rap video.” If you were to ask me “What’s the most random thing you can see today?” The making of a Kazakh rap video wouldn’t even be on my list because it’s that ridiculous. Also, the more I think about it the more I realize just how truly bizarre everything about the whole situation was.

So far I’d had a pretty regular day, I went to work and had taught a few classes and before I went home I had decided to go to my favorite place in town to relax a bit, this place being the local coffee shop called “Кофемолка.” I walked in and didn’t immediately notice what was going on because I was taking out my headphones but when I looked up I stopped dead in my tracks. There were cameras and lighting stuff everywhere. I was confused but the waitress flagged me down and told me where I could sit. My first thought was there was a TV show, commercial, or something like that being filmed. The people were talking and there was some music being played softly. The cameras were focused on a man and an attractive woman sitting at a table in the center of the room. They were talking romantically over the soft music, then out of nowhere I had my mind blown.

The man suddenly stood up and as his chair shot backwards the music suddenly started blaring and he started rapping. I think the best way to explain what happened is to say that my mind broke, it simply broke. I almost spit out my coffee and just sat there eyes frozen on what was going on. After my mind finally started working again I was racking my brain to figure out what the hell was going on. Even though I didn’t understand 90% of what was being said it was obvious that there was some attempt at rapping going on. I didn’t understand well enough to get the point of what he was rapping but I am guessing it was something about him not needing the girl and so on. At this point he was circling and the girl and basically rapping in her face while she did her best “whatevs, I’m too hot for your broke-ass anyway” look while she was flipping her hair, giving him dirty looks, and crossing her arms. Basically she was doing what Santana does in every episode of Glee. This all went on for a total of about 45 minutes before they began packing up.

While after a few minutes I had realized the guy was rapping, it took a few more minutes for me to realize that the whole things was a rap video. I know, I know that it’s pretty obvious from all the cameras and the guy rapping that this was a rap video, but it took a few minutes for me to realize that this was really a rap video. At the beginning all I could think that this wasn’t like any rap video that I had ever seen, it didn’t have any of the symptoms of a typical rap video. No one was making it rain, no one was having an ass shaken in their face, there weren’t a ton of pricey cars around, ohh and it was in a coffee shop of all places. Of course after a few minutes of thinking I was witnessing the making of the worst rap video this side of Bangs. Then I had the inevitable “ohh wait this is Kazakhstan” moment and eventually sat back and just enjoyed what I was privileged enough to see that day.

To be honest I doubt I will ever seen this video in the wild. It looked fairly low budget even for a a kazakh rap video. But it the end I got a free look at something I thought I never would and never will again get a chance at seeing in my life. Sadly I didn’t have my camera with me or all of you would be enjoying the awesomeness of what I saw, but for a while at least I will have the memories of my brush with Kazakh rapdom.

It’s cliche to hate cliches

I generally hate cliches. I cringe a little every time that I hear someone say one. I don’t hate them because I’m a language snob and think they aren’t proper English or because I think they are improper grammatically, most of the time I just hate them because of what they represent and when they are used. They are overused, unoriginal, and when I’m watching a movie or a television show and hear a cliche I think that some writer somewhere got lazy and didn’t really want to do anything that particular day. This is probably why I like the works of Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith so much, because when I’m watching their films I am feel like I am listening to the words of someone who knows what it feels like to be cheated by cliched dialog.

By now you’re probably asking “what does any of this have to do with your life in Kazakhstan?” Well today when I was talking to one of my co-workers she happened to use one of my least favorite cliches, “you’d be surprised about what you can get used to,” and, grudgingly, I had to admit that there was some truth to that stupid cliche.

It all started this morning, I had just finished my first class of the day and had a break so I did what I do pretty much everyday at 10:30 and headed for the teacher’s lounge to get a cup of coffee. Another teacher was in there preparing for a lesson and drinking tea, so we just started chatting. It was a simple ‘hey, how are you doing?” type of conversation that, we have almost everyday because we have the same free period in the morning. Today she decided to ask me if I was finally adjusted to my life here yet and I told her that I was because I’ve got some semblance of a routine in my life. She asked “ohh really?” and I thought I would be funny and say “yeah, I wake up everyday hope to not die on the bus coming to work, teach, then hope not to die on the bus going home.” Now anyone reading this who has taken a bus ride in Shymkent, or Kazakhstan in general, knows that this is one of those things you say when you’re only half-joking. Naturally her response was “huh?’” I forgot that for her, because she grew up here, that the bus rides here were totally normal. So I quickly explained to her about I how I was not used to envying sardines when I was riding the bus and was also used to drivers who didn’t smoke on the bus and had actually heard of concepts such as not passing on the shoulder.

Naturally all of this made her laugh, and she told me that it was normal here and that she’d seen only a few accident’s in her life, which I must admit seems true, because I can’t think of an accident I’ve seen during my time in Kazakhstan. She laughed and told me I would get used to it. I told her, that funnily enough, I already had, and only noticed it anymore when the bus driver did something particularly crazy, such as laying on his horn and going through an intersection as the light turned red almost causing a pile up. In case you were wondering this was actually my bus ride to work this morning and it was made even more fun by the fact that I was sitting in the front on a bench next to the driver and had a front row seat to the whole thing. She laughed and said “see you’d be surprised at what you can get used to,” and I said “yeah, seems like you’re right.”

At this point I was sipping my coffee and cringed a little on the inside. Not because she had used a cliche, to be honest foreign speakers love idioms and cliches, but because at that moment I had to admit that that cliche, well, kinda made sense. It wasn’t unoriginal or misused and it was actually very fitting.

Up until the last few weeks, my whole time in Peace Corps has felt very transitional. Knowing I would have to move to a village, unpack, get comfortable, re-pack, move again, unpack, and get comfortable again wasn’t pleasant. When you’re moving, to literally the other side of the world, it’s difficult. You want to find your groove, routine, or whatever you want to call it as fast as possible. The longer it takes to find a routine and get comfortable, the more stressful and hard life in that new places becomes. So I had been so desperate for a routine and for things to feel comfortable, I had made myself get used to things I would think were totally crazy in normal circumstances. And because of this had become the embodiment of that stupid cliche.

In the end of it all, I’m still not sure whether getting used to some of the craziness around will ultimately be a good or bad thing for my adaptation to life in Kazakhstan. If so, awesome, if not ohh well I’ll deal with whatever comes when it comes. Though, there are a few things that I am now sure of. Firstly that director Matthew Vaughn was correct when he said “Cliches are what make you understand something.” and secondly, that I still hate cliches.