Ennui

So this is the New Year. I’m lounging around my apartment with a few friends, and none of us can muster the strength to get up and brave the cold, twenty minute walk to the bazaar to buy ingredients to make pizza as we had earlier planned. We are all pretty tired from last night. I went to a party at my counterparts house. I stayed up till 2am, an unheard of hour, drinking wine with my colleague and his family all while trying to remember how to speak Kyrgyz. We went outside at midnight and set off fireworks in the street. Then we went back in a drank and ate more. Good times.

My counterpart, Aleysher, and his family insist that I am in need of a Kyrgyz wife. They believe that I can’t cook (true), I can’t do my own laundry (partly true) and that I can’t take care of my apartment (very much untrue). I countered this by telling them that I am fine living alone and that recently I sewed my own curtains. Yeah, that’s right. I sewed my own curtains. I’m the Central Asian Martha Stewart.

Speaking of curtains, (check out this segue) our Country Director Joseph Curtain will be resigning in a few weeks. He is the one who instituted the Big Brother-esque out of site policies that require all volunteers to submit in writing our overnight plans. They must be approved by our program manager a few days before hand and anyone caught spending the night in an unapproved location could be sent home. The K-11’s who have lived here for a year under the policies of Joseph ‘The Iron’ Curtain have been pretty vocal about how much they dislike this system. It really hasn’t effected me since I’ve been here such a short period of time, but I do hope the policy changes with the new director. Who that person will be, we still don’t know.

Quickly:
1.) I bought an oven for my apartment. Now I can bake cookies and pizza. Its amazing. I think this is how people felt when the wheel was invented.
2.) Last week I asked some students to write two things that they dislike and one student listed “Saddam Hussein and predatory animals”. Best answer ever.
3.) While throwing snowballs at chickens last week on my walk to school, one chicken dashed away and slipped on a patch of ice. Hilarious.
4.) My friend and fellow English teacher, Umut, asked me today what a ’tool’ is in American slang. As in, ‘that guy is a tool’. We spent a good half hour trying to nail down a definition. It’s tough. Try it at home.

Ok, I have to go lay on the floor by my heater and read. The new year looks surprisingly like the last year.