Rockies Series-Bound?

After getting the baseball update from my sister last night, it sounds like the '07 World Series will most likely be Rockies-Indians. If there is anyone on the planet that made this prediction at the beginning of the year, and was not joking at the time, I'd like to meet you. My contact info is in the last blog entry.

I had a big long post typed out on my computer, but because mail takes over a month to arrive here and I therefore still don't have a flash drive, I will have to once again wing it.

News at the Almaty internet cafe is they've added a TV that apparently plays nothing but rap videos from America. Right now there's a song playing that started out as a loose cover/remix of the 80s hit "Tainted Love" and then at the end they started singing "Black Betty." I'm pretty sure these were both part of the same rap song, for some reason. If anyone else has heard this song, I'm sorry.

Right now all the volunteers are here in Almaty at a two-day counterpart conference, where we have met the teachers that we will be working with for the next two years. After this conference (tomorrow), most of us will leave for a one week visit to our respective sites. While there we are supposed to teach lessons, give a presentation about Peace Corps to our school staff, meet our prospective host families, and generally get acquainted with our towns. I met my counterpart yesterday and she is a very nice woman who speaks excellent English (which I think is pretty lucky for me according to the level of English of some of the other counterparts) and has been teaching at Kzylorda State University for five years. Although teaching at a university was not my first choice, I'm now pretty excited about getting going with it and seeing what it's like.

I leave for my visit to Kzylorda at about 4pm tomorrow (Saturday) and will be on the train for just a shade under 24 hours, which should give me plenty of time to stare aimlessly out the window at the Kazakhstani "steppe," as they call it. (I'm still not totally sure the meaning of this word, but as far as I can tell it means some combination of desert-flatland-nothingness.) I was talking the other day with a volunteer who is preparing to leave Kzylorda, and I made the mistake of asking her about the weather in the summer. She said that for about a 6-week stretch this past summer, the temperature during the day was about 120-125. After fainting, coming to, asking her what had just happened, asking her to repeat herself several times, and then doing the math in my head, I realized that that is really, really hot. So we'll see how much time I end up spending in Kzylorda next summer versus, say, far northern Kazakhstan.

Other news- our talent show went off without a hitch last Friday which was a pleasant surprise considering how underprepared we were for all the logistics of it. It also reached previously unseen levels on the Adorable Scale. Performances included a rendition by two girls of the timeless Britney Spears classic "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman," a very Kazakh version of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" (one of my all-time favorites), a poem about simple addition, a beautiful Hawaiian Hula dance led by our resident Hawaiian volunteer, and a very politically-incorrect but very cute Thanksgiving Play which included lines such as "Look, I caught a fish! But I'm still hungry..." and "How, me Big Cheif Wambossat." Of course what remained of the Five Little Elephants brought down the house with their performance of the popular remix version titled "Three Little Elephants." The video I took of this is what I'm now going to watch anytime I start feeling sad about things.

I swear I have more written on my computer at home, but this is all I can think to write about for now. I hope it's a good World Series- the last Series I didn't watch I believe included a pretty catastrophic earthquake, so I hope this one manages to avoid natural disasters of that kind. And whether it's Red Sox or Indians, go Rockies!