Two Weeks Left

I started to realize the other day just how much I'm missing the variety of food in America when I was walking home and thought I smelled nacho cheese. It turned out it was just a pile of burning trash in our backyard, but it's amazing how similar this smell is to ballpark nachos. Soon after this disappointing episode I decided I would make spaghetti for my host family before I leave Chamalgan, if for no other reason than I would make enough for myself to eat too, and I really need to have something outside of the five-meal Kazakh rotation, which is delicious - don't get me wrong - but a little variety every now and then doesn't hurt anything.

Yesterday we all returned from our week long site visits, mine in Kzylorda, and while my visit was a lot of fun, it was a lot more fun to reunite with everyone back in Chamalgan. While there we all taught a few classes, got to know our towns and counterparts (the one teacher we'll be most closely working with during our service), and met our prospective host families. That to me was the craziest part of the whole experience- we each got to visit three prospective host families, and after visiting them all we were to choose one to live with for the first six months of our stay (possibly longer if we want). But here we are, a bunch of young Americans with extremely limited (if any) professional experience, not to mention language skills and cultural knowledge, and we're judging these Kazakh families, deciding which one we like the best as if it's a job interview. To me the whole thing felt pretty uncomfortable, since I still can't verbalize most of my thoughts or express myself to people in the local language, and yet I was the one deciding which family to choose.

All this being the case, I have to admit that it was in some ways nice having a choice, and after some careful consideration I think I am going to live with a family of two in a 5th-floor apartment overlooking the Cyr Daria (Secret River), about a five-minute walk from the University. It's a nice apartment, on the inside at least, as were all the apartments I saw (horrible looking on the outside with crumbling cement and no paint, and beautiful on the inside), and the family is very nice. It includes an aunt and her niece, who is a fifth year student at my university and is studying English to become an interpreter. She is already fluent, so I'm not sure how much I will be able to help with her English, and in fact I'm fairly certain she'll be able to help me much more with my Kazakh and Russian.

Walking around Kzylorda this past week, I realized that it wasn't nearly as terrible as everyone had warned me. It's a sprawling city of 200,000, yes the air and water aren't exactly clean, yes there are no hills or mountains anywhere in sight, yes most of the buildings are pretty ugly, yes there isn't a ton of vegetation, yes there is a ton of wind, it was pretty cold, but all things considered I thought it was kind of a neat little town. In the middle of the university there is a big square where people gather for holiday concerts and other get-togethers, there is a pizzeria and a "MakBurger" - a fast food joint at a gas station that serves very Kazakh-tasting hamburgers, along with the other Kazakh staple dishes like Manti, Pelmen, Pilaf, Borsch, and Lagmon - and it was the capital of Kazakhstan for a brief time in the 1920s. Near the square the town also features a billboard with a picture of a man in overalls wearing a baseball cap that bears an eerily striking resemblance to 1983 World Series MVP and long-time former Orioles catcher Rick Dempsey. (I had to stare at this billboard for several minutes before convincing myself it wasn't actually Rick Dempsey.) All in all though I think the town will have a lot to offer and will be an interesting place to work for the next two years. It will be difficult being as much as 40 hours by train away from some of my closest friends in Kazakhstan, but I also think this will make for some en joyable travel to different parts of the country.

When I returned to my host family's house Saturday night, after a week and a half away we were all extremely happy to see each other. My nine-year-old host brother Tolyesh, who seemed especially excited to see me, proceeded to talk for about 45 minutes at dinner about something having to do with Halloween, Spiderman, Freddy Krueger, and the Incredible Hulk (I know these were the topics because these were more or less the only words I understood). After having the floor for the better part of an hour while his grandmother and I quietly sipped our borsch and nodded our heads in unison, he paused long enough for his grandmother to look up and ask in Kazakh, "Are you done?" This comment had me laughing pretty hard, but he was unfazed and continued on for another several minutes talking about how he and his friend had had a pretend fight earlier that day and how they kept switching from being Spiderman to Incredible Hulk to Freddy Krueger. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, and many times during these long diatribes his grandmother will wave her hand at him in disgust as if to indicate she is ignoring him and will start asking me a question. Sometimes I'm able to answer, as long as I can a) stop laughing and b) understand the question.

It's going to be really difficult leaving in a couple weeks because I've gotten to really like my host family and I've grown accustomed to living with them and working/studying here in Chamalgan. But, life goes on, and I'm sure I will be back to visit just as soon as the thermometer in Kzylorda hits 130 next summer. Either that or when the tap water starts boiling as it comes out of the tap, we'll just have to see.

Oh, and sorry to any Indians fans reading this for single-handedly jinxing them and sending them home early from halfway around the world. I shouldn't have just assumed they'd be able to seal the deal with a 3-1 series lead, like they did with ease back in the '97 ALCS against the Orioles. In fact back then it was so easy that if I remember correctly they had Tony Fernandez hitting series-clinching homeruns for them. If I remember correctly. (Which I do. All too well). But really, sorry. And now the Red Sox are probably going to win it all. How thrilling! Their fans really deserve it. Really, I can hardly contain all my excitement for them.