First Week

Remember that better internet access I was talking about? Well as I've told a couple people there are three computers with internet at our university, but two are in rooms that are almost always locked and the other is in the dean's office (slide over dean, I got a blog to write!). So access might be just as spotty as before.

First week is in the books and first two days of teaching lessons are done. On Wednesday, before I started teaching, I was taken around to several different classrooms to introduce myself, and the reactions ranged from apparent excitement at meeting an American to utter boredom and disinterest. One class almost didn't let me finish my intro spiel before diving into the question-answer session with "How old are you?", "Are you married?", "What religion are you?", and "Do you like your president?" while another class remained completely silent and after an uncomfortable 30 seconds of silence one girl finally looked up and said "we have no questions." (Okay, I said.)

Today I was asked to teach a lesson on cultural sensitivity, focusing especially on ethnocentrism, ethnorelativism, stereotypes, and empathy. When talking about stereotypes the topic of Borat came up, as it often does here, and one student that seemed particularly angry with the film said that he "hate(d) all Jewish people because of Borat." I tried to explain to him that maybe he should focus his hatred just on the man that made the film and not on all Jewish people, to which he seemed to agree, but the anger in his eyes was scary. Suffice it to say people here do not particularly like or appreciate Borat, as it paints an extremely inaccurate and unfair picture of Kazakhstan (not to mention none of it was filmed in Kazakhstan). They also don't especially like when I explain that most Americans' only impression of Kazakhstan (including mine before I came) is/was based on that film. But it was very interesting to discuss these kinds of issues with the students; sometimes they seem to understand and agree with the American point of view of open-mindedness and tolerance, but other times (see above) they seem somewhat traditional, closed-minded, and unjustly prejudiced in their thinking. I guess such is a country that is transitioning from the old world to the new world, for lack of a better way to say it.

Switching gears, I just quickly saw that Barry Bonds was finally indicted (a year too late for baseball's sake), A-Rod is staying with the Yankees for the GDP of Madagascar, and there is no news on the Orioles. As the old saying goes, no news is good news!(<----does not apply here, Chris) Anything else of note please feel free to let me know as I usually won't have time to check both my blog and the news but rather one or the other. But to surmise, the weather is cold, the air is bad, the food is good (if carb-heavy and protein-light), and I'm finally a teacher. So, things are off to a decent enough start.

In KO

I just figured out how to add pictures to my blog - really it's about the easiest thing to do in the world yet somehow took me nearly three months to figure out - but the computer here would not allow me to do it. But I hope to have some pictures posted in the near future.

This will be a pretty short entry since I'm already past my hour of allotted internet use (allotted by my budget, not by the internet cafe), but I arrived in the majestic city of Kzylorda at about 6:30 this morning after another 23-hour train ride. The day before we left Chamalgan the weather changed from unseasonably warm to unseasonably cold and snowy in the span of about 3 hours, so our last day there felt like Christmas with several inches of snow on the ground. There was also a lot of snow on the way to Kzylorda, but by the time we got there it was decidedly warmer and more desert-like.

So far today I've moved in with my new host family - a woman named Rosa and her niece named Gulnur - I've unpacked my bags, taken a 4 hour nap, eaten lunch, and gotten a haircut, where the woman flat-out refused to use hair clippers, insisting that short hair was out of style and long hair was in style, so I could not have my hair as short as I wanted it. (This was translated for me by Gulnur.) You've gotta love Kazakhstani customer service! But I stopped complaining as soon as I remembered it was costing the equivalent of $3.40.

Not a lot of other exciting news to report, except that we were all sworn in as volunteers on Friday, so I'm now a seasoned vet of the Peace Corps, already more than 48 hours into my term of service. And let me tell you the time has absolutely flown by. It already feels like just yesterday that we were being sworn in, and now here it is, Sunday. Hard to believe.

Tomorrow I head into Korkyt Ata University at 10 for the first class of the day, but I most likely won't start teaching until Tuesday or Wednesday. So I have until then to try to figure out what I could possibly teach these students that they don't already know about the English language. Should be interesting. I'm considering a lecture on either sub-prime lending or a brief history of the Orioles, 1954-1963: The Early Years. We'll see. Maybe I can even combine the two topics, seeing as both sounded like great ideas and then became complete disasters. (Go O's!)

I'm hoping to write more later in the week, now that I will have better access to internet.