Sorry and a Request

Sorry if everyone got another invitation email to this blog- I noticed that most of the people I had sent emails to months ago weren't on the list of people allowed to access the site. And I know some people have been having trouble accessing it. So I just reinvited everyone. It would be a whole lot easier if I didn't have to password protect it like this, but I'd rather stay on the safe side of things.

Anyway, I'd like to make a quick request to anyone reading this. Nearly everyone here has at one point or another asked me what Americans think of Kazakhstan. The answer for me before I came was of course "not much." But I think it would be really exciting for the students at my school to hear directly from Americans about what they think of/know about Kazakhstan. So if you have the time, I'd invite anyone reading this to send me your thoughts on my glorious new country. It can be one sentence or one page or however much you want to write; I think the important thing is that people here get a good sense of what Americans think of their country, because that seems to be very important to a lot of people here. I'm hoping to get enough responses to read some aloud in class and make it into part of one of my lessons. So any thoughts you have would be great, you can email them or leave them in a comment here.

On a different note, a quick sports update- the World Languages Faculty continued its run of utter non-dominance today with a resounding 16-2 defeat in basketball. I learned a lot about Kazakhstani basketball in the process too; they tend to not call fouls, and they play basketball the way they play soccer- lots of contact and lots of crazy off-balance shots and not a lot of structure or bodies under control. It got pretty frustrating as I'd watch guys dribble through traffic with their heads down and then throw up a crazy shot off the top of the backboard from behind the three point line, and also frustrating when I was mauled every time I touched the ball and only one foul was called, which just meant I got to take the ball out and have the same thing happen again. My last chance at athletic competence is ping-pong, but in playing for fun a few times I've realized there are a lot of pretty good players here that will immediately exploit my strategic weak point of not moving my feet. The funny thing is that when Brad and I used to play he'd be the one that would stand still and make me run all over the place. I guess in my advanced age I've adopted the feet-nailed-to-the-floor strategy, not so effective against guys that have been playing competitively for 15 years. So if the ping-pong experiment fails my last resort will be to start a baseball team in order to assert my athletic dominance, in something.

And One More

Here is my new address, as I promised (myself I would put in my blog), in case any of you are just dying to send me cards, letters, or packages full of American candy:

Kazakhstan, Kzylorda
120014
Zheltoksan 32, OC 14, P/O 46

And in Cyrillic:

Kазаkстан, Kызылорда
120014
Желтоkсан 32, ОС 14, А/Я 46

It's probably a good idea to use two labels, one with the English and one with the Cyrillic version. Hope all is well back in America.

Worth a Try

After waiting nearly an hour for the video to upload, it somehow didn't work. So now let me try a picture instead. It's a picture of me and my extended Kazakh family at New Year's. I'm the one in the middle, in case you couldn't tell us apart (many can't).

A Quick Video

Here's a video of one of my students singing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" at a holiday party. I may or may not make a surprise appearance at the end. I'm hoping to add another video and some pictures a little later.

Until then not a lot new to update. I did the math and realized that by the time I start teaching again (next Monday) I will have been on break for as long as I've been teaching here (one month, 5 days). In my downtime I've been working on integrating myself into the community, which for the most part means yelling at people instead of talking to them, not holding doors open for people (and in fact closing them in people's faces), remembering that there is no such thing as a line in Kzylorda, and slowly getting accustomed to the glacial cold.

This week saw the beginning of the University sports competition, where all the different faculties compete against each other. So far we've only played volleyball and soccer, and lost every game. It's pretty interesting to see how intense everyone gets when we lose points, as if we've been practicing for years and this is the culmination of all our hard work and we're blowing it. No one on my team seems particularly concerned with the concept of bumping, setting, and spiking, and then they yell when we lose. Maybe by next year I'll be one of them, yelling at everyone in Kazakh. (I can only hope my Kazakh will be good enough to do that in a year.)

But apparently this competition thing is a pretty big deal, because the local news station came by on Tuesday and did a story on it. Each team marched into the gym one at a time while a band played, and the school rector made a speech in Kazakh I didn't understand. Later my dean, a wonderful, energetic man that speaks near flawless English, pulled me over to do an interview, along with a Turkish teacher in our department. I say interview, but all it was was basically me saying my name, where I'm from, what I teach, and what sports I will be participating in. The "interview" aired that night, and I was able to take video of it with my digital camera, so I'm hoping to post it on here soon. I think people will get a good laugh out of it.