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.