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So I neglected to mention anything about the Erik Bedard trade. It’s good to see the O’s finally making a committed effort to full-scale rebuilding. To be fair though, until now they didn’t really have two players good enough to get a 10-player haul like this. As it usually goes with them though, chances are all ten will flake out either immediately or within 2-3 years, depending on when all of them will suffer their career-ending injuries and/or decide eating 6 meals a day at McDonald’s is more important than throwing in between starts (I wish you were reading this, Sidney Ponson).

On to (only slightly) more important things here in Kazakhstan. Although I’m busy, in Kyzylorda I’ve found I have a lot of time to myself to think, mostly as I’m walking around the city getting from place to place. Usually I think of what I think are great, hilarious blog topics, but unfortunately I’m not able to record my thoughts as I’m walking; the people that see me laughing and talking to myself already think I’m weird enough. Either they stare at me because I’m obviously American (although I swear I don’t look any different from the Russians here), because I look crazy laughing and talking to myself, or because I carry a Nalgene. No joke, at least half of all people I walk past on the street, if I follow their eyes, are looking not at me but at my water bottle. To people here it is the strangest thing in the world. I’ve had literally dozens of people ask me what’s in it. One student told me a few weeks ago “You know, I shouldn’t tell you this because it’s a big secret, but everyone at the school talks about and wonders what’s in your water bottle.” I found out the hard way that people here tend toward the gullible (read, overly influenced by the Soviet Union’s storied love affair with alcohol) side when I joked that it’s vodka inside, and people didn’t laugh but nodded knowingly. A few times I’ve had to tell them “No I’m just joking.” On that note, I also could very easily have had my host sister still believing that I dated both Jennifer Love Hewitt and Katie Holmes in the late ‘90s, but I felt too guilty keeping the lie going more than a few minutes. When I asked why she believed me, she said “You’re all from America, it’s possible!”

I unwisely deduced from these interactions that people don’t really know about or use sarcasm as a form of humor here, so I decided to do a lesson centered around the theme of sarcasm. As I found out early in the first lesson, it turns out there’s a Russian word for sarcasm pronounced “sarCASM” with the stress on the last syllable instead of the first. This has happened several times, when I think I have to go into great detail to explain a word to a class, and it turns out there is a Russian cognate that sounds exactly the same as the English word (same thing for “irony,” for example). As a result I hear “Yes, we know, we understand, please stop talking” pretty often. This only stops me for a minute though. A couple of the examples of sarcasm I used were when Joanna would dump an entire bowl of sugar on top of her grapefruit in the morning and someone would say “Why don’t you have some grapefruit with that sugar?” or when we would all go to a fancy new restaurant when we were younger and Betsy and I would order the chicken fingers/french fries dish, and we’d hear “Wow you guys are really branching out this time” (I took this opportunity to explain “branch out”). Most of the students seemed to understand these, though they didn’t find them all that funny. The important thing, though, is that I found them funny.

As for the weather here, it actually got above freezing for a few days in a row last week, which made for a nice sopping muddy surface on the streets, sidewalks, areas inbetween the streets and sidewalks, floors of the buses and marshrutkas, and pretty much every surface that humans might potentially need to walk on. I’ll put it this way, I’ve stopped licking the bottoms of my shoes every afternoon when I get home.

Most of the third-year university students in the teaching department are on their “practice” this semester, which means they are teaching at a local school for 8 weeks. I’ve gotten the opportunity to sit in on a few of their lessons this week, and they’ve been thoroughly impressive and entertaining at the same time. For example, during an English Week competition between the seventh grade students at one school, one team gave themselves the name “Happy Britain,” which made me laugh a little. The students were hilarious- I served as a judge for a couple of these competitions, and every time I awarded the highest score, a 5, the members of the receiving team would pump their fists and yell “Yes!” This only made me want to award a 5 to every team, every time, which I pretty much was doing anyway. Another entertaining aspect was that after each round of one competition, a contestant would be eliminated. Based on their performance in that round, we the judges had to choose which student would be eliminated, and after we made our choice, the teacher would say, “Ok, you must leave now.” One time the eliminated student tried to sit down in a different chair and the teacher said “No you must leave the room.” Pretty harsh. I’ve gotten more and more used to this kind of thing, but I still couldn’t really believe it. These kids here must have pretty thick skin; at age 12 that would have at least sent me running to the bathroom crying. Of course I also cried every time I struck out until I was about 15. I’m not sure how either of these things pertain to what I’m talking about, or why I’m writing about them, so I guess I’ll stop. But I just hope I’m asked to attend many more of these English competitions over the next two years.