Summary

I was going to post this on the 29th using the computers and internet connection our school has generously allowed us to use. It turned out to be a bad day to use the internet, however, and the posting was postponed. I may just go to the internet cafe and post it there. Russian is progressing, and I think I successfully conveyed to my host family that I would return at 8pm on Friday. Dinner is very late here, generally 8 or 8:30. I think I have also managed to say that I will be going out with friends tomorrow (Sunday) at 9am, and expect to return by noon or 1, I'm not sure which [chas] means, and I haven't looked it up recently. I will be with a REAL PCV (I'm merely a trainee) so she will have a cell phone with which to advise my host family if I will, in fact, be later than I had thought.

We will be going to the nearby bazzar. My host mother took me there today as well, so I got to have an initial experience of the place. I hope to get as much practice as possible before I am called upon to use this edifice or ones like it on my own. It is very large. I haven't seen one as large in the US, and I think it may be larger than the one I saw in Rome, though I can't remember the name of that one. This bazzar is also permanent; it opens every day. While I don't think we can buy anything here, there is certainly a huge variety of things, and the selection of food is quite wide. I wish I had my own kitchen that I could stock.

The one thing that I didn't see was olive oil although they have a huge variety of vegetable oils. They seem mostly to have sunflowers on the container, and I am told that they are brands from the general area: Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, etc. I did see what looked like arborio rice, however, which I found heartening, and they have spiniach, though I didn't see it yesterday, so I will probably make a spinach risotto at some point. I am also thinking about scones, though I will need to hunt down some baking soda.

Today we also had our first Kazakh lesson. I am told that the language is structurally easier than Russian, but has much more difficult pronunciation. So far that bears out. The language itself is Turkic and originally used the arabic alphabet. For reasons that hadve not been presented, they changed to the Roman alphabet in the 20's or so, and then to a modified version of Cyrillic in the 1940's. At that point they also got rid of many of the more complex aspects of their language like gender. They chose to make the alphabet entirely phonetic so each character represents only one sound, unlike English and Russian where, especially for vowels, the same written character can represent multiple sounds. At the same time, there are 40ish letters, and I'm not entirely clear on the distinctions between some of them, and several are very difficult to pronounce since there the sound does not exist in English.

Much of the vocabulary of modern life does seem to be more-or-less cognate with Russian and English, so I remain hopeful that I will be able to achieve conversational fluency in Kazakh, if not total facility. By the end of this three month training period I need to achieve an Intermediate Low on the American Teachers of Foreign Languages evaluation (I might have that name wrong), which means I need to be able to describe myself and chat a little with the examiner about myself and daily life. I certainly think I can achieve that, so I will shoot for Intermediate High, which requries me to converse with moderate fluency about myself as well as some other topics of interest to me. I know some other volunteers, whom I believe had no prior Russian, were able to achieve that, so hopefully I won't now embarass myself in three months by saying I'm still a novice.

Happy thoughts nevertheless. Looking back over my previous posts, I note that I left some dangling intentions. I chose to focus on Russian during training because in speaking with volunteers and staff I was told that Russian is the more difficult language, and is more commonly spoken. They also said that most PCV's do not become fluent in both languages. I am more concerned with fluency in Russian by the end of my service than Kazakh, so I decided to let Kazakh take a back seat. I do still hope to do well, but Russian will be my focus.

The food also is fairly good. It is different from the food that I generally ate in America. In America most of my meals were influenced heavily by Italian cooking, and had limited meat, were generally pretty dry, and were able to take advantage of the very specific subsets of a given piece of food that I could buy (think boneless chicken breasts; you never really think what happens to the rest of the chicken. The documentary Life and Debt suggests that all the chicken backs and necks that the US produces are exported to the Carribean at cut-rate prices in order to get rid of them).

The food that I have been eating is generally some variety of soup with either pasta or grain, and usually some pieces of meat. There is also generally an excellent salad composed of chopped cucumber and tomoto and onion covered with mayonaise. Their bread is also excellent and served with every meal. Breakfast is generally bread with cheese and sausage. There is also a cafe on the other side of town that has neat tables on elevated platforms. You kneel or sit crosslegged on the cushions around the table. Enough for now.

I am well and we will take a group trip next week to Almaty (where there is a larger bazzar as well as actual shops), the main city in this area and the largest in the country where I will have the opportunity to purchase a cell phone. Incoming calls are free for me, though perhaps expensive for you, and I will be able to receive text messages. I will find some way to distribute the number to interested parties. If you would like my number, send an email or post here.