Pictures!

I understand that there is a way to hide pictures behind links, but I don't know how, and the blogspot help on pictures didn't mention anything of the sort. If someone would like to provide script or a keyword I can look up, I would be happy to hide the pictures so the page will load more quickly.

This second one should be a picture of me, not to be confused with the President of Kazakhstan, guest-teaching in School Number 8 during an English club. We were doing logic problems.



This first one should be of Naserbaev speaking to a crowd here in Petropavlovsk for Maslenitsa, which is a spring holiday I don't really understand at the moment.



Somehow my second block of text became a hyperlink.

International Women's Day

I will begin with the proximate event, and then transition roughly into mundane ramblings.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY!

Although we don't celebrate it in the US, they do in Kazakhstan. It is a major school holiday since, of course, most of the teachers are women. It is a fairly major holiday. It falls on a Sunday this year, but classes were abbreviated on Friday, canceled (I think) on Saturday, and there it is a national holiday on Monday, so school is canceled.

The students performed a concert (read: talent/variety show) for the teachers on Friday, and then reprised themselves on Saturday. Saturday also some students prepared amusing mock lessons for at least some of the teachers.

On Saturday after the concert the male teachers had laid out a tea for the women. This was one of my very few encounters with a group of men here in Kazakhstan, and they sat in almost complete silence at one end of the table while the women chatted and suchlike. They nibbled at the fare and some drank tea. After the women finished the other men and I cleaned up, and the PE teachers came back with real food for their own little meal: a loaf of bread, a two-foot link of sausage, a jar of Ikra (a vegetable past, tastes good, also on pasta) and vodka.

They were still pretty taciturn, even after the younger subset of the faculty; specifically the secretaries, came back in a joined us (they drinking wine as befitted their lack of...cognac). The guys mostly gave toasts, and the girls chatted. I left after the fourth shot and halfway through the second bottle, but they were still going strong and showed no slackening of their interest.

When the guys do speak they are pretty difficult to understand. They tend to mutter or mumble their words, as if enunciation is too much trouble.

Maybe I should write a story. I am surprisingly busy, all things considered. I have my violin, which should take up more time than I really give it. I have my Russian, which is taking up an appropriate, but massive amount of time, and I have my classes, which take up a variable, but currently small amount of time. I have a few other skills I want to specifically work on developing, including learning to effectively use OpenOffice and learning to type swiftly in Cyrillic. The latter of these is currently dependent on acquiring from a previous volunteer software to help practice, although I'm sure I could find a lesson plan somewhere online if I started looking for it. I haven't spent any meaningful amount of time recently reading, though I have enjoyed the first 30 pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I expect to continue through it. My internet connection recently has not been functioning correctly, presumably due to a recent switch of the phone lines. My host mother was kind enough to call them and ask what was happening, and they suggested that we should wait to the end of the week to see what would happen. These last few days I spent a lot of time creating flashcards to get a few weeks ahead so that I have cards to go through during training in Almaty without having to drag my dictionary down. I am looking forward to Shymkent, though I am still a little fuzzy on the details of the trip. Others tell me that it is scheduled properly and will all be fine, so I'll live with that for the time being.

I participated Friday in the initial celebration of Women's Day at school. My part was limited; I congratulated the women on their holiday and wished them health and happiness. The first part was in Russian, but I got through it comprehensively with only two or three tries. Students also performed and the male teachers sang a martial looking song; they were dressed in armor and had swords. They also had an image on the projection screen that came up a few times of a naked man covered only by an apron scrubbing the floor. I hesitate to contemplate where they might have found such an image.

I think I have fixed my 403b, so that should settle in a week or two, and now I need to turn my attention to my taxes, and see what this cool new stimulus will do for me. I need to take a look at the numbers on my W-9's. I remain optimistic.

Year 2008 PC August to December 4 months

Can deduct moving and storage expenses for 2008.

Year 2009 PC January to December 12 months total 16 months

Can deduct storage expenses for 2009, but have no income to deduct it from. Likewise insurance. Is there a way I can move this to 2008 where it would actually help me?

Year 2010 PC January to August or November 8-11 months total 24-27 months

Can deduct cost of getting back to the united states that I pay out of pocket, excluding sightseeing trips, and the cost of moving my stuff from DC to wherever. Problem is that I won't have any significant income for this period either. Can I shift it to 2011?

The answer to these last few important questions seems to be no. My best bet is to take what I can this year, and then make sure I don't move my stuff out of storage until January 2011 so that I can deduct the expense. This is an example of the value of tax planning. If I had examined this carefully I would have rented the full 27 months in advance. On the other hand, my readjustment allowance might be taxable. I should look into that in a year or so. Yay taxes! ::wiggles hands::

I also really like blini. You should all learn to make them.

I thawed I saw the snow melt...

Yes indeed, this city is beginning to fill with mud! I think it will not be as pretty as the snow, but I remain unrealistically hopeful. The lack of snow, on the other hand, should bring about the return of green things, which are also pretty.

As mentioned in my last post, I was successful in moving my audiobooks to their own lonely little corner of my WinAmp library where they are free to beg and plead in vain to return to the group. I also have an audiobook in Russian, which is neat, though I can't yet understand much of anything.

My Russian is proceeding apace. I passed 1000 cards last week, and I am shooting for 250 per week, or about 35 per day. It takes about 2 hours to fully memorize that number, but I have lots of time now since I can't find brown sugar.

Brown sugar, you ask? What an interesting and well-placed tangent, you say! Yes, I am currently in fervent pursuit of brown sugar. I think it was sold in the Raxmet supermarket, but that supermarket is closed for renovation (the locals mutter darkly that they closed to raise all the prices because of the devaluation of the tenge) until the end of March. My usual supermarket doesn't have it and I have been unsuccessful in locating anything looking like brown sugar in the bazaars (unlike the flayed and decapitated goat that I kept passing). I know I can find it in Ramstore, but Ramstore is in Almaty, and I won't be there for a while. I seem to recall that Pyramid sells specialty foods, so today or tomorrow I hope to venture in search of this store somewhere in the vicinity of the train station.

And now we come to the highlight of this post!

Last week was Maslenitza, which is a holiday of some sort that involves agriculture and blini, which are halfway between crepes and pancakes, and are quite delicious. On the Thursday, my school called me in earlier than usual so that I could be prepared to give a speech to the Kazakstanian Minister of Education, who was to visit that day.

After I arrived, I found the school eagerly preparing itself for their distinguished guest. In particular, I saw about two dozen students wearing blue scarves standing at four-meter intervals all along the halls of the school. They had been standing there for several hours, and would stand there for several hours more, until the guest left. These were the atlichniki, the excellent students at the top of their classes and I was told that it was a great honor for them to stand like little unarmed sentries and represent their school. There were also groups of students in classes which had been sent into a holding pattern since the minister was scheduled to visit them, but ended up about two hours late.

Initially I was to give my speech in the main hall, but at some point they decided, presumably since my speech was to be in English and almost noone of the hundred or so faculty and students would therefore be able to understand it, they decided to move me to the Language Center of the school to be their distinguished American volunteer. I bounced around a bit then from class to class before ending up in a Kazakh language Information Technology class. I think it was an IT class, since they had an interactive board and the highest proportion of males that I have seen in a class here, though it might just have been a Kazak classroom fortunate enough to have one of the school's boards.

With suppressed excitement the word passed quickly around the school that the minister had arrived and was beginning his whirlwind tour of the school. Not long after, he stepped into the classroom I occupied. He was accompanied by a whole cluster of aides, sycophants, school officials and a pair of cameramen who captured his every move for posterity. He went to the front of the room and was suitably impressed by the slideshow on the interactive board, delivered a short speech that mentioned interactive, an English cognate in most languages I expect, and began to leave the room.

At this point someone mentioned that an American PCV was in the back and everyone gave a little gasp. The cameramen almost tripped over themselves in order to get a good angle for the the handshake between the minister and myself, and everyone was very impressed by my Kazakh greeting. The minister then said something in English as he left.

One of my teachers, who was guiding me to and fro during this experience then led me across the hall into the English classroom I had been in earlier. I still don't know why we went in, but while we were there the minister had finished his little ditty on a dombra (Kazkh national instrument like a 2-stringed banjo) and entered this room, somewhat surprised to see me again, but over his surprise at hearing me greet him in Kazakh. He poked the student's books a little, and spoke some words before heading out to make his way to the auditorium where he delivered a longer speech.

My guide and I were by that point behind him and since his entourage took up the whole hallway, and in any case it would have been a little implite to sidle past the rolling cameras, we could no longer make it to the auditorium before him. My guide and my counterpart decided that it would be inappropriate to enter after he began speaking, so we hovered just outside the doors for a short time before deciding that it would also be inappropriate to be caught hovering outside the doors when he made his whirlwind exit, so they dispersed and sent me home, having been for the second time featured on a Kazkhstanian television camera, and having shaken the hand of a high government official.

But it gets better!

Earlier that day I had, in passing, been told by one of my teachers that she and a number of her students would be going to a street fair the next day (Friday) to represent the school on the arrival of President Nazerbaev, who was scheduled to arrive and address the populace!

Needless to say, I immediately decided that I too would take this opportunity to gaze upon the weathered and grave countenance of the man who had been leading Kazakstan since five years before it gained its independance from the Soviet Union. Other volunteers in the area shared my view that this would be the right thing to do, although we were aware that Nazerbaev had been scheduled to arrive last year also, but had not done so.

Nevertheless, we showed up at 11, ready to wave our little Kazak flags as Naserbaev approached and passed before the stage full of colorfully dressed and probably very cold traditional Kazak dancers, many of whom appeared to be of Russian derivation. I unfortunately had a class at 12, but was still able to get back in time for the announcement of the president's approach. Thronged by a nearly silent crowd with the occasional waving flag, he walked up the road flanked by a dozen policemen, and gave some sort of address or interview or review of something into a bank of cameras. Then he finally moved up onto the stage and began to speak. I didn't understand a single word, but I am told it was less than inspiring oratory.

He seemed pretty short and unemotive. He was certainly very staid, and looked much older than 55, which I think is his actual age. The crowd was also very quite and sedate, and was much smaller than I had expected, with only a few hundred, maybe a thousand people. They also put the fair together very quickly, and took it all down in less than two hours.

My next post I hope to add a few pictures, but right now my camera batteries are dead. I hope you are all well, and your lives are filled with blini-like goodness.