Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you all! This is postdated, of course, but I was thinking about the outside world at the time.

Interesting events occurred as the days around New Year's were associated with my first real parties in Kazakhstan and my first experience with Bishbarmak, the national dish of Kazakhstan. Each in its time, however.

My college faculty held a party in the school with feasting, dancing, and departmental skits. There was also, of course, drinking. There was, in fact, more alcohol per person than I have seen before, but less than I had expected. Each table of about 10 people split 2 bottles of champaign, two bottles of red wine, and a liter of vodka. This was polished off in about 3 hours, together with a fair amount of food, most of it excellent. My table had the English teachers (all female) and the PE teachers (all male) so I had some champaign and then some shots with the PE teachers while avoiding most of the offers to dance. I couldn't guess at the style of music, but they seemed like dance tunes and most people seemed to have a good time dancing. Each table also presented a short skit, and the English teachers presented a popular, although pretty morose, New Year's song from 1979, which I later heard almost everywhere I went, in supermarkets, on the TV, on the radio, on the main street.

In the evening one of the other volunteers hosted a dinner for his counterpart and the rest of the volunteers, and one of their host mothers and there was more vodka, and, of course, champaign.

I diverge here for a moment on champaign. I'm sure there are good champaigns, and I may even have tried them in the past. A bubbly, dry, sharp wine with a clear pale golden color. The cheap stuff here, however, is terrible, and certainly never came from the Champaign region of France. It is sickly sweet, and has no redeeming features at all, except perhaps for US college students for whom it would cost substantially less per liter than Pabst.

Returning to the thread of narration, we sang the first verse of Old Lang Syne, because nobody new the second or third, and parted ways. The following day, New Year's Eve, we again were hosted by a volunteer and ate spicy things and drank, of course, vodka. We then drifted to the apartment of another volunteer whose host mother hosted us for a while with another dinner and more vodka. President Naserbaev, looking rather terrible in poor lighting and in front of a washed-out background gave a speech on TV and after clock struck we again sang the first verse of Old Lang Syne, for which I really need to learn the latter verses, and traveled in a group to Constitutsia, which is a large and very pretty pedestrian street where lie the old museum, the city park, and the city and oblast administration buildings.

For New Year's, the street is decorated with blocks of ice cut from the lake nearby and stacked into rails for the street, a bandstand complete with ice backdrop, platforms for giant Christmas trees, and two large structures for children to slide down on the ice. It is pretty cool. See the enclosed pictures!

Anyway, we also played a game or two or three of Risk over those few days. A few volunteers from outside the city came in so we gathered together to chat and walk around town and suchlike to celebrate the new year and had some vodka.

Concerning vodka, which I had never really tried in the past except to decide that I despised the crap that comes in big plastic bottles: There are some types that are not that bad. The standard brand here seems to be Status. This is what my school got for their party and what the volunteers seem to buy by default. It is much, much better than the plastic bottle stuff in the US, though still a bit harsh on the pallet. It costs about 420 tenge for half a liter, which is about $4. I did spend some time over the holiday haranguing the older volunteers about the various qualities of vodka, and they asserted that there are better ones which are more expensive, and they recommended two brands in particular which are quite expensive, one almost 1300 tenge, nearly $11! At any rate, by putting up some money I convinced one to journey into the cold and the dark in search of one of these mystical bottles, and though he returned with a third brand, Zelony Marka or Green Label, it was noticably better than the standard Status. Someone also later bought a bottle of some 85 tenge vodka and the difference was very much noticeable in the other direction. You get what you pay for when you spend 50 cents on half a liter of alcohol.

A note to younger readers if there be any: I do not recommend drinking to excess, and you should eat heavily when drinking, especially strong drink. The standard Russian feast includes lots of alcohol, but little drunkenness both because you are expected to eat correspondingly huge quantities of meat, fat, and buttery goo, and because it is socially impolite to become too drunk. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a social prohibition against drinking early, so sometimes you'll see guys staggering to the corner store at 11am to get another bottle.

The holiday was very enjoyable, and I look forward to next year, though all the locals were sad that there wasn't any new snow.