Happy Day of Friendship Between the All the Nationalities of Kazakhstan , formerly International Workers Day! While I don’t particularly care for the communist propaganda that spawned the original holiday, I do like taking a random Tuesday off work. And a Day for All the Nationalities (we have more than 100!) is a nice symbol.
Today I “went to nature”, in the words of my counterpart. Irina, her sister, husband, and I all piled into their little Lada (a Russian automobile brand) and drove south, out of the city limits, and past Bishkul, the suburb housing the volunteer Dorothy. We set up camp at the edge of a large, deciduous forest of what I believe were birch trees, but may have been aspen. They were tall and white, and apparently can be “milked” for some kind of juice-like substance. I tried some it was terrible. Whatever they were, we had them in Eagle in large quantities, but I cannot remember ever drinking anything that came out of them. Now that I think about it a little more, I am pretty sure they were aspen.
Irina’s sister brought about 150 lbs. of food, which we dug into as best we could. Eventually, Irina’s nephew Jenya, his girlfriend, and Irina’s son Jora showed up as well. We prepared some shashlik (meat kebobs), ate some fresh vegetables, and generally enjoyed our picnic. Eventually the women wandered off to gather mushrooms (returning with far more than they could possibly need), while Jenya and I used the father’s hatchet to whittle makeshift wooden spears. Jenya is in the egg-transportation business, and thus had a lot of cardboard boxes in the back of his truck. We used these to construct a target, and had a jolly good time pretending to bring down a mammoth in the Siberian wilderness. After a particularly good series of puncturing throws I managed to quip in Russian, “We eat tonight!” (literally: today we will eat dinner!), earning a hearty laugh, and perhaps my first grammatically correct Russian joke.
All in all, it was a good day, though thoroughly unproductive. I did manage to punish some of my students who missed my class, by forcing them to take a class on the holiday. I also began a collection of essays by Isaiah , who I am ashamed to say I have never read before (or Kant, or Hegel, or Carr, or practically any other philosopher classic or modern). I hope I have more relaxing days like this in the summer.
To recap the rest of the preceding two weeks:
On Monday I left my gym bag on the trolley bus on the way to school. Now, besides the fact that the bag contained my precious Nike’s, which are worth their weight in gold mixed with cocaine here, the bag also had significant emotional value. A judo bag, it was given to me by my Sensei John Gregory upon my winning the state championship back when I was twelve (or was I thirteen? Miriam?). John Gregory—I always said his full name—later killed himself, and the bag is really my strongest connection to him. Thus, you can imagine how desperate I was to reclaim the bag: I went back to the bus stop and waited for about half an hour and six buses on both sides of the street before the exact bus I was on returned. I gave the bus girl who held on to the bag 500 tenge, which is a trifle, but hopefully enough to express a portion of my gratitude. She actually yelled at me to keep my money, and I was forced to wedge it between her and the seat before I leapt off the bus at the next stop. Hopefully I did not commit some kind of horrible cultural faux pa (as it would have been in Japan ).
Shortly after my last post, my mother came home with a surprise: we have a new dog! It is small, helpless, worth 500 USD, and poops everywhere. It is also incredibly cute, in a
hideously ugly way. It looks like a Gremlin©. I will try to post photos on flickr as soon as I can.
In other dog related news there has been a minor scandal here in Petro involving the stray dog population. Stray dogs here are a significant problem hundreds wander the streets. A pack (seriously, a pack) of these dogs lives near the House of Mercy, where the PHP library is located. Anyway, a few months ago the government instituted a program whereby people could bring stray dogs to the government vets for sterilization, receiving a small monetary reward for their good deed. However, it now appears that no sterilizations have occurred. Moreover, an inordinate number of dead dogs have appeared around town, many with blood coming out of their ears or mouth. No one knows why these dogs are dying, or who has caused it, but the rumor is that government employees have been feeding them poison. This is preferable to the old system of dog disposal the dog catcher shooting dogs in the street as it is safer for the town’s residents, but does not seem humane, as the poisoned dogs seem to be dying rather agonizing deaths. I will post a picture of one of the dogs that I found near my house on flickr too.
Speaking of dying, my laptop is on its last legs. It recently contracted a slew of viruses and spyware, most of which I destroyed using AVG 7. But the notebook overheats and crashed all the time now, and struggles to open anything at all. Even typing this in Word is causing it to overheat. Fortunately, before the computer went into its death spiral I was able to move most important files to the new mobile hard drive my parents sent me. I planned on getting a new laptop once I entered graduate school; now the purchase is unavoidable. Seen as how I bought this Fujitsu in 2002, I’d say it has had a pretty good run.
I sent away for a visa to , but there already seems to be some kind of problem. I am hoping to get to Urumqi , Xingjian by June 6th, which means I have to leave here about June 1st. Unfortunately, they are now saying that my visa will not be ready until May 26th. That cuts it way too close for my tastes. I hope to go back to the travel agent on Friday and see if there is anything that can be done.
Finally, in a piece of exceptionally good news, we held our first movie night last week. Though only eight people came to our screening of Little Miss Sunshine, I am confident that we will be able to meet or exceed those numbers tomorrow when we show Impossible 3 . Then, I am hoping for a full house (between 20 and 30) in two weeks when we show Casino Royale, courtesy of Meghan’s expanding DVD collection. I am praying this will be a major revenue stream for the soup kitchen, though for the time being it is a very modest affair. We also need to figure out a way to pay the PHP bills over the summer, when apparently every student goes out of their way not to learn anything. Most of them don’t work either, so I am curious to see how they spend their time.
До свидания
Hmmm, I don't work and spend a lot of time watching movies; can you hook me up with a citizenship form? As for your computer; dude, that thing was always overheating even waaaayyy back in the day when we lived together (that's what you get for buying a Japanese computer--good cars, bleh computers). My Welfare Unit is even still alive after nearly 5 years, and it was created by buying random generic components of low quality and putting them together when I only sorta knew what I was doing (seriously, my OS is a bootleg copy of WinME, and that was an upgrade). I will give it credit for being a fighter though, always seems to come back from the dead in some reduced capacity.
Posted by: Conan | 05/03/2007 at 04:00 AM