The intervals widen

Hey everyone, sorry it's been so long since my last post. Here in my Ujar, my new home sweet home for the next two years, all the place that say "Internet Club" are big fat lies, and should be labeled "Adolescent Video Game Club". The only time I have access to internet here is when I visit nearby PCVs who have it at their house, which happens about once a week but usually not long enough for me to put anything interesting on the blog. Hopefully come April when I get to move into my own place it will have a phone line that will be suitable for an internet connection, so I'll be able to post more regularly. Until then, posts are going to be sparse and photos probably won't be included since I don't have the bandwidth to load them here.

As far as my new home goes, it has its good and bad sides. One good thing is that it's conveniently located slap in the middle of the country, which makes travel to other regions relatively quick and stress free. From here in about 20 minutes I can get to Goychay, the nearest town which is nestled in the foothills of the Caucusus. Another hour from there in either direction and I can get to Mingechevir, one of the larger cities in the country, also sitting at the foothills of the mountains, or Ismayili, a town which decided to surpass all this sitting at foothills business and go straight up into the mountains. I went there last weekend to visit, saw the mountains, walked about in the snow, spent way too much time in the cold weather, and now I'm sick as can be.

All these nice travel spots make up for the town of Ujar itself. After a month of being here I've decided that the main form of entertainment here is extremely long, intense, and overwhelming boredom. The aforemention "internet clubs" are the closest thing they have here to an entertainment venue besides the train station, which offers excitement in the form of a ticket to somewhere else. Other popular activities include driving aimlessly and wrecklessly (thankfully an activitiy reserved for those lucky enough to own vehicles) and "squatting", a very Azeri activity that goes something like this: a group of two or more males ranging in age from 13-50 acquire cigarettes, sunflower seeds, and a street corner. Said group then proceeds to squat on said street corner, smoke said cigarettes and eat said sunflower seeds, whilst staring at passers-by and occasionally muttering the offhand comment to one of them, which if you're an American is usually "Hello, what is your name!", followed by a stupid looking face when you respond because this is the full extent of their knowledge of the English language. The most popular form of work here in unemployment, and overall it's like living in a ghost town that happens to have several thousand people still residing in it.

Other than all that, my life is going along swimmingly. My school is a small one, just over 300 students, and when I'm not teaching classes or wandering out trying to figure out which class I'm supposed to be teaching, I'm sitting in the teachers room listening to gossip about children and clothes and neighbors and other such things from the teaching staff, all of whom with the exception of myself and 3 other teachers are female. This doesn't bother me so much as make me nervous, since the culture here has a ton of somewhat foreign and sometimes seemingly absurd notions that dictate the interactions between men and women, none of which I am going to go into here since it could make an entire post by itself. However, most of the teachers in the school are significantly older and marrieder than I am, which means that as long as I don't do something extraordinarily vile or really piss off their husbands I'm safe. For the most part, these potential problems are the least of my worries, and I've been focused more on trying to figure out which classes I'm going to teach and how I'm going to get the kids in these classes to listen to me and take me seriously. Even kids here who have been studying English every year since the first grade can still barely piece together a sentence, and suddenly I've been thrust into the middle of it with the expectation that with a mere touch and wave of my hand I can bring to light all the locked away (read: nonexistent) English knowledge in their brains. It is a daunting task indeed. Fortunately I've got two years to get good at it.

So that's all for now, I'm going to head home, drink a couple liters of orange juice and take a two day nap in order to try and kill this cold I've got. Keep an eye out for intermittent updates over the next few months, but not too close of an eye because it might be quite disappointing.