My Favorite Pasttime

(these photos were all taken in Sumgayit in December but I didn't have an internet connection to post them then. Mostly stuff from our swearing-in ceremony, but in no way related to the post below. enjoy)

Well, after a week of insomnia, frequent guesting due to the holiday, and the general difficulties of living with a deaf father, an idiot brother and a country full of people who are thoroughly convinced that drinking cold liquids as deadly as radiation, I feel I need a catharsis for what I consider to be my most beloved and widely practiced activity: complaint. Where to begin...?

Firstly, as I mentioned in previous posts I am currently looking for a house of my own so that I can escape from my host family who, despite being nice and taking good care of me, are driving me to the point of murderous insanity. My host father, who is disabled and therefore at the house all day every day, is also deaf. He has a hearing aid, but he doesn't wear it. This means that he spends the majority of his day sitting 2 feet away from the TV with the volume turned all the way up, meaning that from 9am until 1am I get to hear every single thing that happens on Azeri or Russian television, the vast majority of which is absolute garbage. A variety of loud bombastic talk shows hosted by hideous old women with enough plastic surgery to make Michael Jackson jealous, call-in talk shows where sad Azeri women bemoan the pains of having a husband who doesn't care enough about them or a mother-in-law who doesn't like them, or, worst of all, Azeri music.

Azeri music is so bad it deserves its own paragraph. I know that those of you who are familiar with my musical tastes may feel that I am in no position to judge the music of an entire culture when I spend the majority of my time listening to blasting death metal, weird techno or uncategorizable insanity. You are wrong, and kindly shut up. As far as I can tell, Azeri music is broken into three categories, all of which are awful in their own special way. First is pop, which despite being crap due to the merits of merely being pop, is made especially awful by the fact that the music is largely produced from a synthesizer that could be bought at Sears circa 1983, as well as the unfortunate reality that apparently nobody in this country has ever heard of musical terms such as key, tone, meter or rythm. This fact bleeds over into the next genre, Azeri folk music, known as "mughan", which replaces the severely outdated synthesizer with traditional instruments such as saz, tar, accordian, etc. This would be all well and good if they didn't have to have someone come and start singing over it, thereby ruining any good qualities the music possessed beforehand. The skill of an Azeri singer is judged not by tonal quality or vocal range or any other things that are normally required for a person to be considered worthing of making noise with their mouth for the enjoyment of others. Instead, it is judged entirely by vibrato, or the ability for one to fluxuate the tone of one's voice as rapidly as possibly. Tone and key are thrown completely out the window here, and the rapidly warbling mess of noise that is the result sounds approximately like an eppileptic cat in heat tied to a drowning parrot on bad acid. The third and final genre is called "meyxana", and is as close an approximation to freestyle rap that drunk Azeri men sitting in chairs with microphones can get to. The problem is, instead of interesting lyrical rythms, humurous observations or other such qualities that make freestyle rap generally listenable and sometimes enjoyable, "meyxana" is an accordian, stone-age synthesizer and electronic drumset PLAYING THE SAME BEAT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER....ad infinitum. The last time I took a taxi from Sumgayit to Baku, the driver was listening to meyxana, and 1 track lasted 45 MINUTES, WITH THE SAME BEAT! Furthermore, the "singers", always two Azeri men sitting in recliners with microphones, don't actually sing, but talk, and say the same thing repeatedly because they either lack the ability to come up with creative rhyme schemes or are on the verge of falling asleep in their comfy lazy-boy.

Perhaps I wouldn't be so bitter towards Azeri music if it wasn't for the fact that everyone in this country seems to suffer from some sort of hearing loss, meaning that it is required to blast music at a volume roughly equivalent to the sound of a hippo being sucked into the engine of a jet liner. I consider my host father a special case, as he really is legitimately deaf, but I was awoken after 4 hours of poor sleep at 8am this morning to the sound of Azeri pop blasting out of our TV not from my father, but my brother, whose hearing is perfectly fine as far as I know. Every second of every day I am bombarded with it from every corner, and as of now I want nothing more than to go to my own house and sit in absolute silence for a week or so.

Anyways, now that I've got that off my chest I feel much better. I'll save Azeri traffic, pensioners, gypsys and being ripped off by sellers at the bazar for another post. Take care!

-K

Novruz: Yaz Gəlir!

(my convo club and a dinner party with my counterpart Hediyye, whose name literally translates to "gift", and a bonfire, explained below)

So, spring approaches here in Azerbaijan, and that means one thing to the people here: Novruz! Novruz, originally meaning"new year" in some super-old language, is originally a Zoroastrian celebration of new life in spring. For those of you who neither know who Zoroaster (aka Zarathustra) is or can't even pronounce his name, it will simply suffice to know that he was the prophet of the first monotheistic religion (predating Judaism, Christianity, etc) and a key developer in theistic morality based on a battle between good and evil. However, none of this is really important, because he has been dead for a few thousand years and the extent of his influence in the cultures of Persia and Azerbaijan has been largely glossed over by the influence of Islam. What is important is that because of him, we now have Novruz, so I get two weeks off of work, a ton of free food and a glimpse at a bunch of traditions and customs that are both intruiging and wildly confusing.

The actual holiday of Novruz is on March 21st, the first day of spring. However, the four Tuesdays preceding it are celebrated in relation to the four elements: water, wind, earth and fire. The first Tuesday involves sprouting wheat in a dish, around which a red ribbon is tied to symbolize the new life of spring. The second and third Tuesdays are a bit confusing to me, as I'm not really sure what it is they did to celebrate it, but they did feed me dolma so it made me happy anyways. The final Tuesday was this week, the day of fire, and to celebrate it we went over to one of my counterparts houses, ate, then built a bonfire and jumped over it. In my experience, jumping over bonfires has always been the preferred activity of bored boy scouts or drunk fratboys, but here it's part of a tradition that's so old it's hard to fathom, and has something to do with new life or granting wishes or genies or something; quite frankly, between the sleep inducing huge meal I had eaten and my relatively poor grasp on the local language, I didn't really understand why I was jumping over said fire, but I went with it and did it anways.

On the 21st there are bound to be more fires to jump over, kids running around to houses knocking on doors asking for baklava, candy and baked goods (ala Halloween), coloring of eggs (ala Easter), and eating a crapton of food (ala Thanksgiving). Also included are a variety of fortunetelling rituals involving dropping wax in water, banging a ring on a string against the inside of a glass, and eavesdropping on your neighbors. Incidentally, according to these rituals I will be married at age 42 to someone whose name starts with "X". This was met with great dispair by the family I was guesting with, who would have preferred I get married at 23 to their daughter. Alas, my bride-not-to-be will probably be better suited to a man who can understand more than half of what she says and has a job he actually gets paid for.

Anyways, the guy at the internet club is telling me to get up so that some kid can sit here and play video games for three hours. I'm gonna go home and build a fire.

-K

Settling In

Sorry for the long wait between posts, especially to my parents and relatives who have been so long itching for a photo or two to peer at in rememberance of their long lost Kevy. Here are a few photos I've shot around Ujar, including a pic with my host dad and two visiting host sisters, both with children in tow (as well as my school, and some shots of the edge of town where the mountains can be seen off in the distance). Unfortunately the kids aren't in the pic, as the baby Alekper was sleeping and the 4-year old terror Ali was taking the picture. The sisters were in town for the International Women's Holiday on March 8th, which for me involved getting a day off of school which I spent in a çayxana reading and drinking tea because the women took over the whole house and sent all the men out on the porch. However, I did get fed really well, and got to meet some host aunts and my host grandmother, who upon seeing her son (my host dad) declared to me in broken Russian "I don't know this man, his mother is dead!". She was a trip, and though she is 76 she had a handshake that could break a finger or two, probably developed over countless years of housework, tilling fields, and the relentless murder of farm animals for great feasts of kebabs and such.

My new home is starting to feel a bit like an actual home now. I've gotten my schedule down, gotten used to the town and its logisitical and cultural workings, and met a few people to whom I say "salam" as I pass them on the street. I've got a barber, a couple of stores that know me, some taxi drivers I know won't rip me off, and a çayxana to go to when I want to drink tea and read. Additionally I've got a few friends who will invite me over on occasion for "guesting", an Azeri term for bringing someone over to your house, feeding them until they can't move, giving them tea, showing them pictures, making them watch wedding videos, feeding them again, and then playing backgammon until about midnight. I can't play backgammon, and I hate watching wedding videos, so I usually just eat as much as I can and then play with the kids (note: Azeri weddings, known as "toy", are nuts. It's more like a giant block party than any sort of wedding we are used to, and I'm sure I'll dedicate a post to it someday). Overall, I'm getting used to the day-to-day of things, existing on Nietzche's maxim of "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" every time I'm presented with a meal of questionable cleanliness or the organized terror of Azeri traffic.

So, for those of you who are missing me or my posts, fear not, for I'm writing this from an internet club I've discovered in Göyçay (the town closest to mine) which has a fast enough connection to send pictures and such. I'll be sure to make it up here on my off days and send a few pics your way as I gather them. For the time being I'm still living with a host family, but hopefully I will find my own place soon, and optimally by mid-April I will be living alone in a place with my own phone line so I can connect to the net any time I please. Till next time,

-Kevin