From the Bowels of Hell: Summer in Ujar

Forgive the title, but if you were here you would understand. With the exception of a week or so it's been at least 100 every day for like 3 months here. At its worst it got up to 110 for about a week and a half, then tapered off to 108 for a couple more and finally fell below 100 last week. The past couple of days storms have been rolling through and brought the temp down to a nice cool 80, though from what I've heard it's not destined to last. I haven't posted in so long because the only working internet club in my town wouldn't really be well aptly described as "working". It's so eaten up with viruses that the net only works only half the time. Furthermore, it's about a 30 minute walk away, and is located inside an unairconditioned box that maintains an air temperature that I would estimate is only slightly higher than the surface of the sun. Considering this, I usually find myself less than enthusiastic about coming here unless I can make the walk without losing 5 pounds of body water in the process. I apologize to those of you, especially my family, who have been waiting patiently by the computer to get news from me. So, here it is.

First off, I've finally planned my summer trip, though by the time I get there it won't really be summer anymore. I'm going to be spending a week in the ancient and lovely city of Istanbul. I've secured my flight and a cheap but reliable hotel room for the week, and the rest I'm playing by ear. I'm flying solo, though a few of the departing volunteers from AZ will be there for a few days during my stay. I'm gonna get to see the Hagia Sophia, the Grand Bazaar, the Blue Mosque, and all kinds of other neat stuff. Plus, since I now speak Azeri (sort of), that means I will be able to understand Turkish (less sort of). I'm looking forward to a break from Ujar and Azerbaijan in general before the school year starts again.

As far as home life goes, I'm basically sitting around reading a lot and trying not to boil in my own heat-stressed bodily fluids. I've become exceedingly good at freecell and solitaire on the computer, and extremely bad a showering regularly. I've adopted a stray cat who was abandoned by its mother in my yard. At first he was totally terrified of me, but now he is just about the neediest animal I have ever seen in my life. He will NOT SHUT UP. Fortunately for him he's cute and I like cats, otherwise he would have been left outside the gate to fend for himself. I have dubbed him Magnus the Brave, on account of the fact that he is afraid of his own shadow. Pictures will follow when I have time to get to a computer whence I can send them.

Finally, I've been trying to get more acquainted with people in my community by essentially doing as they do. This means I spend a good amount of time sitting outside the local store, at the local tea house and the local restaurant/bar hanging out with "the guys". "The Guys" are all people who live nearby me in Ujar, all of varying ages, professions, marital status and walks of life. I've shared countless glasses of tea (yes, glasses. They drink it piping hot, but out of tumblers, so you get used to the end of your fingers having no sensation after a while), beer, and more than a few reluctantly accepted shots of vodka. Out of these interactions I have found a few fundamental truths about the Azeri soul. First off, family, especially kids, is the be all and end all of Azeri life. These guys, or the married ones at least, care more about their kids than anything else, for which I applaud them. However, this also means that anyone older than 20 that isn't married with a kid on the way is considered a bit odd. To them, the proper course of life is 1) grow up, 2)get married, 3)start a family, 4)find means of supporting said family. Because of this they cannot for the life of them understand why I am neither married nor have any desire to get married. Without fail, every single conversation I have with a group of men here will inevitably result in at least one, and usually many, attempts to convince me to find a girl and get married in Azerbaijan. To them, which girl, her personality and our potential compatibility are completely irrelevant. As far as they're concerned, I just need to get married quick and then figure things out afterwards. Outside of family though, most guys here are just trying to live the best they can with what they have and try to have fun with it. Average salary here is around $100 a month, which is very little but enough considering that most households have about 4 incomes and no rent to pay. They like to do some irritating things, like constantly argue about money as if arguing about it makes more of it appear, and when I grew a goatee earlier this summer they constantly gave me crap about it because they think beards look bad. But for the most part they just like to joke and have fun, which is about all there is to do here in this flat, hot, boring town.

That's all for now, I'll post more when I'm in Istanbul. Peace.

Son Zeng

Pictures from Son Zeng ("last bell"), the last day of school, and my extended host family who I visited in the village for a Son Zeng party. Copious amounts of fresh mutton kebabs (super fresh, killed in the yard 2 hours before cooking), bozbosh (a hearty, buttery soup made from beef or chicken and chickpeas), and vodka (by the men only, of course) were had by all.

More pics

Pics from a teachers' seminar in Ujar in May.

Silver Lining of a Very Hot, Boring Cloud

I'm stuck in Baku for three days for a teachers conference that is going to be extraordinarily boring, but the hotel they put us up in is awesome so I get free wifi connection at high speed all week. I'm going to just post pictures randomly for the next few days as I have time, and I'll provide detailed explanations some time in the distant future...or never. This first round of pics is from my trip to Zagatala and Balaken last weekend. Zagatala is a town way up in the mountains, close to the border of Georgia and Russia, and Balaken is north of Zag literally right on the border. They are fairly liberal areas compared to the rest of conservative Azerbaijan, and the mountains and scenery are beautiful. Balaken has a huge Heydar Aliyev (the former president) park with a gondola from the big hill at the end and some carnival rides at the bottom. Also across from the park they have the coolest bar I've ever seen in this country, with tables made out of giant tree stumps and bear and wolk skins hanging on the walls.

Ev Sweet Ev

If it would please the Court, I would like to present exhibits A through E, photographs of my ev (Azeri for "home"). Included are pictures of the porch with two doors which lead into the respective bedrooms, the kitchen (the stove is to the left, out of shot), the house itself seen from the yard amidst the gigantic weeds I've yet to cut down because I don't enjoy cutting an entire yard with scissors, the hamam (shower house) and the dreaded outhouse. Anyone offended by the outhouse picture can direct your comments to one Ms. Linda Neighbors, who specifically requested it. Anyone offended by the rest of the pics has a bug up their butt and needs to either get it out or stop reading this blog.

I present these exhibits for the consideration of the people of the Jury.

I rest my case.

Verdict: Guilty

Journey to Porkland

Having been made jealous by various people I met at our legendarily boring In-Service Training meeting in Ganja (yes, that is the name of a city here), I decided to actually get out of my cave in Ujar and do some travelling. We made a trip to a village called Nij a couple hours west from Ismayilli, a town in the mountains where some friends live. This village is mainly famous for being one of the only predominately Christian areas in a decidedly Muslim Azerbaijan, which means two things for the Western visitor.

Firstly, there are a few very old churches which are quite a sight in their own right but are also a reminder of the once close ties to the peoples of Armenia and Azerbaijan who have since grown to hate one another over long and complicated conflict over the Garabagh region in the southwest of Azerbaijan. Our guide for the trip was a very nice man named Sergei, which I thought rather strange since that is a Russian name and not at all common for ethnic Azeris to have. After a while in the village, though, it became clear that this was not like the rest of the villages of Azerbaijan. While everyone spoke Azeri, the common language was Russian in the town, and also a smaller language called Udi which is only spoken by about 5 thousand or so people in that village and the surrounding areas. The people we met were mainly speaking Azeri for our benefit, because out of the five of us there only I spoke Russian. Furthermore, after a long, high speed and very one-sided conversation between me and Sergei over the history of the region I was reminded that I do not in fact speak Russian so much as stumble around with it in a haphazard fashion, and I was finally able to admit to myself that in only 6 months in Azerbaijan my Azeri skills have far surpassed those I acquired with the equivalent of 3 years of Russian study. Guess it goes to show what living in a country does for language acquisition. Anyways, one thing about this trip to see the churches that struck me is illustrated in the picture of the writing above. This was found above the doorway of one of the churches we visited, and I recognized it as Armenian. However, when asked what language this was (we also thought it might be old Georgian) Sergei claimed he had no idea. We figured out later that he was either embarassed or afraid to admit that there is an Armenian orthodox church standing in his town, while every other remnant of any historical ties with Armenia have been wiped out of the rest of Azerbaijan with extremely extreme prejudice. Also telling was the fact that the church with the Armenian writing lay in decaying disarray while the other church in the region which was devoid of such script had been restored to a pristine condition, complete with gate and visitors rooms. Anyways, it's sad to see that two people who once lived side by side for so many centuries could fall into such a hateful conflict over the posturing of elitist politicians over a small strip of land and some very different notions of right and wrong.

But, this sad moment did nothing to ruin the second (and best) reason to visit the village of Nij. Being Christian, the people of Nij have one thing in great supply that the rest of Azerbaijan is decidedly lacking in: PORK! And due to the recent outbreak of swine flu, we showed up just in time. We learned as soon as we arrived that pork was almost out of supply due to a recent mass slaughter of swine in the area as a precautionary measure. We wandered up to the town restaurant and sat down to the last pork kebabs he had left in the house, and they were D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S! Some of the best pork I've had outside of the roadside barbeque joints in the backwoods of my home state, it was melt in your mouth delicious and accompanied by fresh greens and yogurt sauce and a fruit called "alcha".

Alcha is about the size and shape of a large olive, green in color and tastes a lot like a fruit I used to eat off my neighbors' tree as a kid. My mom always told me they were "crab apples", though in truth I'm not sure what they really were. Anyways, I like tart stuff so I consider myself blessed to have a tree full of them growing in my yard (along pomegranate, quince and persimmon which will be in season come late-summer). My teacher pointed out that I'm not really supposed to be picking my landlord's fruit, but I'm paying twice what an Azeri would pay for rent at the place and the landlord moved to Moscow so I'm going to eat as I please.

Anyways, overall our trip to porkland was decidedly awesome in every way. The people in the village were some of the most genuinely kind and caring people I've met in this country, so much so that our tour guide even refused to take money from us, and the guy at the restaurant undercharged us for kebabs because we didn't have change. The only downside was that there were 5 of us travelling and there were no buses that went there, so we had to take a taxi. This means all of us--5 grown men plus a driver--had to cram into a Russian taxi that was about the size of a Civic hatchback for almost 2 hours both ways.

Winding down

One month left of school, and then it's off for summer. Between trying to find projects to keep myself busy I'm gonna try to do some travelling, both within Azerbaijan and to neighboring countries as time and funds allow. So far my top picks are Russia, Georgia, Uzbekistan or Turkey, with the Baltics and Balkans falling short behind due to the distance from AZ and the relative uselessness of my current language skills in any of those countries. My main problems will be getting a ticket and a visa to said countries, especially Russia, whose love of beauracracy is trumped only by their suspicion of foreigners, making legal entry into the country the international equivalent of a trip to the DMV. I'm sure it'll all work out, and right now I'm just trying to drag myself through the last month of school before I start planning my escape from, as I was told today by a local English teacher I met, "The hottest place in Azerbaijan". I told him I was from Alabama and he could bring on the heat all he wants...he was not impressed. We shall see.

My last month of school is wearing on my last nerve. Problems with my counterparts are compounded by kids who are well aware that summer break is only a few weeks away and have all but zoned out of class for the remainder of the year. You can't blame them really, we all know we were the same way when we were in school. I think every kid in every school in the world has an internal clock telling them the exact time when they no longer have to go to school anymore, like some Pavlovian response built up over years of going to school and suddenly stopping once they weather gets hot. As soon as the rainy season ends here, the kids just lose it, like the one synapse left in their brain that was keeping them tethered to the happenings of the classroom just snapped loose and started waving in the breeze, leaving them struck with a legendary case of ADHD. To make matters worse, half my classes feature magic disappearing counterparts, who start the lesson with me and then leave it midway, officially dooming the class to failure becase there is no way the kids are going to listen to the American with an Azeri teacher around to keep them in line. An unfortunate lack of any type of standardized punishment here means that kids don't respond to anything except physical violence, and the kids know I'm not going to hit them so they just go nuts as soon as I'm alone with them. I just keep telling myself that there's only a month left, and after that I'm going to be free to do what I want till the next school year starts. It doesn't make the days any easier or shorter, but I keep telling myself anyways...