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 This fact bleeds over into the next genre, Azeri folk music, known as "mughan", which replaces the severely outdated synthesizer with traditional instruments such as saz, tar, accordian, etc.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

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.

Incredible Inedibles pt. 2

The sunrise over the Caspian, the boulders at Gobustan, and me on the aforementioned wrecked Soviet tanker, the Bolshevik NN Manov.

But wait, there's more!

One striking feature about the food scene here is the produce. It is, in a word, indescribably amazing. The best tomatoes I've ever eaten in my life have been here, and the rest of the fruits and vegetables live up to this standard of quality. During the harvest season virtually any type of fruit or vegetable can be found in the markets here, and almost all of them are super cheap. For instance, while in the States you may pay upwards of two bucks for one decent pomegranate, I can buy a kilo here for around 50 cents. Same goes with apples, pears, tomatoes, onions, and anything else. You can get 5 kilos of potatoes here for the price of a pound in the States. And, in addition to all this wonderful stuff, there are quite a few things which are quite rare in America, and some which are not available at all. Of fruits, there are things like quince, persimmons, and strange unidentifiable melons. Stranger still are things like feyxoa, small green things that look like miniature limes and have a slightly grainy texture and sour taste. I've also been served some sort of small brown fruit resembling a radish which I can't remember the name of. Whatever it was, I quickly found out that the only way to eat them was to let them overrippen, i.e. rot, so that the flesh turned brown and gooey but tasted quite sweet.

Of course, all this amazing fresh produce would be for waste if there wasn't a way to preserve it, which is why Azeris are masters of the arts of canning and pickling. I've eaten jellies, jams, preserves and conserves of every fruit imaginable here, all homemade and kept out back in a shed in old mayonnaise jars. Additionally, pickled green tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage are served at almost every meal. Fruit compotes and juices are served quite often alongside tea at the dinner table, especially if one is sick, as they are rightfully considered to be very healthy. Also, a type of preserve made of eggplant, tomatoes, and carrots called "ikra" is eaten with bread or on pasta like tomato sauce. This confused me quite a bit when I first ate it since ikra is the Russian word for caviar, but my family and teacher assured me it's just another type of "ikra", which incidentally doesn't contain fish eggs. Nevertheless, it is quite tasty.

The harvest season only lasts so long, so once winter comes around there needs to be a way to keep fruits and vegetables in ones diet. Since they don't have a southern neighbor named Mexico here, or the money or infrastructure to import fresh tomatoes and apples in January, these people have become quite skilled at preserving what they have to be used at a later time. It is goodness.

Incredible Inedibles

One of the most interesting parts of being in a new culture is the things people eat. In the US we have a vast variety of foods from all over the world available to us, as we are a nation of immigrants, and because of this we may sometimes forget that in most countries the only things to eat are whatever the ethnic populace has to offer. Here, that means Turkish food. However, owing to the fact that Azerbaijan has, at different times throughout its extremely long history, been conquered, occupied, or inhabited by Mongols, Talish, Tatars, Persians, Arabs, Armenians and Russians (to name a few), there are a variety of different foods that have been adapted from these cultures.


In Azerbaijan, unlike in the US, there are six main food groups. They are: fruits and vegetables, meat, sugar, grease, bread, and tea. All of these are sure to be found in abundance at any Azeri meal. Eggs cooked at breakfast will usually be served swimming in a pool of grease that is equal to twice as much mass as the eggs themselves. The same goes for potatoes, pasta, and anything else that can be pan fried or have butter added to it in any way. Bread is served at every meal, usually with butter and cheese. In this part of the world bread is considered sacred, and is treated as such. None of it is wasted, and if a piece of bread is found laying the street, you will usually see someone go pick it up, kiss it three times, and then place it on top of a wall or windowsill so it won't be left on the ground. Along with bread, tea is served at all hours day and night, steaming hot. Iced tea is a foreign concept here, and considered to be unhealthy as Azeris think drinking cold liquids leads to illness. And instead of putting sugar in the tea as we do, a sugar cube is placed in the mouth and then tea is sipped through it. The final mealtime staple is sweets, which Azeris consume with such fervor that it leaves me seriously wondering how the majority of the population isn't diabetic.


As far as actual dishes go, they range from the delightfully tasty to the indescribably awful. Among the best is dolma, a mixture of rice and minced meat that is wrapped in cabbage or grape leaves and then boiled in a stock. This is by far the favorite Azeri food among all the Americans here. Also quite nice is doner, a grilled meat quite similar to gyros that can be found at most Mediterranean restaurants, which is served either in bread or lavash, a ubiquitous flatbread here that is like a cross between pita and a tortilla. Lahmajun, a staple of Turkish places here, is a flatbread pizza-like tasty treat which was, even though Azeris would never admit it, adapted from Armenia (or so I've read in my giant Russian cookbook). Furthermore, a huge variety of soups of all types are served everywhere all the time. In fact, with my host family I eat some sort of soup or stew at least once every day, sometimes for every meal. All of these are delightfully delicious, excepting one: the dreaded Xash. This evil concoction is a stew made from the head and bones of a cow. All parts of the head, brains and all, are cleaned and boiled in a pot for hours on end with the leg bones and hooves. The end product is a rank, gelatinous bowl of goo filled with unidentifiable hunks of meat which, due to being boiled for hours, are left which a texture comparable to extremely sticky, steaming-hot jello. I've been served this only once so far, and I made it through about a quarter bowl before I had to give up. I've eaten some worse things in my life (sea urchin roe comes to mind), but I gotta say it's in my top ten of nastiest things I've put in my mouth. My Azeri family and friends strongly disagree, saying that Xash is a hearty breakfast food that will make you big and strong. I told them if that's the case, I'd rather remain weak and scrawny, and I'll stick to eggs, sausage and potatoes for breakfast.

It's all just a game...

More pics, including a view of the city of Baku as well as a view of the desert outside of Gobustan. The kids from my house (the twins are Aydan and Faydan, the little girl with the pointy hat is Zeynab, my "niece" who calls me Ami (uncle), and the boy is Fared, a totally undisciplined and awful demon child about which I've said innumerable nasty things that I do not see fit to repeat here). The dude standing with me is Mehemmed, my storekeep about whom I've already spoken, and the Arabic script is on an ancient gravestone that is on display in the old city in Baku.

Azeris are, like most members of post-Soviet republics, ridiculously good at chess. I've so far I've only beaten one Azeri out of all the ones I've played, and that just because he's really not a chess player and was just playing to get a chance to speak English with me. The other day I went to my store to get a soda and was carrying a chessboard with me, and Mehemmed closed down for 10 minutes to beat me without mercy in a game. It was hilarious, every move he kept saying "Excuse me Kevin, pardon me" as he steadily wiped out every piece I had on the board. Everyone from friends and host relatives to random guys at kafes and chayxanas are so ludicrously good at this game that I feel certain that, by the time I leave this place, I will be experienced enough in chess to totally whoop anyone who challenges me.

In addition to chess, there are other games which are quite popular here, all of which we have in the US but which are played with various different rules because Azeris love to do things their own way. The most popular game, considered by many to be the national game, is nard, the Azeri version of backgammon. You can see old men sitting in shops, kafes, chayxanas, on street corners and pretty much anywhere else playing this game. Since I don't know how to play backgammon in the US, I'm not sure how the rules are different, but suffice it to say that even if I hadn't been told so I would know it's not the same as in the States. For one thing, it seems to me that every move the player is required to slam their pieces down with such force as to simulate a small earthquake. Additionally, this most important of rules is applied to every other action involving pieces which can be physically slammed onto a board or table, including, but not limited to: chess, checkers, dominos, vodka shots, paying for things, supplementing conversation and getting the attention of others. I can only hope that after two years I haven't adopted this concept, or I may find myself getting kicked out of every library and restaurant I go to.