April Showers Bring May Mosquitoes

Pictures of kids in my conversation club. All these kids are in 5th and 6th grade, most of them at my school but a handful of the boys are from other schools.

So, it's April here in Azerbaijan, which unbeknownst to me is the rainy season. This means that for the past week it's been raining every day and freezing cold, which makes me seriously wonder why everyone here celebrates Novruz and the coming of spring right before the weather turns to absolute crap for an entire month. As icing on the cake, either my change in environment or the change in weather gave me the flu, so I've spend the past 4 days locked up in my house feeling like I got hit by a Peterbilt full of influenza. I finally returned to school today, where I was scolded by teachers for being a child and being unable to take care of myself, to which I sincerely wanted to (but did not) respond that compared to the level of maturity of Azeris my age I may as well have the life experience of a Highlander, and at least I'm not 40 years old and still having my mom cook meals for me.

I've been told not to worry about the weather, because in a month it's going to start getting so hot it'll make Alabama seem like Nova Scotia, but I beg to differ. If there's one thing I know about my home state, it's that it's HOT, and I can't wait to see how my sitemate from Michigan reacts to the heat compared to me. Also the mosquitoes are already terrible and only posed to get worse as summer rolls in, but fortunately I've got an awesome mosquito net hanging over my bed to keep me safe from malaria and such. If the heat gets too unbearable I'm just gonna escape to the mountains or head to Georgia or Russia, as school will be out and I'll be out of work and bored out of my mind anyways.

On the positive side, I've got a house! A place all my own, located on the edge of town about a 15 minute walk from my school. Being able to to sit in peace and QUIET has left me quite a bit less nervewrecked than I was with my host family, but it is not without it's difficulties. Foremost is the water situation, which isn't intolerable but is far from ideal. Basically, I've got a hose running in from the street where the water runs for 3 hours a day, 2 in the morning at 9am and then another at 4 or 5 in the evening. It's my job to get this water from the hose into a cistern in the yard and a water tank above my hammam (shower house). Since the water has no pressure coming out of the hose, I have to use an old, worn out and fickle water pump to get the water into said containers. This has provided me with hours of hair-pulling screaming frustration, but I think after a week of messing with it I've finally got it worked out. It involves a process of plugging and unplugging the pump while repeatedly reinserting the feed hose into it so as to get a flow of water running through it, and once this is established it will flow more-or-less steadily until I get enough water in my tank. Once the water is in the tank it doesn't get any easier though, as there is no running water in the house and I have to wash my dishes in a tub in the hammam. And of course, being Azerbaijan, it wouldn't be a house without a squat toilet out in the yard, making midnight trips to the can in the freezing cold and rain quite a special delight.

All told, however, my new house is pretty sweet. I've got two rooms, so there's plenty of space to have guests over (if any of you are planning on making the trip! :). My kitchen is huge, but fairly sparse: two tables, a fridge, a small freestanding cabinet and a range. No oven, no microwave, and no insulation. The neighbors I've met are fairly nice, and it's right down the road from a place which PCVs here have dubbed "The Awesome Store", due to its western supermarket style setup, its selection of imported goods, and a fairly incredible liqour isle. If only I had more than 5 manat a day living allowance I could be dining on Russian caviar, German sausage and a bottle of Chivas Regal special reserve. But alas, one can dream.

To switch gears for a bit, I have a request for the readers of this here blog regarding the pictures you see at the top of this post. I have recently been approached by the director of my school to help make an English education library in my school. Books in English here are in short supply, and the textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education for use in schools here are legendarily awful. Mispellings, bad grammar, confusing texts and complicated lessons that are about as succinct as a Tolstoy novel. So, I would like to ask all of you, when you have the time, to look around at your local thrift stores and such for anything you think might be useful for a kid learning English to read. This includes dictionaries, thesauruses (sadly enough, I'm an English teacher and I don't even know if that's the correct plural form of "thesaurus"), classics of English and American literature, and kids books. Now don't go overboard on finding stuff, as it will cost a ludicrous amount of money to send it all here, but maybe a book or two stuffed in a padded envelope will add up to a substantial collection once they all get here. I'm going to try to find other sources for book donations, but if you guys feel inclined to help it would make a lot of little Azeri kids quite happy. Take care,

Kevo

Zen and the Art of Agglutination

Note: This post is probably going to make little sense to most of you, as it will contain references to a variety of linguistic jargon and general nonsense that probably only Jon, Robb and Ilya will care about or understand. Furthermore, the only other language I'm acquainted with is Russian, and I will use it as a comparison throughout this post, and for those of you who don't know any Russian (once again, everyone but the three people listed above), it will probably be meaningless to you. Forgive me while I indulge in a bit of language dorkery.



So, 6 months into my adventure abroad and out of all the new, strange, exciting, and occasionally unspeakable awful things I've encountered, the one that stands out foremost as both a problem and solution on all fronts is language. Here the spoken language is Azerbaijani, aka Azeri, a member of the Seljuk branch of Turkic languages. It's most closest spoken relative is Turkish, with which it is mutually intelligible, meaning that even though they are two different languages a speaker of one can understand the other. It is also somewhat mutually intelligible with Uzbek and Turkmen, though not as clearly as with Turkish. Additionally, being in the Turkic language family it is also related to Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uighur, Tajik, Mongolian, and a bunch of other smaller languages spoken throughout Central Asia. It is not, however, related to the other langauges of the Caucusus. Georgian is a Southern Caucasian language, in a little family of its own, Armenian is an Indo-European language, therefore related (albeit loosely) to the langauges of Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Talish is spoken in parts of Southern Azerbaijan (aka Northern Iran), but its closest relative is Farsi (Persian).



Grammatically, Azeri is an agglutinative (uh-glue-tin-a-tive) language, meaning that it expresses meaning by way of suffixes added onto the end of words. For an English speaker, this is ridiculously complicated to learn at first, as there are dozens of suffixes which are used with all word types to represent different meanings. Additionally, these suffixes are all dictated by a rule present in all Turkic languages called "vowel harmony". All vowels in Azeri (a i ı o ö u ü, and an inverted "e" that won't display here) Are separated into four categories: round, unround, open, closed. The last vowel in a word dictates which vowel will appear in the following suffix. To complicate things further, various suffixes can be added onto words one after another, meaning that not only do you have to know the correct order in which to say these suffixes in order for your newly enlongated word to make sense, but you also have to take into account the category of the vowels in each previous suffix in order to say the following suffixes correctly. Here's a short example of how these suffixes are used to make sentences:



Biz=we; kitab=book; otaq=room: Bizim kitablarımız otağımızdadırlar= Our books are in our room.



The suffixes mean the following:



-im, -ımız= Possessive case, added to both the possessor and the object being possessed.

-lar= plural form

-da= Locative case, meaning (depending on context) in, at, on

-dır= Present tense third person singular of "to be"



As if this wasn't complicated enough, there are four other cases (ablative, dative, nominative, accusative) and a variety of other suffixes used in adjectives, participles, and other parts of speech.

The syntax isn't much easier either. Unlike English, with is a subject-verb-object(SVO) language, Azeri is a subject-object-verb (SOV) langauge. Therefore, verbs almost invariably come at the end of sentences, with very rare exceptions. This means that my natural inclination as an English speaker to put the verb before the object in a sentence makes me seem like a total moron when I try to speak Azeri. It's the equivalent of saying "I bread eat to like" in English.

The verbs themselves aren't that complicated though. There are no irregular verbs, putting it far ahead of Russian in terms of ease of conjugation and making English look like a grammatical trainwreck by comparison. All the conjugations for all the tenses (present, two past, two future, and a rough equivalent to past progressive) are regulated exclusively by vowel harmony and a couple of simple spelling rules. Overall, once you get the proper endings down for each of the conjugations you can easily conjugate any verb you find. Best of all, you don't have to worry about any of the perfective-imperfective nonsense and seemingly endless prefixes of Russian verbs (just imagine, in this language they only have ONE VERB for "to go"), or any of the ridiculous irregular verbs in English (buy-bought; swim-swam-swum; go-went, etc.) for which I always vehemently blame the French (see 1066 a.d. in any European history book).

Regarding vocabulary, it is mainly Turkish with a variety of borrowings from Persian, Arabic and Russian. The Persian and Arabic borrowings are clear enough, owing to their proximity and the spread of Islam. The Russian comes from 70 years of being under Russian rule prior to and during the Soviet Union. Fortunately for me, this meant that I already knew the vocabulary for all furniture, several food and a handful of other things when I arrived. However, the problems come when some people in certain regions prefer certain words in certain languages, and I have to figure out what they mean. The most common of these is "heshtat", the Persian word for "eighty" which is commonly used in place of the Azeri and Turkish "seksan". There's no telling how many times I overpaid for sodas and snacks at stores because I had no idea how much the guy was asking for.

One thing the Soviet legacy has left on this place is something I refer to as "cognitive dissonance of the foreigner", meaning that when Azeris see a foreigner, they automatically start speaking Russian to them, regardless of whether said foreigner knows it or not. This is not a problem for me, but I am one of only 5 Russian speakers out of over 100 volunteers in the country, and they are continually driven insane by sellers at the bazar who, in spite of being spoken to clearly and directly in Azeri, refuse to speak it back and insist that this white foreigner cannot possibly not understand Russian. Even I, when I approach people in stores or at the bazar, speak in Azeri, only to be responded to in Russian at least 1 out of every 3 times. It definitely keeps me on my toes, but it's also fun because since I похож на русском (look like a Russian) I can get away with claiming that I'm really from Moscow, which is generally less exciting to people here than being an American and therefore makes them leave me alone.

Finally, of all the common words in this language and various exclamations to and swearings upon Allah, there is one verb which drives me nuts: "chekmek". Nominally it means "to pull", but depending on context, it can also mean: to smoke, to weigh, to paint, to draw, to take a photo, and seemingly endless other meanings. Basically, if I don't know the right verb to say in a certain situation, I say this, and half the time I'm right. The only other sound I know which has more common meanings in Azeri is a car horn, which can mean, again depending on slight and variable context clues: hello, how are you, see you later, goodbye, coming through, come outside, answer the door, give me a call, on my way, move, or get the hell out of my way. It's too bad I don't have a car here, or I'd already be halfway to fluency.

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.