Back to It

We've been back in Olgii for just over three weeks now and we are soldiering on with the rest of our service. We are officially within about 5 months of returning to California!

Life has returned to its usual pace. We are still spending lots of time at home watching shows (we have recently discovered AMC's Mad Men), but things are picking up at school for me. This semester I am co-teaching fourth grade in the afternoons. The kids are ridiculously cute and incredibly enthusiastic. Since it's their first year studying English, we mostly play lots of games and sing songs.

The 9 secondary schools throughout Olgii are also busy preparing for my counterpart Agii's third annual "Knowledge Olympiad" that is coming up in two weeks. Each school will send small teams of 9th, 10th, and 11th grade students to compete in the areas of Math, Computer Science, English, and Russian. Naturally, I am in charge of preparing my school's English teams. My students are all working really hard and we have been meeting for two to three hours every afternoon for the past week. The English portion of the competition includes six rounds: (1) introductions; (2) a spelling bee; (3) grammar; (4) a talent show; (5) general knowledge; and (6) proverbs and slang. I think my students have a real good shot at taking some of the competition's top prizes, which would make my director happy. She has not made it a secret that she expects our school to take 1st place since we are hosting the event -- and since we have a "real" English teacher. Naturally my arguments that the most important thing is that the students work together and have fun means nothing to her. Oh, well.

Here are some pictures from the past few weeks:

This is from my birthday dinner at Altai BBQ in UB. My buddy Todd (who lives on the opposite side of the country from Olgii) was also in town and he joined us. He gave me one of the greatest birthday presents ever: a bottle of Jack.

This is a picture from our favorite place to eat in UB: an Indian restaurant called Hazara's. We get the garlic naan, butter chicken, and saag paneer.

This is a picture of frozen Olgii that Ashlee took from the airplane on our descent. Looks welcoming, huh?

One of the packages we had waiting at home for us was from Thoreau Elementary School in New Mexico, the school I correspond with. They made us this gift for Christmas.



Since my birthday is January 22nd and Ashlee's is February 1st, our sitemates threw us a joint birthday party at Brian's place. Chef Brian made an alfredo pizza and Cincinnati chili. We also had cheesecake (the Jello no-bake kind) and a chocolate cake courtesy of our German friends in town.

Over the school break our "soumer" Adi decided to spend the week in the "big city." She spent most of the time at Justin's, but she stayed with us one night. She brought along her kitty.

Last Friday Bahitgul and I took our 8th graders to the local museum to take pictures of Kazakh and Mongolian cultural items for our friends in Thoreau.

That's about all that is going on for now. There are 5 weeks left until spring break and the huge Kazakh celebration of Nayourz. The weather is warming up and we have been having daily highs in the 30s. Just yesterday was my first day not wearing long underwear since October. It was glorious.

Oh yeah, I should be hearing back from grad school in the next 6 weeks or so. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

PS - The BBC has put together a follow-up series to the acclaimed "Planet Earth" series. It's called "Human Planet" and it looks at groups of people all over the world. One of the episodes focuses on Kazakh eagle hunters. The series has so far only been broadcast in the UK, but you can watch a short clip on YouTube here.