Saturday, December 1, 2007

GO DUCKS

Here is a photo of me with the duck stuff my mom sent. She got me duck Crocks, a stuffed duck that quacks, and then a that shirt before i left. i'm wearing this around all day today in my show of support! Read the Civil War post below and then go get changed! GO DUCKS!!

CIVIL WAR

December 1, 2007

When you wake up today it will be the most important day of the year and many of you may not even realize it! Today is the 111th annual Civil War! GO DUCKS!! Even though I am on the other side of the world thanks to many of you and especially my mom I have been able to keep up on the football season this year. Some of you have emailed or called me with eyewitness accounts of the games thank you Sean, Monica, and Dave. Many of you have forwarded me articles, thank you all. And my loving mother has sent me play-by-play text messages in real time, Mom You’re the best! Yes Sunday mornings I wake up in the middle of the night and lay huddled under my sleeping bag anxiously awaiting the messages. Then I forward them to fellow duck fans here that are waiting patiently. I hope you all understand how incredibly awesome each of you are! GO DUCKS!!

As many of you know this season has been great but tragic! We started the season unranked but very quickly moved our way up in the polls and then slowly moved our way into the number two ranking which would have led us into the national championship game. But then, while we were on top of the world the season came to a crashing halt as our Heisman quarterback tore his ACL in the first quarter of our game with lowly Arizona. We went on to lose that game and then the next week our second string quarterback sprained both ankles and then our once mighty, best in the nation (yes I know we were like 4th or 5th but the teams in front of us don’t count because they don’t play the same caliber teams) offence was shut-out by a marginal UCLA. So that brings us to today where the Duck’s will face the beat up Beavers. GO DUCKS!

The Beavers GO DUCKS! are beat up a bit they are on their second string quarterback they are without their top receiver and may be without their starting running back. That sounds bad until you realize the Ducks are without their first and second string quarterbacks, one of the two great running backs the one playing has a serious turf toe problem, many of our defensive backs, and our two best receivers. This game is turning into a JV Football game but there is still state pride behind the game. The state of Oregon is a wonderful state in that a person may not watch football or even care that much about it, but when the Civil War comes around everyone has an allegiance to one team or the other. GO DUCKS!

This game means more than people from outside Oregon can understand. 3-4 hours each year decides who has bragging rights for the rest of the year. No matter the conversation, it could be about a any sport, who has a better academic program, or anything else comparing the two schools, but whoever won the previous years civil war can always come back with “Yeah but we kicked you butts is the civil war last year” and that, is the ultimate trump card. GO DUCKS!

So all you who are Duck Nation get into that closet and get your Lightning Yellow and Thunder Green out. Wear it with pride down to the store and get the something to BBQ get the chips, dip, beer or soda, and take in the pageantry that is… College Football! GO DUCKS!!

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Photos

Here are some new pics. the first is of me holding a mirror pond that my wonderful sister sent me!! then the other three are of the pig roast.



Thanksgiving

November 26, 2007

Being away from home always seems to make you appreciate what you are thankful for more than when you’re around everything you’re thankful for. This year on thanksgiving I spent the entire day on a bus going back into Baku. I was asked along with a few other volunteers to go into the PC office for a meeting to help further develop our youth development program. The meeting was on Friday so I had to spend all day Thursday traveling into the capital. When we all did get there we all went out for a meal of nachos, which was amazing but still didn’t compare to a lazy day of watching football, napping, and eating my moms home cooking.

The day after the meeting I headed down to visit a few volunteers in a town called Ali Bayramli who were cooking a small thanksgiving feast complete with a couple of chickens, mashed potatoes, candied carrots, cranberry sauce, gravy, and pumpkin pie! It wasn’t moms and I didn’t get to see all the family but it was very nice to be around others who understood and were in the same situation.

As I was riding the bus into town on thanksgiving I was thinking about what it is that I’m thankful for and realized I’m most thankful for my family, and the things that have happened in my life to allow me to do the things I’ve done and am currently doing. It’s an amazingly humbling experience to live with people who have so much less than we have in the US but are just as happy. It really confirms what I learned on the trail which is all you really need in this life to be happy is one warm meal in your belly a day and a semi dry place to sleep. Everything else just gets in the way. We tend to get lost in the rat race thinking we need to have this and that to be happy but why? Will those things really bring you happiness? I think its just more stuff you’ll need to sell or ask to store in your moms basement to collect dust when you leave on your next life adventure?

I really hope you all had a wonderful thanksgiving and that you had an opportunity to share with someone what you are thankful for.

Oh, I almost forgot I have to make a special note that I’m thankful for the best sister in the world. The day before I left to Baku I received a package from my sister with all sorts of goodies and as she knows me best she sent me three bottles of Mirror Pond Pale Ale and a note saying I was thinking you could use this about now! Thank you, thank you, thank you Becky! You so rock. I did the best thing I could and took them to the thanksgiving celebration and shared them with everyone there and they are all so appreciative of the kindness. There was even a fellow Oregonian who could appreciate it not just as great beer but as a little taste of home.

Luau and Thanksgiving

November 20, 2007

So I got an email from my sister with a guilt trip just as bad as the one I sent to all of you when I hadn’t gotten an email in over a week. It made me realize if I want to keep the support coming from your side I better keep up my end of the bargain and keep this thing posted more often! I couldn’t believe it when I looked at it and realized I hadn’t posted an update in 20 days!! I’m deeply sorry and I thank you Becky for keeping me honest!

Well let me try to recap what has been happening the last few weeks. After Halloween my host brother left to go to Baku for training for two months. He is going to be an air traffic controller at the new airport they are building in our town. The significance of this is that he is fluent in English so now a whole new host family dynamic has started. Before he left I’d get frustrated because my parents talked to me through him and when I tried to speak in Azeri they would look at him. I had asked him over and over to try to talk to me only in Azeri and he would, but really fast and if I asked him to slow down he would repeat it in English rather than slower. So now that he’s gone I miss him because he’s a really great guy and I’ve realized how much easier life was with an interpreter.

Now around the house there’s a lot more charades and laughing while shrugging the shoulders as my family and I try to communicate. I’ve learned that instead of getting frustrated when we can’t get a simple point across it’s much better to laugh and give my mom a big bear hug. I think she thinks I’m nuts and I haven’t yet figured out if when she’s laughing, she laughing with me or at me, but there’s rarely a dull moment when we talk.

The weather has gotten substantially colder the last few weeks. It’s not really that much colder than the weather in Oregon the difference is that there just isn’t any insulation. So it just feels much colder. We brought the heater in and set it up a few weeks ago and the room it’s in is really warm, when the gas is on, but when you head into any other room you either hurry to get back or start putting the layers on and jump under the sleeping bag. I’ve actually got two bags. I brought the one I hiked the PCT with and then Peace Corps gives us a massive subzero slumberjack bag that I mostly sleep on as a mattress but on the really cold nights I crawl into it as well.

The room I hold my conversation clubs in is really cold. It’s in a really old building and during the day it is actually colder in the room than it is outside. I’ve tried to talk my students into having class outside but when I mentioned it they looked at me like I just stepped out of a spaceship or something. The Room is actually just what I wanted though. I was talking to another Peace Corps Volunteer the other day and we were discussing how each of our conditions, yet different from each others, were just what we had imagined in our romantic vision of what PC was going to be like here. I have two oil lamps in my classroom that we use for light (we don’t have any electricity in the room) but also to stay warm. They smell really bad because they don’t have oil for the lamps so we use diesel. On the really cold days we all gather really close and act as if the lamps are a campfire.

My weekends have been pretty busy lately. I went to a city called Ganja two weekends ago for another softball tournament and the PCV’s who hosted it put on a pretty good show. After the games we went back to one of the guys houses where they had a luau themed party. The day before they went out and bought a pig then all day while we were playing ball they were roasting it! This was good in so many ways. First anytime you eat an animal you can still see what it is while eating you have that cave man like feel of manliness. Then the fact that this country is Muslim and they don’t eat pork made it to where I really craved some and it was one of the best meals I’ve had! After the meal when the food comma wore off we decided to have a dance party that lasted until the early hours of the morning when it was just a few of us rocking out in the kitchen in nothing but our underwear? Not sure how that happened but it was good fun!

This last weekend we had a thanksgiving party in Baku at the house of the DCM of the Embassy (he’s the guy that is second in command to the ambassador). It was a really nice event, which everyone looks forward to and gets all dressed up for. PC works with the embassy to find us Americans who work at the embassy to host us in there completely western houses. Our host was completely amazing. She gave us the key to her place with a fridge full of beer and let us have it for the weekend. She came in Saturday afternoon to check up on us to see if we needed anything and then left us to just completely relax in a real western home! We even had a few English news channels!

Well this year because of budget issues the dinner was not catered as it had been in the past. Our country director threw in for a few turkeys and everyone signed up to bring something. My site mate and I, probably because we were relaxing so much, waited until the last possible second to get ready and prepare our meal. Well as it turned out we didn’t have the pots we needed to cook the things we had planned so we hit the market to see if there was anything we could substitute. Unfortunately we didn’t find anything and this put us way behind schedule. We decided to go without and be a little late rather than really late.

We got out of the cab and followed where the directions told us to go. As we turned down a shady unlit alleyway we thought we must have turned the wrong way so we asked someone if there was a barber down the street (which the directions said as across the street from the house) and the person said no the barber was out on the main road. (It should be noted that Azeri people are so nice they will still give you directions rather than tell you they don’t know). Well, we were not smart enough to investigate for ourselves and went back out to the main road and walked down every other alleyway. We decided we must be lost and thought we should call someone to find the way because now we were about 40 minutes late. None of the three people we called answered their phones so we thought it must be so formal that everyone has turned their phones off. So we decided rather than show up to a formal party late with no food it would be better to skip the party. As it turns out we just called the wrong three people. The party was tons of fun and it wouldn’t have been a problem if we had shown up. We ended up walking all the way back to where we were staying, which was about a two hour walk and completely missed our thanksgiving feast. We did end up meeting up with everyone after it was over and had a good time but really wished we would have just walked another 100 meters down that alleyway.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Halloween

October 31, 2007

This past weekend I went down to the southern region of the country to the city Lankaran for a Halloween party. The country is only the size of Maine but because of the roads it takes 12 hours to get from where I am in the north to the cities in the south. The morning I arrived a group of us went hiking in a village to the east called Lerik.

The drive to Lerik was really beautiful and reminded me of driving in the Oregon coastal range in the fall. When we got to the village we walked around looking for some socks that they make there that are supposed to be really neat and unique to the area, but they said they wont start selling them until it snows. Then we saw some hills above the town we wanted to walk to, to get a great view of the area.

It was pretty comical walking through the town some of the looks we got you would think that we had just stepped off of a UFO. When we got to the top of the hills the clouds had rolled in and we were in an eerie fog that was really neat. The land up there was a rolling pasture land that was all green. We’d wished we’d brought a Frisbee. We wanted to have a competition to roll down the hills but because of all the cow pies we decided just running down yelling would suffice for the childlike urges we were having. We also saw fresh wild saffron growing on the hillsides. I tried to get some close-ups of the flowers with my camera but my photography skills were lacking. The saffron flower is really pretty. It is a purple flower, which has a bright yellowish orange center, which my friends said was what they use as the spice. After playing around up in the hills like kids we decided to head back to get ready for the Halloween party.

The party was pretty surreal. There was probably about 40-50 of the volunteers in country that came. And it ended up being just like any other college party in the states. The next morning when I woke I decided I’d experienced enough and didn’t think my body could handle another night of it so a few friends and I decided we’d head back a day early. When we got into Baku we found that there weren’t any more seats on the night train (and we can’t travel the roads at night for good reason) so we talked to Peace Corps and they allowed us to stay the night in the capital. Lucky for us there was a volunteer who was in town for a dentist appointment so we were able to crash in her room and didn’t have to spend the big bucks for a room.

The greatest thing about being in Baku is the food! Out in the regions there are very few restaurants and when there are they are usually all the same Turkish food, which is good but lacks variety. So that night we first headed to the Thai restaurant where I had one of the best curries I’ve ever eaten. For dessert we went to McDonalds where I had a happy meal with a chocolate milkshake! Oh, was that heaven.

While we were in McDonalds we all got a text telling us they uncovered a terrorist plot to attack on the US Embassy and other western buildings in Baku so as a precaution the office would be closed the next day. It turns out that they got everyone before anything happened which makes me feel safe that the authorities have a pretty good handle on what’s happening but it was a little unsettling realizing those feelings are here. Which when really thinking about it there are those feelings and threats anywhere in the world you travel. But now that I’m back in my city 8 hours from Baku I feel just as safe if not safer than walking down the street in any city in the US. The news covered it pretty well over here and the next day as I was talking to people in town everyone’s reaction was the same telling me how bad those people were and how happy they are that I’m here. So thank you to everyone who saw it on the news and sent me an email. There is no need to worry however as living in this small town way up north is probably much safer than being in most cities in the US.

Weekend Photos

Here are some pics in Lerik. The first is while driving there. The second is of main street. The Third is of us having fun in the fog. The last is a house that reminded us of Borat.