More to say...

It’s Tuesday night at 8:39pm as I write this. I’m a wee bit tipsy and to be honest a bit enamored with the whole idea of what it means to “be Kyrgyz”. It’s more than a birthright. It’s like a way of life. I could go back to America tomorrow and still employ some time honored tricks to living that I’ve learned from my adopted homeland. (1) When it’s your birthday, don’t just celebrate the day of instead, stretch it out over a week and have progressively larger parties until the final blow-out spectacular that’s actually two days after the calendared day of your birth. My Apa’s thirty-fifth birthday is/was today (November 18). We had a small get-together on Sunday to celebrate the beginning of her birthday but tonight we had the real birthday party replete with presents, vodka, bishbarmark, vodka, music, vodka, dancing, vodka, and a little vodka to make sure everyone had a good time. Then as I was stumbling through my goodbye’s (linguistically and physically) I overheard that the real party is on Thursday (that’s forty-eight hours after my Apa’s birth thirty-five years ago, for those of you playing the home game) at a local café. They’ll have a DJ, vodka, dancing, vodka, more people speaking a language I am just beginning to get a grasp of, and yes, vodka as well. That’s pretty cool, no? (2) When you get paid fuck your job, just DRINK! Today was pay-day at my school. Because I live in a cash-based society the teachers are paid in cash (repetitive? Yes. Needed? I think so…who else gets paid IN CASH as an adult unless you are working for “the union”?) so when I arrived at my school promptly at 9:30 for our first class at 9:40 I walked into the teacher’s lounge to find every single teacher in the school there. They were all milling about and keeping a stern eye on a man I’ve never seen before who was sitting in the corner with a large metal box in front of him. Two things: One, the Kyrgyz have absolutely no sense of what it means to stand in line, so everyone literally rushes forward at the same time in a “may the best man win” type of situation. Two, the man with the metal box turned out to be the banks’ representative. He had every single teacher’s salary hidden in the confines of his large metal box. Sort of makes you appreciate your direct deposit, doesn’t it? As the teacher’s all rushed forward screeching their names to the metal-box-carrying-man hoping that he’ll pay them first I played about thirty-five intense games of Snake. For those of you that have never owned a cheap Nokia phone, Snake is the greatest game in the history of the universe. I could describe more but Google should do it justice. Anyway, as I was playing the last level of the “Campaign” option in Snake (the level is called the “apartment” and it’s FUCKING HARD) I watched a teacher get knocked to the ground. No sooner could I swear under my breath and stand to help her up than other teachers were already pushing her to the back of the crowd so they could yell their names to the pay-box-man as loud as they could. As soon as I saw that the poor lady that was too weak to elbow her way to the front of the melee in front of me was okay I began to laugh. I’d been there for almost two hours and only about six teachers had been paid! If they’d all just waited in line and been ordered about the whole endeavor they would have been in and out in a matter of minutes! But I digress. The reason that this is all so related to number 2 (stated much too far above) is that as soon as my counterpart, Narjan, was paid she grabbed her purse and said “James, let’s go.” Now, being the ignorant American that I evidently am, I took this to mean “James, let’s go teach at least one bloody class today because we’ve just conveniently missed two of the three we were supposed to teach.” How wrong I was. She led me directly into the English Club Room where our director (Kyrgyz equivalent of the American principle) was sitting with two bottles of vodka, a gigantic bottle of beer, meat, cheese, bread, and a ton of candy. Fuck it. IT’S PAY DAY! The best part is that as my director, my counterpart (who happens to be vice-director) and three other teachers were enjoying our pre-noon imbibing and copious sustenance consumption numerous diligent students stopped by enquiring about their supposed lessons! Silly kids. IT’S MOTHERFUCKIN’ PAY DAY, MAN! One by one the teacher’s of the subject in question got up to address these ignorant youngsters and explain to them that IT’S MOTHERFUCKIN’ PAY DAY, MAN!! No self-respecting teacher works on pay day. Silly kids…(3) If you get a phone call in the middle of class, whether you’re a teacher or a student, answer it and make sure everyone is aware of your popularity as you do so. A specific instance of this didn’t happen today, or any day mentioned thus far but this scenario has happened on more than one occasion and therefore I feel that it is duly worth mentioning here. I team-teach with Narjan and yet in the middle of a grammar lesson involving such intricacies of the English language as the distinct difference between “a” and “an” (sarcasm at its finest: every schoolboy knows that “an” is only used to preface an indirect noun beginning with a vowel [basically…you want more? Look it up yourself, I’m tired], but when you’re teaching it to 9th form kids who have been learning English for seven years and they look at you like it’s new information it’s a bit disheartening, nay, ridiculous) she’ll get a phone call that she’ll immediately answer and take outside. This has happened more times than I can count. It’s more than a little distracting, but am I wrong if I also think it’s completely hilarious in its absurdity? Thank you. Finally (4), if someone who is not employed by any health related agency and has absolutely no degree or certificate in medicine has ever given you advice or concluded anything about any health-related matter either directly or indirectly believe it and adhere to it as if it were given to you by the hand of God. One of my favorite myths that every Kyrgyz propagates is that drinking cold water is bad for you. It is. Actually yes, I’m not being sarcastic. Drinking cold water infected with bacteria such as Giardia or the like is actually quite bad for you. I have tried numerous times to tell my host family, both my current one and my PST one, that it’s not the cold that’s bad for you, but the bacteria that (if left un-treated) lives in the cold water that’s bad for you. The Kyrgyz have figured out that if you boil your water and add tea that it becomes okay. They refuse to believe, however, that my “magical distiller-device from America” (it’s Peace Corps issued and not that great, but it does the job) actually makes cold water okay. I have thus been forced to resort to drinking my cold water in private and away from the judging eyes of those around me because of the fear they have of what the “cold” might do to me! That’s right. I’m a closet-drinker-of-COLD-water. Are you as ashamed of me as I am of myself? It’s okay…according to Kyrgyz folklore you’re absolutely in-the-right. However, last night my Apa explained to me that if you don’t want to get sick during the winter all you have to do is SWIM IN A FROZEN BODY OF WATER. Yeah, I capitalized that last bit because I wanted to emphasize how ABSOLUTELY INSANE it is. Okay, so I can’t drink distilled cold water, but I can swim in a frozen-fucking lake and THEN I’ll be healthy? Hell...I’ll believe it. Just give me the activities of six paydays in a row combined into a two-hour time span and I’ll believe anything!
I very well could have broken the above stories into a few different paragraphs and worked on the grammar, punctuation and the like but I neglected to do so because I’m drunk and I like the free-flowing nature of my prose. If you don’t, then FUCK OFF CRITIC! For everyone else out there: Enjoy. Believe me, I certainly am:)