Week four ...

This Saturday was Kaz 15's "culture day", which is a big party in the morning with lots of food from every major ethnic group in the area (Uigur, Kazakh, Turkish, and Russian) and shows from each village put on by volunteers and locals alike. There was a belly-dance that blew the Kulture Klatsch away (you Boiseans know what I'm talking about), a roof-raising Uigur dance from the Koktobe Bir kids, a long jam by Dan on a giant Uigur dombra-type thing (I forget the name) that made me think of Alice in Wonderland's caterpillar and made old Turkish men get up and dance like they were forty again, and several traditional dombra-accompanied folk tunes from Koktobe Eki: the Kazakh standards Erkem Ai, Kozimning Karasin and the American standard Blister in the Sun. See the photos section.

If everything continues to go well, the kids in our computer class will have web pages of their own up on this site in a couple weeks. Again, if any of you with better internet access than I do want to mail me a primer on how to use Kazakh fonts in a web page in a way that will be readable to everyone, feel free.

In Kazakh, a literal word-for-word transcription of "I want to taste it" is "Eating towards-look is coming to me". The language is coming along, but with stuff like this, it takes some time. ("To taste" in Kazakh is "Eating-look", that is, the gerund of to eat followed by the infinitive for look. To say that you want something, you put the verb stem in the dative case, which expresses going towards something, and say that that verb is coming, that is, you use the verb for to come conjugated for the third person, and finally, to say that it is you and not someone else that wants it, you say "to me".)

I went ghosting in the middle of the steppe this Friday. An hour drive on paved roads and a half hour on dirt roads brought us to a tiny house under a big sky where my host father's younger brother lives. We ate bes barmak (meat on pasta served on big platters that you eat with your hands - the cleaner you get your bones, the more beautiful your wife will be!) and drank vodka by the light of gas lamps while wild ostriches (or something that looked a lot like an ostrich) ran accross the steppe somewhere outside. Someday, I hope to go to a party where the major source of entertainment won't be how badly I speak Kazakh.

Coming back from ghosting (at 3am, and by the way, at least some Kazakhs do have designated drivers) we got a flat tire. I was pretty impressed with what good humour everyone had, even though they were tired and drunk and there was no flashlight and no moon and no jack. Everyone was having a great time. How does one change the tire without a jack? Everyone gets out and lifts the corner of the car while someone piles stuff under it, repeat until the car is high enough to get the tire off.