Holidays ...
The first of my two holiday seasons in Kazakhstan has passed. Christmas isn't a big deal to anyone except Americans here, so we celebrated comparatively quietly. I got a phone call from my parents and grandmother in the morning, opened the presents my family had sent me, and went to a relatively laid back gathering at Sojin's, an ex-PCV who was sent home for medical reasons and returned on his own initative and dime for mysterious reasons.
New Year's here plays the role of both Christmas and New Year's rolled together, with a lot of similarities and a few differences. One difference is that here Santa Claus is known as "Ded' Moroz", or "Grandfather Frost". (It's interesting that Grandfather Frost is represented pretty much exactly like the American Santa Claus, in a red suit and white beard, which I'm sure makes Coca-Cola proud.) A bigger difference is that where in American Christmas symbols we have the matronly figure of Mrs. Claus, Kazakhstan has "Snegurochka", Grandfather Frost's sexy granddaughter. Every major New Year's party is emceed by a wized Grandfather Frost and scantiliy dressed Snegurochka who lead the party with toasts, games, and songs. On December 29th, our school had a party, at which the teachers got drunk and got funky together in the school cafeteria, dancing like they were twice their students' ages and half their own. I won a bottle opener for dancing like a rooster.
I was asked to dance like a rooster because this is the year of the rooster, or "the year of the cock" as the uninitiated in English slang, like my counterpart, love to loudly proclaim. (Interestingly, Russian also has an antiquiated word for rooster with a sexual double meaning.) There are consequently ice statues of roosters everywhere, everyone gives each other cheap rooster trinkets (making it impossible to find anything remotely rooster-like in Kokshetau for two days before New Year's), and everyone makes rooster sounds at midnight. By the way, there's a superstition here that the way you spend your New Year's is the way you'll spend the rest of the year, which could explain some of Kazakhstan's drinking problems.
I spent New Year's with Gulshat and her roommates and friends. The most remarkable part of the evening was our obligatory visit to the city center ice village. In addition to the giant ice statues and walls around the center square, the city constructed two giant ice-hills, about two stories tall, that you can climb up via ice stairs in the back and, at great personal risk, try to safely slide down. Note I said ice, not snow - it was slipperly slippery ice, like an ice cube. There were big holes, about six inches deep, that had been somehow been gouged in the middle of the hill, and all the ice sloped towards them, so you inevitably bruised your butt every time you went down. Often a child would get completely stuck in one, and take out several people coming behind. Most adults - that is, adult males, I guess - tried to go down standing up, though, which was really dangerous, what with the holes and very fast kids sweeping your legs out from under you. I never made it all the way down standing up, which involved doing a little jump over the holes that I could never get right, but I'm proud to say Brian did it. At the bottom, people gathered oblivious to the children rocketing by. More than once I saw someone get their legs completely swept and fall flat on their back on the hard ice. Meanwhile, all around, children were discharging cheap fireworks that were available for a few hundred tenge apiece. The most hazardous, and consequently most popular, was a tube that shot bottle rockets about a hundred feet up. The first few usually didn't get very high, though, and exploded on the ground, and even the later ones required the child to hold the tube up to prevent them from becoming surface-to-surface missiles. It also wasn't exactly clear when the tube was spent, since there were about ten rockets that came at 10-20 second intervals. All this went on in a crowd of people gathered around a giant, spinning Christmas tree next to giant ice statues of Grandfather Frost, Snegurochka, a rooster, and a monkey. Brian and I agreed - this was all absolutely first-class.
New Year's here plays the role of both Christmas and New Year's rolled together, with a lot of similarities and a few differences. One difference is that here Santa Claus is known as "Ded' Moroz", or "Grandfather Frost". (It's interesting that Grandfather Frost is represented pretty much exactly like the American Santa Claus, in a red suit and white beard, which I'm sure makes Coca-Cola proud.) A bigger difference is that where in American Christmas symbols we have the matronly figure of Mrs. Claus, Kazakhstan has "Snegurochka", Grandfather Frost's sexy granddaughter. Every major New Year's party is emceed by a wized Grandfather Frost and scantiliy dressed Snegurochka who lead the party with toasts, games, and songs. On December 29th, our school had a party, at which the teachers got drunk and got funky together in the school cafeteria, dancing like they were twice their students' ages and half their own. I won a bottle opener for dancing like a rooster.
I was asked to dance like a rooster because this is the year of the rooster, or "the year of the cock" as the uninitiated in English slang, like my counterpart, love to loudly proclaim. (Interestingly, Russian also has an antiquiated word for rooster with a sexual double meaning.) There are consequently ice statues of roosters everywhere, everyone gives each other cheap rooster trinkets (making it impossible to find anything remotely rooster-like in Kokshetau for two days before New Year's), and everyone makes rooster sounds at midnight. By the way, there's a superstition here that the way you spend your New Year's is the way you'll spend the rest of the year, which could explain some of Kazakhstan's drinking problems.
I spent New Year's with Gulshat and her roommates and friends. The most remarkable part of the evening was our obligatory visit to the city center ice village. In addition to the giant ice statues and walls around the center square, the city constructed two giant ice-hills, about two stories tall, that you can climb up via ice stairs in the back and, at great personal risk, try to safely slide down. Note I said ice, not snow - it was slipperly slippery ice, like an ice cube. There were big holes, about six inches deep, that had been somehow been gouged in the middle of the hill, and all the ice sloped towards them, so you inevitably bruised your butt every time you went down. Often a child would get completely stuck in one, and take out several people coming behind. Most adults - that is, adult males, I guess - tried to go down standing up, though, which was really dangerous, what with the holes and very fast kids sweeping your legs out from under you. I never made it all the way down standing up, which involved doing a little jump over the holes that I could never get right, but I'm proud to say Brian did it. At the bottom, people gathered oblivious to the children rocketing by. More than once I saw someone get their legs completely swept and fall flat on their back on the hard ice. Meanwhile, all around, children were discharging cheap fireworks that were available for a few hundred tenge apiece. The most hazardous, and consequently most popular, was a tube that shot bottle rockets about a hundred feet up. The first few usually didn't get very high, though, and exploded on the ground, and even the later ones required the child to hold the tube up to prevent them from becoming surface-to-surface missiles. It also wasn't exactly clear when the tube was spent, since there were about ten rockets that came at 10-20 second intervals. All this went on in a crowd of people gathered around a giant, spinning Christmas tree next to giant ice statues of Grandfather Frost, Snegurochka, a rooster, and a monkey. Brian and I agreed - this was all absolutely first-class.
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