I Just Work Here.
I want to mail my family some cds with pictures on them. But when I went to the post office, the lady told me that I needed special permission to send digital media through the mail. Where do I get permission? I asked. How should I know, she answered. I just work at the post office.
On a parallel note, my school has two printers and a copy machine that don't work because there's no money for toner. At the same time, the school has bought over $300 worth of one hundred percent useless English-English technical dictionaries, against my objections (and despite a promise NOT to buy them) but ostensibly for my math program. Moreover, these books were paid for not by the school but by the students' families to the tune of about $15 apiece. Even worse, the students who bought them aren't allowed to take the books home - they're sitting in my classroom. Not that they would be able to use them if they could take them. What can I do about this? I can talk to people about it. Whether this will do anything besides make important people angry at me isn't clear yet.
But we cannot have just bad news. It so happens that a restaurant called "Venice", which I had previously only noted for the irony of the combination of its name and appearance, serves the second best pizza I've come across in Kazakhstan. The pizza's name is the "American Hote", which I think it an botched attempt at "American Home", since the Russian cursive "t" looks like a latin "m". I have to admit that I didn't miss pizza too badly when all the "pizza" around was more like tuna melts, but now I crave it every now and then. If that living allowance increase comes through, some of it's going to pizza, like it or not.
On a parallel note, my school has two printers and a copy machine that don't work because there's no money for toner. At the same time, the school has bought over $300 worth of one hundred percent useless English-English technical dictionaries, against my objections (and despite a promise NOT to buy them) but ostensibly for my math program. Moreover, these books were paid for not by the school but by the students' families to the tune of about $15 apiece. Even worse, the students who bought them aren't allowed to take the books home - they're sitting in my classroom. Not that they would be able to use them if they could take them. What can I do about this? I can talk to people about it. Whether this will do anything besides make important people angry at me isn't clear yet.
But we cannot have just bad news. It so happens that a restaurant called "Venice", which I had previously only noted for the irony of the combination of its name and appearance, serves the second best pizza I've come across in Kazakhstan. The pizza's name is the "American Hote", which I think it an botched attempt at "American Home", since the Russian cursive "t" looks like a latin "m". I have to admit that I didn't miss pizza too badly when all the "pizza" around was more like tuna melts, but now I crave it every now and then. If that living allowance increase comes through, some of it's going to pizza, like it or not.
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