The latest and greatest

I’ve really been bad about updating since summer. Part of it was that I was traveling pretty much nonstop for several months, but part of it is that things just aren’t as new and exciting as they used to be. Life has become fairly routine. Well, routine in the very loose sense that has to be applied to routine here.

However, in an attempt to not be a pathetic excuse for a blogger, I present this latest post of Kazakhy goodness.

I went to Pavlodar over the weekend. Had a slight dental issue. Seems the permanent retainer I have on my bottom teeth decided it didn’t want to be permanent on one side any longer. After checking the other side and seeing that it had no intentions of giving up its position in my mouth I decided a call to one of our Peace Corps Medical Officers was in order.

At first we thought that I wouldn’t be able to get it repaired, only removed, locally. I was OK with that. Better to have no retainer at all than one that’s botched, right? Did I mention that things have gotten fairly routine here? Nothing exciting or exotic about this at all.

So Saturday morning I head to Pavlodar to get this wayward piece of metal taken from my head. Except the guy says he can fix it. Peace Corps doesn’t cover dental stuff, so I had to foot the bill myself. Luckily it was a very small bill. So I got everything more or less fixed. My investigation into the holding ability of the still-attached side seemed to have bent the wire a bit, so it’s not quite like it used to be. Ah well. Guess if my teeth start to get really crazy I’ll try to have it removed.

After my adventures in Kazakhstan dentistry it was off to explore the city. I met up with Emily, one of our Pavlodar-dwelling PCVs, and we cruised around a bit. Had lunch in a cafeteria. It was cool. Food was cheap and tasty and the décor was a rocking old-school Soviet theme. They loved them some Lenin!

Then we checked out a few shops. I was looking at clothing options – might have to buy a pair of pants soon – and Emily was looking for clothes hangers. I still remembered the Russian word for them, a word I learned nearly a year ago in my own hanger search and a word that I haven’t used since, so that was kind of cool. Also saw some neat watches that were made in Russia.

I’d been looking at mechanical watches online lately, and I recognized one brand as being the company that used to produce all the watches for the Red Army. They were not too expensive, so I thought I might buy one. And I did. That was kind of cool. All the writing on the face is in English, but everywhere else it’s in Russian. Pretty nifty, I think.

Later that evening it was off to a café for Jeffrey’s going away party. He’s not leaving for a while, but his organization wanted to have a party for him and they invited all the other volunteers in our oblast. It was a fun dinner. Among the many dishes we had that night was sturgeon. Yeah, the caviar fish. It’s also the Tsar’s fish. It’s also ugly as sin. But it’s quite tasty! We stuffed ourselves on a ton of other stuff as well. Then we danced a little. Then we called it a night.

And that, folks, is the latest and greatest from my neck of Kazakhstan. Tomorrow the Ministry of Education is paying a visit to our school. I think it has something to do with the school’s attempt to get certification as a school for gifted students. Should be interesting. Hope it works out. My director is certainly putting in the work to make it happen. Latest addition to our curriculum – Chinese. We also have a new zavuch (sort of like a vice principal) who will oversee our polylinguistic program. Jealous?