14 February 2010

Happy Valentine’s Day! – Jordan, you’ll have to call me or write me a long email about your weekend. I want to know how many times you and Kris fell down your first time snowboarding!

This is the “I had a slumber party, and it was awesome and I love everything” blog.
I realize that my last blog was quite miserable, almost humorously so. After I wrote it, I put on my pjs and watched Anastasia. I was feeling much better, and then my host sister came and got me and told me that the teachers at school needed me. So, I got dressed and went to school. There was a visiting delegation of directors from other schools and they wanted to see me. I went to school and saw them, and they complimented our classroom. The teachers and my director wanted me to sit and have tea with the visiting directors, but I was in no mood to be on display, thank you very much. So, I hung out in with the teachers who were serving tea. After the directors left, my teachers and I all had tea. We chatted for a bit, and then I came home. On the way home, I ran into a tree. I was walking with my head down, watching out for ice, since I had already fallen once that day and BAM… I walked right into a tree. I guess you could say that it, quite literally, knocked some sense into me. Haha I’ve been in a better mood since then.

I woke up this morning to one of sunniest, blue sky days we have had in quite some time; maybe that has something to do with my fantastic mood. The past few days have been considerably better. I guess I should go in chronological order starting with the slumber party from last week, skipping the bad days and finishing with this morning.

So.
The slumber party… was awesome. Granted it was very overwhelming with 15 girls descended on my house all at once. (I was thinking they would trickle in, but they all met up and came together) The 15 girls, plus my 4 host sisters, brother, apa, ata, counterpart, another teacher, and I made a big crowd. I have found that teenage girls are most resourceful and are best handled by being left to their own devices. Of course, here “their own devices” almost always ends up with a disco-tech, so our hall was turned into a dance party for a while and I was roped into re-teaching the cha-cha slide for the girls who were not at the last club. (shuddup Jordan) after which, the girls had a tea and cookie break. They all brought cookies, and I made about 10 dozen oatmeal cookies due to an error in our PC cookbook (I don’t want to go into detail because it makes me feel like an idiot. 6 cups of butter, honestly!) anyways. Teenager sure can eat! We had our tea break at around 7ish, so I decided to push the pizza dinner back until 9-9:30ish since it turned out that all the girls got permission to stay until the morning and no one had to leave early. I had intended on having all the girls help make pizza, but I reevaluated trying to avoid an anxiety attack on my part. 17 girls in our little kitchen would have been WAY too many. So I enlisted the help of the two 11th grade girls, my two youngest sisters and my counterpart and we made pizzas. I always end up making too much food when I cook for big groups (enchiladas in Norfolk as an example haha) and figured “hey! We can just have cold pizza for breakfast” – wrong. After we ate, I led a game of three round charades. I took a while to get the rules across –the second round where they could only say one word was particularly hard for most of them. And the third round they had to act out each other, me and my counterpart, along with every fruit and vegetable haha. (They weren’t very creative with the first time of picking words) Then we had another dance party, they girls played some games, and I got bullied (teenage girls are quite demanding haha) into reading tarot cards for every single girl (and my host dad haha) right after I started the power went out, so I read tarot cards by candlelight, which I thought added to the scene, although my use of two different dictionaries to translate the little book probably detracted from it. Tarot card reading, Uno, B.S, and Egyptian ratscrew carried us until about 2am. Then we put in “27 Dresses” on my computer for the girls to watch. Only about 5 girls made it through without falling asleep. The others said “we’re just gonna lay down, not sleep, until the power comes back on.” So from 3 to about 5:30 most of the girls slept. And of the course the ones that didn’t sleep were ruthless. Haha every girl that slept got drawn on with lipstick. I felt kinda bad ( I mean, it was my lipstick haha) but hey, girls will be girls, and who am I to detract from their fun. Especially if I’m being kept awake all night. And I’m sure a number of illicit calls to and from boys on friends’ cell phones occurred, but they were harmless. (I had to adamantly refuse about six boys at school the day before who begged to come) The power came back on at about 5:30 and we made friendship bracelets and listened to music until about seven, when we had tea again with the rest of the cookies (the left over pizza disappeared in the night.) and at 8ish when it got light outside, the girls went home. My two oldest sisters and I promptly passed out. I slept til noon and was the first to rise. All the feedback was positive and the girls have already asked when the next one will be. I told them “anan” which means “later” and gets me off the hook for some time.

Skipping over the ghastly next few days and jumping around: (I think I’ll just do this in bullets and say all the good stuff from the past few days and this morning)

-My oldest host sister has started eating around the meat in her food, something I am saved from doing because Apa does it for me. The resulting “discussion” reminded me so forcibly of the same conversation I had with my Mama in high school, when I did the same thing that it made me laugh and want to cry at the same time. (but in a good way)
-I agreed to chaperone the Valentine’s Day party yesterday so the kids could have it, and was forced to be on a jury for the contest. It was a lot of fun, even if I did freeze half to death.
-I finally figured out how to knit a week or so ago, and last night apa taught me the kyrgyz way of knitting. I’m gonna attempt a scarf once I finish crocheting the blanket for heidi.
-My youngest host sister turned down a trip to the city with my parents this morning so she could stay home and bake cookies with me. (I’m going to attempt apple tarts this afternoon. Wish me luck)
-I did my weekly change of thermals this morning and decided to not put any back on. So, for the first time since October, I’m not wearing thermals at the moment. And not because it is particularly warm, mind you, I just realized that I’d forgotten what it feels like to not wear them.
-Granted, after I went outside to do my weekly hang-up of my sheets, it took the better part of half and hour for my lower extremities to thaw out. It is sunny today, so I am going to pretend that my sheets are going to be clean when I bring them in. I haven’t been able to wash them in a while because I only have the one pair and it takes at least a week for anything to dry all the way on the line, so I make do with hanging them outside to air out and to beat the dust off of them once a week. It continually surprises me how much dust accumulates in my room. My window doesn’t open, so it is really hard to air out my room in the winter, and it seems like I dust my room every day. It isn’t surprising really, that I have a perpetually stuffy nose. I need a heap-filter. I’m rambling.
-My rice cooker has surpassed itself with awesomeness. I have made rice, beans, lentils, noodles, and oatmeal. Delish.
-I’m slowly (very slowly) learning to play the guitar. It has been difficult to find a downloadable pdf file for help. I’ve found ones that just cover reading music, and ones that have something to do with “tabs” but it is kinda hard to teach yourself with a book. It was the same with knitting. Jenn sent me that fantastic teach-yourself-to-knit-book, but it wasn’t until Holo showed me that I really got it. I think the guitar might be the same way. Luckily, a good number of the volunteers know how to play. I guess I’m what all my training books call a “tactile learner.” Haha
- I just realized that I’m on page three, so I think this qualifies as enough positive to make up for the negativity of the last blog.

Miss you!
Love from Kyrgyzstan,
Jess