I’ve finally committed to a woman!!!

I know most of you have asked/wondered why I have never committed to a woman. Well it finally happened on last Thursday. I moved in to a house with a wonderful lady and will officially be living with just her in our house for a while. While I always pictured my first female roommate would be Elle MacPherson in a villa overlooking the ocean, this may be just as good. My new home in Lenkeran for the next 6 months is with a 70 year old Russian speaking woman!!! I’ll give you all time to think that one over. To try to quote Owen Wilson from Armageddon, "I’m 98% excited and 2% scared….or maybe it’s 2% excited and 98% scared. That’s what makes it so great!"
One quick housekeeping issue I want to take care of. It has been brought to my attention that several of my good friends here have told their friends and families to read my blog since they are involved in most of my stories and are too lazy to write their own blogs. This is fantastic and I hope you all enjoy. I will try to include more names in my stories for everyone. If you would like and good dirt on your particular friend, relative or child, feel free to email me at euroash@gmail.com and I will be more than happy to pass any information/pictures along to you that you request for a small fee of powdered Gatorade sent to me in AZ or a good story on the person in question that I can use as blackmail.
Everyone got to go visit their new site for 2 days and 2 nights this past week. The overall response to sites, families and job assignments is really positive/excitement. Some people got some really hot/dessert locations, but they seem to be ok with it and up to the challenge. You could basically get ocean, desert, mountains, or a mix. The city location could range from bigger city w/60k-250k people (mostly for CED volunteers doing business) or a village 2k-10k people (TEFL volunteers teaching English in schools). TEFL may or may not have a site mate from our group or the previous group, and all CED volunteers have at least one site mate (except for Carlo who is all by himself in the desert but he’s a good guy and I think he’ll be fine). So me, Tom and Tim all headed to our new homes in Lenkeran on Thursday. It is 6.5 hours from Baku by bus (it was miserable on the way down) and 3 hours by taxi (which was both scary and great on the way back). A bus is $4US and a taxi is $8US/person (if you have 4 people). The city has about 200k people, is really pretty, clean, and calm. There is one huge bazaar and one small one, several nice parks, an Olympic training center I haven’t seen yet (but they have tennis courts so I’m going to try to sneak in later), tons of mountains, and is on the Caspian Sea as well. Lenkeran has 7 out of the 11 weather climates in the world. It is Houston humid in the summer and snows in the winter. They grow tea, oranges, lemons, tobacco, and anything citrus related. They also just opened a huge powder milk factory. My house has a new good fridge, TV, stereo, clothes washing machine-HUGE, 2 recliners and nice squatting toilet-I’m going to be a squatting pro! My boss and 2 co-workers seem really nice. I’ll work from 9-6 starting off (with a 2 hour lunch break to walk home, eat and nap) and see how that goes. Still not sure what I’m going to do, but that’s going to take some time since none of them speak English and my Azeri isn’t good enough for working situations yet. Tom and I have already agreed to work with the Eurasia Foundation in town advising a group of college age youths on grant writing. Both local papers want to interview the 3 of us when we get to town and we are going to suggest they throw a "Carnival-esque" party to welcome us! Everyone stared down the new Americans that are invading their town (Tim’s parents are Asian which really throws them off). There are 3 current volunteer chicks there teaching English, but they leave the day before we get there, so the city will have to make a big switch. The girls treated us to homemade chicken enchiladas and they were fantastic. Add a few cold beers and it almost felt like Chuy’s….minus the margaritas and creamy jalapeno dip. It’s a really conservative town and women don’t really leave the house much, so the girls were only out in town when they walked to and from their school or to buy food and that’s about it. Us as guys will have a ton more freedom and can do pretty much anything we want. I heard a story from one of the chicks that live there last night that I have to pass along, and then I’ll let you get back to work: So we have squatters here mostly for toilets. One of the girls was hand washing her clothes with her iPod in her back pocket so as to not get it wet. She spaced out and forgot about it and when to take care of her business. Well in falls the iPod, a direct shot into a hole as big as your hand into months and months of poo. An iPod is one of the most valuable possessions for a PC volunteer so she and her 2 roommates put on faces masks, head lamps and latex gloves and went after it. After 2 hours of searching in a pit o’ poo, one of the girls finally got it out. They used hands, a broom, a stick with a spoon taped on it, branches, and other weird stuff. The neighbors thought they were insane-and so do I. The amazing thing is that the girl who owns the ipod swears the battery now lasts an extra hour. The iPod is now known as the pooPod. With that tale, I bid you a fond farewell for another week…..ash
One picture is of the garden in my new house’s courtyard. The other two are from Sunday’s movie day at my school-Tom (who is going to Lenkeran with me), Kasey, and Magda in the first and Rachel and I laughing at Ben acting like an idiot.