Snakes on a Marshrutka

Just a few topics to hit upon this week:
First and most important, OU seems to be doomed this year. First Bomar gets kicked off, and then the PAC-10 decides to start rigging games so Oregon can win them. 2 gigantic blown calls in a row-COME ON! We did kill Middle Tenn. St. it seems, yippie!

I finally got to watch the movie “Snakes on a Plane” and it was horrible. I couldn’t have been more disappointed. There were a few good parts, but nothing near as cheesy/ridiculous as I was hoping for (plus my bootleg dvd was pretty crappy quality).

I had my first full week of work last week and it was pretty slow (I think with each passing week things will get better though). My boss is on a 2 week vacation, no one speaks English (and my Azeri isn’t business grade yet), and it was just a slow week I think. I went to a conference on put together by the Counterpart Organization. They come in, invite people from the community to get together and discuss what the major challenges/problems are in their region, both locally and nationally. It was very interesting to hear what all they had to say. They are doing 6 of these in the major cities in AZ, and then will have a grant competition in 6 months for people to get money to fix the problems. I hope it works well for them. I then went to a city hall meeting (I was invited by the mayor’s office-the mayor is the big wig of each city, appointed by the president and has all the power so I’m glad he likes me already) about a new 4 lane road they are building from my city to Baku over the next 2 years. They made me sit on stage with the 2 American engineers that were there to talk about it. Pretty funny stuff. As I was writing this my boss just brought in a local college girl that is going to volunteer at my office for a while to translate for me. She did an exchange program and went to her senior year of high school in Michigan, so things are looking up at work in the language department. Oh yea, plus she’s really cute and 19…

My nene took me as her date to a wedding Thursday night. I sat at a table with all of the professors from the local college, one spoke English so that was nice. Everyone stared at me when we entered the room, and then really stared at me when my nene grabbed my arm and made me dance with her. What made that even more fun was the fact that we were the only 2 dancing at the time so there were about 100 Azeri’s just watching me do my best Azeri dance with a 70 year old woman. My life is soooo weird right now!

A big group of us went to Baku this weekend for my friend Rikki George’s 24th birthday party! Man McDonald’s is so freaking good I can’t even begin to tell you. I also personally killed 2.5 huge nacho grande plates over the weekend, chicken strips, a club sandwich, and as many Gatorades as I could get my hands on. There were a lot of volunteers in town, so it was a lot of fun-we went dancing till 4 am both nights and we are all completely pooped. One major highlight was us playing wiffleball in a park by the Caspian Sea-IN SHORTS!!!! It was great. All the Azeri’s just kept walking by and staring at us having a great time.

I now have 5 straight weeks coming up where I’ll stay in Lenkeran with no friend contact (besides Tom and Tim). I’ll be working 5 days a week and will begin language tutoring soon hopefully so things are changing. It should be a big adjustment period for me, so I’m hoping it goes well. A volunteer that has a huge house in Ganja (big city 8 hours away from me by bus) is throwing a Halloween party for us at the end of October, so I’m already working on costume ideas and looking forward to that. OU/TX is coming up and I’m missing it. I may cry. Fletcher’s and Budweiser for breakfast followed by OU football, best day of the year…

The pictures are of me and nene at the wedding and then our gang Saturday night in Baku: Marko (an Aussie that lives in Baku), Ram, Jason, Tom, Ben, Me, then Magda, Kasey, Rachel, and Joy (in very front).