The Dog Days of Summer

Well it is officially freaking hot here. I sweat 100% of the time, and usually it is more than just a little. I walked to work Friday morning at 8:30 and my entire shirt was soaked-not much fun.

Last week was pretty tame. I had a meeting in Baku for my small grants committee on Tuesday and there were a few other friends in town for other reasons, so we had a good couple of days. One tragic discovery was that our favorite pizza place has started using a lesser quality cheese-very disappointing. I came back to Lankaran for a few days of work-I’m trying to help my office build a website for our region with a lot of information and pictures about the 6 cities in the region they are responsible for. I also got to meet the new second in command at the head Ministry of Economics.

A group of us went to Mingechivir this weekend for a last get together with some of our AZ3 friends out in the regions. AZ3 Tom has an ex-pat buddy in Mingechivir that bought us a ton of hotdogs, chicken drums, pork, hamburger meet, etc. We ate like kings all day-it was fantastic! His house is on the river that goes through town from a large fresh water quarry. Needless to say we all jumped in several times even though it was bone chilling cold.

I got Lyka from Terah this weekend also. I now have my first solo dog ever. She rode on the bus very well the entire ride back and no Azeris gave me crap about brining her. Most people here are either scared of dogs or just don’t like them. Very few local families have a dog as a pet. They are usually just stray dogs everywhere that people treat horribly, so when they see an American with a dog on a leash and a bag of dog food they paid for, people tend to be quite confused. She’s almost a year old we think and tons of fun, although she is kinda freaking out about being at my house with me. She just sat in the room and growled at me for a couple of minutes, so hopefully she will calm down soon and adjust to her new home. If not I may have to ship her to America and let Terah have her back!

In some very exciting news, my sister Alison has put up the video of me and Tom’s Thanksgiving talent show performance from last year. It is certainly good for one or two dumb laughs, so I hope you enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E4TKAzXwcQ

This week I’m going to just work on getting Lyka settled in, work on that website and another presentation I’m giving in August, and then we are all heading into Baku on Friday for the last weekend AZ3 will be in Azerbaijan. Most of them fly out this coming Sunday or Monday, so we will go play one last time with them. Then on next Tuesday a group of nine of us is flying to Budapest to go to a week long music festival. There will be approximately half a million people there, several hundred bands from all over the world, tons of crazy things, tons of good food, fashion shows, and movie screenings all on islands in the middle of the Danube River. We are camping out on the grounds all week, so I’m getting really excited! It should be a really fun and laid back vacation and a chance to let my inner PC hippie self really shine. I’m sure I’ll have tons of pictures and stories for everyone when I get back from my trip…