Here’s Lyka!

Last week was a fairly low key week. The only real excitement was when our two new site mates, Jane and Joyce, came down to Lankaran for their first visit. We prepared a huge Mexican feast with chicken quesadillas, queso and margaritas! We all ate way too much, but enjoyed every freaking bite. Jane will be teaching English at School #10 and Joyce is a Youth Development Volunteer. It will certainly be fun to have a couple of new Americans to hang out with. Tom, Tim and I all gave presentations on volunteerism, time management and how to give a good presentation to about 20 high school and college kids Friday morning, so that was fun. This week I will be in full preparation mode for our boys leadership camp. It starts on September 3^rd, so everything needs to get all taken care of this week. We will have about 36 high school guys, plus some return guys from last year as councilors, azeri counterparts and several guest speakers all joining us for the week. I’m getting excited-it should be a really fun time.

Since I don’t have too much to talk about I figured I would just give you some pictures of Lyka. We are getting along a lot better now, so she is becoming less of a pain in my butt. She stays outside pretty much all day, when we walk she always go straight for the shaded areas to walk in, she LOVES bread, and has waaaay too much energy….

Oh yea, there is also a new picture from Budapest that Rikki George sent me-it sums up out time there pretty well I think. The two really blond people are our irish friends we hung out with a ton.

Budapest and Back Again...

So Ram, Rikki George, Carlo, Jenny, Brendan and Ressa all met up in Budapest for the 15^th Sziget Music Festival on Obudai Island in the middle of the Danube River. We camped out on the island every night and had an amazing time! A little info about the festival before I give you the complete week’s run down. There were over 250 foreign artists from 44 countries, 200 programs per day and 400-500,000 visitors. Here’s a break dow of each days events as well as my take on the concerts I saw:

Tuesday: We got in and had to take a bus, metro and two different trams to get to the island, and then had to wait in line for about 1.5 hours to get our wrist bands and get onto the festival grounds. Brendan and Ressa got their in the morning and set up our camp site in the trees about 20 meters from the river. They put up 2 of our tents and a huge tarp covering most of our area. They did a great job and we were lucky they got there early, because when I got there, the place was packed! We had Germans, Brits, Irish, Aussies, French, and who knows what other nationalities camping around us. We went and saw Locomotiv GT that night-an older and very popular Hungarian rock band-think Rolling Stones of Hungary I guess. They were a ton of fun to watch and the crowd loved them. We toured the grounds and then hung out on the beach with a ton of hippie bongo players and fire dancers (the people that have the two chains with fire balls on the end and swing them all over the place). It was a really cool start to a long week of weird experiences and fun!

Wednesday: Carlo and I started off the day with a Danube swim and then the group checked out new parts of the island. We found the showering facilities, best spots for food and all of the main stages we wanted to visit. We hung out on the lawn by the World Music Stage in the early evening and saw some really cool performances before we saw Manu Chao that night. He was awesome! Very high energy, fun punk/dance music-the audience LOVED him. Only bad part was when he announced that “ the biggest terrorist in the world is George Bush”. Anti-American sentiment will be a semi-constant theme throughout this blog sadly.

Thursday: The day was pretty tame after a late night of walking around the island and meeting people after the music was over and knowing this night would be a big one. We slept in, ate a bunch, took my one and only on site shower-the lines were insanely long and the water was insanely cold (way worse than the Danube), but the actual crate shower facilities were really nice. We saw The Good, the Bad and the Queen and the Chemical Brothers that night. The GBQ (British pop music) was ok, but not as good as everyone was building them up to be. We got about ¾ the way into the crowd for The Chemical Brothers (electronic dance music). They were unbelievable. They played some of their old classics as well as some of the better songs off of their new cd and their light show was the coolest show of that kind I have ever seen. The crowd was totally into it and people were dancing like crazy. The only bad part was when they had this “scary clown” guy on the light show singing part of a song-think the clown doll from Stephen King’s It scary. I met up with two really hot Hungarian chicks at the show and went out dancing with them well into the night (the festival had three late night dance tents as well as a late night kareoke, cheesy 80’s music, and heavy metal tents every night). I thought the night was going great until they just started making out and said they were going back to their camp site-OUCH! Ha ha ha! Oh well, it was a great time.

Friday: Well today started off really weird. Around 7 am some drunk British dude stumbles into our camp, pulls out a lighter and starts babbling about how he’s going to light our American flag on fire. Needless to say there were enough of us telling him to chill out and leave that he finally took off. Carlo, Rikki George and I all went in the human bubble car wash for our shower today. It was a blast. About 10 people all get in at once and just have a big bubble fight while getting clean at the same time. We had some goofy guy who kept going up to the girls asking if he could wash them and they wash him in really broken English. It was hilarious because he was just goofing around, but was actually serious I think. After that it started raining off an on for the rest of the day. We saw Gogol Bordello (a crazy American band) that afternoon and they were hilarious. They sing a song called “Start Wearing Purple” that is pretty funny and their lead singer has a wicked moustache, wears a head band with tight leather pants and just goes crazy the entire show. Good times had by all. As much fun as they were, they were just a warm up for PINK! (this is where you can make fun of me all you want) Jenny and I got up to center stage about 8^th row and had a blast. She’s is FREAKING HOT! No question. She put on a great, high energy show and as cheesy as it sounds, had a blast. Of course being the idiot she is, she sang her song bashing GW, so that wasn’t fun to hear from another American with all of the other people there already thinking it.

Saturday: We all woke up to a soaked island. It rained all night and the place was a muddy mess. Half of the beach was gone because the river went up and the walk ways and area in front of the main stage were just mud puddles. We went to the Luminarium to start the wet day off. It is this huge inflatable structure with colorful tunnels and places to lie down with ambient music playing so you can just chill out and relax. We sat in there and just hung out for a solid 30 minutes and loved every second of it. When we got back to our camp site there was a big commotion on the beach so we went to check it out. The police had a small section taped off and we could see a rusted piece of metal in the center. Well it turns out some one was snorkeling or something in the river and they found an old WWII land mine, so they had to have the Hungarian military come in and dispose of it-so that was fun. After that Carlo and I went for a walk and ended up with a group of people taking some African dancing lesson for about 30 minutes, which was completely goofy but totally fun. We watched The Rakes (UK rock band) that were only ok, The Hives (Swedish rock band) which have the most pompous lead singer I’ve ever heard (he referred to himself and the band in the 3^rd person the entire time and was simply hilarious-an example is “Two years ago some baby Hives wrote a song about some big Hives, and now the big Hives will play that song for you and rock your asses off! Yell for the Hives to rock your asses off and they will!!!!”), and we finished the night of with Nine Inch Nails. They aren’t exactly my favorite band, but they put on a decent show, played their most popular stuff, but played a lot of slow stuff, so it never got as crazy/out of control as I thought it was going to get. Ram and I were bored and wide awake at our camp site around 3am and decided to go on for a walk in the rain. Well we found tons of people still up, dancing and partying in the rain, so we joined them for some fun and soaked rain dancing for about and hour and had a great freaking time.

Sunday: Today we went into Budapest for the afternoon. I’d like to say it was to see the city, but is was more for a combo KFC and Pizza Hut lunch bonanza! Man that was delicious. We went to the Terror Museum (talks about all of the times Hungary has been taken over and has some graphic videos and an old torture dungeon in the basement), which was done really well, but really depressing. After that we sat out in a nice and calm park for a while before heading back to the festival. I made the comment how nice it was to walk in a city for over 30 minutes without hearing one car horn-simply blissful. I headed back to see Sinead O’Connor (only a few came with me) because I figured why not. I really like her voice and thankfully she played “Nothing Compares To You”, so I guess my life is now complete ;). After Sinead was a band called Faithless (UK techno dance) that was really, really good. Not quite as good as Chemical Brothers, but close. I really liked them. The lead singer from the Cure was supposed to sing with them but didn’t show I guess.

Monday: Our last day was filled with packing, ladder golf, getting in our last drops of good food, crafts and some decent music. It started off really weird because the British guy who wanted to burn our flag earlier in the week came by and apologized. I guess he had a British flag in the crowd, some guy punched him, and he realized he had been a jerk to us, so he came back and we talked for quite a while. It made us feel pretty good I must say (and bad for hating that guy so much before). Thanks Thomas, you’re an all right guy! A few of us got free massages, we made some cool pictures, a few made clay pots and wicker baskets, etc. We were late so we onl saw two songs of “!!!” (crazy American band). They were great, but I’m sad I missed their entire set. We finished our festival music with Tool (American rock band) and they weren’t very good at all. Their light show was just their old videos and the lead singer just sang with his back to the crowd most of the time, so we didn’t go out with the best performance, but that’s ok. We walked around well into the morning saying goodbye to our new friends, seeing everything for the last time, watching a ton of fire dancers (Rikki George got hit with a fire ball because she wasn’t paying attention-she’s completely fine, it barely touched her).

Tuesday: I got up at 7am to catch my flight and a new guy walks by and starts going off on our flag one last time. Thankfully all of our neighbors told him to shut up because we were cool and he took off. As I was walking out there were tons of people still up, buying beers and dancing on top of trash dumpsters-it was insane and a great last memory of the festival. My flight home was miserable with a long layover. I got back to Baku at 3am and had to give a training for other Volunteers about project design for three straight days. Somehow I still had just enough energy to make it through ok.

Some random things:

I ate about 2-3 “New York” or “American” hot dogs a day with combos of mayo, ketchup, jalapenos, relish, crunchy onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and BBQ sauce…

I also ate delicious gyros, mini-donuts, goulash, pizza (one with pickles and canadian bacon-oddly enough really good), these cinnamon roll type things, a burger, langos (bread disc with garlic butter, sour creme and grated cheese on top!, lots of sausage, and plenty of local beers…

They had “pissoirs” next to the portolets all over the place. Basically a stand up toilet for 3 men to use which cut down on lines and messes a ton-picture included…

There were sooooo may people with insane dredlocks, I was loving it. I met one guy with 7 years worth down to his butt…

I love hippie chicks-it is official and wonderful…

There were cigarette stands all over (they have like 7 kinds of the same brand of cigs over there like “Extra Flavor”) and at all hours of the day every stand had two INSANELY HOT CHICKS working it. I’ve never wanted to be a smoker, but I mean that’s just not fair ;)

We saw several men and women (sadly way more men than women) playing in the mud naked…

We saw a really cool French street theater group perform…

You could buy Jack and Cokes in bucket form from the Jack Daniels tent. If you bought some Jack Daniels you got a Jack Dollar you could gamble with. Well I showed up the first night we went there in my cowboy hat wtih a Jack Daniels belt buckle on and played poker. They announced to the entire crowd a Texan was playing poker-it was HILARIOUS! I also won enough for all of us to get t-shirts and stuff!!!

They had a ropes course/zip line, roller dance, bungey jump, and sling shot you could do…

We hung out with people from Hungary, Britian, Ireland, Germany, Holland, Brussels, and France (and i’m sure many more places)…

This festival was run as well as it could have been. The day after rain they had trucks out dumping sand and sucking up water, every morning the portolets were cleaned with new toilet paper put in, the grounds were cleaned each morning, the staff was really cool and helpful, there were so many cool and free things to do that you never felt like you cold get it all in, they had a ton of great music that we got to see and a ton we missed, and the people were great overall. I couldn’t have been more happy with my experience!!!

Quick local notes:

Lyka and I are back living together and slowly getting used to each other. Hopefully I can get her trained good enough so I don’t want to kill her every day pretty soon. She’s getting better…slowly…

Our two new site mates Jane (English teacher) and Joyce (Youth Development) are coming to visit us this week before they officially move down next month so we are very excited to have some new Americans around. We will be of course making a huge Mexican Feast this week in their honor (and because any time one person shows up we use it as an excuse to make queso).

We are getting all geared up for our boys leadership camp the first week of September.

It is hot and humid here, but nothing like Texas from what I hear.

I just bought my tickets back to America tonight, so you all better get ready!