Nauryz

Today is Nauryz, the Kazakh new year and one of the biggest holidays for the Kazakh people. This morning I went to the square, where they had a big parade and the Mongolian president made an appearance. I thought it was cool that the president came out to Olgii for Nauryz until I learned that there are elections coming up in May and more than likely his reason for showing up was purely political. Anyways, the parade and festivities were pretty cool and fun to watch. I've never seen so many people in one area in Olgii at the same time. Olgii has roughly 30,000 people and there were thousands today in the parade and watching the parade. There were some gers set up in the square and I guess they were selling tea and food and maybe some other things, I didn't check any of them out. The parade consisted of a number of different groups of people, everything from the students and staff of each school to petrol station workers dressed in matching uniforms to the eagle hunters riding horses and making their eagles flap their wings. It was pretty cool and I took some good pictures.

After the parade is over, the big thing to do on Nauryz is to go visit friends and family all over town to eat a special holiday soup, drink tea, and socialize. I went home for a little bit to get some water and sit down for a sec before heading out to visit some people. My supervisor, the director of the children's center, called me and I got the impression he wanted me to come to his house. I walked to the other side of town and on the way ran into four of my students(Talgat, Bauka, Bata, and Altinbek...four of my students who I teach and play football with on Tuesdays and Thursdays), who let me know they wanted me to come to one of their homes, or so I thought. They walked with me to my supervisor's home and I discovered that nobody was there...so I went with my students to one of their houses a few blocks away. While I had originally thought I was just going with all four students to Altinbek's house to eat and drink tea, I ended up first going to Bata's house, then to Altinbek's house, then to Talgat's house and finally to Bauka's house, eating lots of meat and snacks, drinking a lots of tea and soup at each house. I met many of my student's family members and got to kinda see how they live, which was interesting. On my journey all over Olgii to these four houses I'm pretty sure I saw more of Olgii in two hours than I have in 8 months. I also learned some new roads, alleys, paths, and shortcuts which could prove to be helpful in the future.

After leaving my students I headed to the square to meet my friends Linda and Rike(the German girls) and my friend Agii(English teacher I'm working on projects with). Agii invited us to his home for soup and tea, he picked us up in his jeep and we spent a couple hours talking with him, his mother and two of his friends. It was a pretty fun afternoon. After leaving Agii's the girls went to meet with another friend and I went to meet one of my other students, Gulim, a girl who I am helping work towards studying in the U.S. I went to her home and had more tea and soup, talked with her for a while and then headed home, tired and full of soup and tea. Overall it was a really fun and interesting day. Like I said I took a lot of good pictures and I should have some of them up later tonight. I will probably make a new album on facebook and put up a link to the album asap. Hope all is well back home.

Updates on project work to come sometime soon.