december stories part one

This weekend, my CP was gracious enough to give me Christmas Day and the following Friday off, leaving me with a four day weekend before the last day of fall semester classes on Monday. I finally got my act together with gathering and organizing pictures and a couple stories from the last few weeks. The pictures are on my flickr! account and the stories are below:

The Seminar
December 19th had been a monumental date since October, when Saule Sairanovna announced that it would be the date of our open seminar and lessons. In the city district, each semester there is one school that must host an open seminar for English teachers from around the city. It is on a rotating schedule, meaning that every 2 or 3 years each school must take on the responsibility of planning two open lessons (one older class and one younger) and an extracurricular activity (which can be a club, concert, project or play). Any other activities (seminars, workshops, tea breaks, etc) are welcomed but not required by the education department. But of course, with the resident American working at School #8, of course we would do more. Mike and I each planned a 30 minute workshop, mine on teaching phrasal verbs (note: did you know the verb take can have 30+ meanings depending on the preposition that follows it? take on, off, out, over…) and his on incorporating Critical Thinking activities in otherwise boring and by-the-book lessons. I co-led an open lesson about Ecology with our 11th graders, while one of our younger teachers led an interactive lesson in the computer lab. Then came the show. Galina Anatolevna was responsible for putting together the extracurricular activity, which took the form of a play/concert/game extravaganza with Yours Truly playing the role of Santa Claus. Complete with dances, songs, a rap, and pin the tail on the donkey, I’m happy to say that the conference/seminar ordeal was a huge success. Afterwards we celebrated with a huge feast and the bottle of tequila my parents gave to my CP when they visited this summer. After all the fuss and preparation, nervousness and frantic running about, the day was a hit, giving our English teachers 2-3 years to think of what they’ll do next time.

The Banya
I’ve written about the Russian banya at least two times in my 16 months in Kazakhstan, from my first comical misunderstanding back in Uzunagach to the various hot and steamy occasions in the villages surrounding Petropavlovsk. I’ve “banya-ed” in private banyas at friends’ houses and in public banyas in Yavlenka and Shuchinsk. Last night I was invited by a local friend to go to the large public banya right next to my house. I’ve lived next door to the building for over a year, and have never once considered going. That might change. Last night we gathered our towels, shampoo and money to get our clean on. We bought our tickets downstairs in the café/lobby and headed to the men’s section of the building on the second floor. I’m getting more used to the sight of twenty naked bathing men every time I banya, but it still strikes me as strange that the attendant who collects the tickets in the changing room, periodically mops the floor, and assigns changing lockers is a woman. I don’t hesitate to de-robe, grab my bucket and join the fleshy masses in the hot and steamy washroom, but I can’t help but thinking, “Do you think she ever gets any phone numbers at her job?” “So, where did you two meet?” “Oh, you know, I was just doing my job when I ran into Nurlan soaping his back. The rest is history.”

We bathed in the outer room and then sweated in the steam room, taking turns to beat each other with a fan of birch branches, bathed and sweated, sweated and bathed. I think I washed my hair three times. We were there about 45 minutes before heading downstairs to have a beer and catch our breath. It really is a relaxing experience when it’s all through, and we’ve decided that we should go back again a few more times while winter is still here. One thing that I noticed this time is that 90% of the men at the banya were Kazakh, speaking Kazakh. In this northern city, I very, very rarely hear Kazakh spoken on the street, and I think the population proportion still favors the Russian ethnic groups. But not so in the banya. I’ve been planning for a while to study Kazakh a bit more in preparation for our trip to western China next summer, but I haven’t ever needed it in Petro. Maybe I’ll get started sooner than I thought, and figure out how to say, “Are you done with that birch branch?”