A Whole New World

As is usually the case, my second year in Azerbaijan looks to be completely different (and in many ways much better) than the first.

This year I'll be teaching pre-k rather than kindergarten, though in the British system we work in, it's called reception. My students are all four years old and will turn five at some point during the year. That one year difference changes a lot- though we will still have some large group lessons and work on reading and math, our goals and focuses are different. Also, a large portion of our day is spent in child-initiated/teacher-guided play. What this means is that we allow the children to choose their own activities (instead of having pre-planned lessons/assignments/games), but the teacher comes along and extends the activity. This broadens the experience beyond what they might think of on their own, and is a great way to increase and develop their language. If a student makes a playdough pizza, we ask what toppings are on it, place an order, perhaps even encourage them to set up a pizza shop and sell them to other students (counting, money), ask what other kinds of food or drink they might sell... the possibilities are endless.

The size of my class is another big difference. Where we had six students by the end of last year, I already have 12 in my class this year, with another six expected to start next week. It's an entirely different animal. But where some things are harder with a large group, others are much easier.

The change in schools has made all the difference in the world. The facilities themselves are impressive (funded by the state oil company). There is a kid-sized swimming pool where they will take swimming lessons once or twice a week, a great playground, and a huge atrium in the center for days when the weather prohibits going outside.

My classroom- sorry the picture is dark

 

And supplies! We have supplies! It's so funny- my teaching assistant, Nigar, has commented several times on how few toys we have, or how empty our room is, and I guess that's true to a certain extent. But compared to last year it's a dream! And whatever I need, I just have to ask.

 



 

 

The whole feel of the school is different, much more professional, but also very much like a family. I love all the women we work with, which brings me to another important difference between this year and last: everyone who works here speaks English! The women we worked with last year were lovely, but even after studying Azeri all year, our conversation options were so limited. I'm so excited about the new friendships I'm forming this year, particularly Kamala, who teaches the other reception class, and Parvin, one of the assistants from the primary school.

 

A staff meeting/birthday party with the early years teachers



It's also wonderful working with western administrators! There is a couple from New Zealand and one from South Africa, who have worked together establishing international schools in several countries before this.

Me, Suzette, and Bronwyn

Honestly, if I were to try to go into all the changes at our school this year this blog could turn into a novel. But it is amazing. Truly a whole new world.

Which brings me to the other reason I chose that particular title for this entry: our apartment this year is actually within the walls of the historic old city, right in the center of everything. And it definitely looks like something straight out of Aladdin (the city, not our apartment). There's even a Flying Carpet store!

We are right on the border between the super touristy part, and the part where people actually live. I'll let you guess which of the following pictures belongs to which part!

Maiden Tower (the oldest building in Baku) with an old  bath house
in the foreground (the domes), and a bit of the Caspian Sea in the back



The gate by which we enter the city
(otherwise known as our neighborhood)

The mosque next door (literally)

The mosque next to the mosque next door (we
can see four minarets from the roof of our building)

and... stray cats everywhere

 

We are just so overcome with blessings this year that I can't quite believe it. In addition to the things I've mentioned above:

• Our apartment is clean, well maintained, but not over decorated. Which means we can hang things and make it our own this year
• No landlady to deal with!
• Living in community with all the other foreign teachers- we take up all the apartments in our particular building
• A wonderful program to teach the kids reading, and training on how to use it
• A more secular environment- men and women interacting in a normal way, no school celebrations of Muhammed's birthday
• A western approach to education that includes encouraging the children to do things (like change clothes) on their own instead of doing it for them
• Being close enough to everyone else that we can host our home group
• Being close enough to walk pretty much everywhere we usually go (except school, and some of our friends' apartments)

And this is a huge one for me- I can recycle things here! There are huge bins all around the old city. Last year I had to load up all my recyclables in bags and trek all the way downtown. But this year there is a bin one block away! It makes me (and probably my mom, too) so very happy! :)

 

 

All told, this year promises to be completely different, and I'm quite excited about it!

A Whirlwind Summer

This summer absolutely flew by.  Between school ending late and starting early, my time in the States was much shorter than usual.  Add to that the amount of travelling I had to do, and the longest I stayed in one place (in a row) was 3 weeks.  The runner up was a week and 2 days.  But it was full of good times and wonderful people (and all my favorite American foods!) so I guess I can't really complain. :)

 

I flew into Vegas first to spend some time with my parents

 



My Dad spoiled me with
homemade breakfasts

I beat both my parents at an
extremely close game of Cribbage



 

and met the new office cat, Annie

I paid a visit to my Dad's office

 

Next I headed to Pasadena, California to meet and help train all the new teachers for this year.  Training is always one of the highlights of my year, and this year was no exception. 

 

I got to see and catch up with old friends from last year...

 

AZ roommate reunion!

Introverted bonding time with my roommate
at training: Let's read magazines together!



...and meet all the amazing new teachers.  I may be a little biased, but I think we have a particularly awesome group going to the CIS this year! It's also the largest group we've sent in years, which is really exciting.

Normal group picture

and "With energy!"

Aren't they great?  I kind of adore all of them. :) In the three weeks I was there, we also spent concentrated time getting to know our new city teammates.

Lauren, Jillann, Rachael, and me

One of the many team-building activities we do at training is a photo scavenger hunt.  Teams are given a list of various pictures to try to get, each worth a certain amount of points.  Some of the possibilities were "A conga line including as many strangers as possible," "The whole team in a store display window," and "Changing the numbers at a gas station."  Though our team didn't win, we had a blast and got a ton of great pictures in the process.

"CD cover"

"Cooling off on a hot day"- Jillann really knows how to take one for the team!

Though training is really intense, especially for the new teachers (12+ hour days), we still managed to squeeze in some fun activities on the side, whether it was simply cards in the dining hall on Saturdays, Ultimate Frisbee on the lawn, or movie nights in our dorm rooms.  This year, though, one of the new teachers loved to dance even more than I do, so we ended up getting groups to go swing dancing several different nights. It started slowly, then gathered steam as everyone who had been told everyone else how much fun it was! I gave a lot of intro-to-swing lessons that last week, often on the spur of the moment in the courtyard or in the classroom between sessions.  My last night we had 11 people, and the Thursday after I left, another group went.  It was sooooo much fun.  You had better believe we'll be reviving last year's Thanksgiving swing dance parties come November!

 

After training I flew out to Georgia to see my sister and her family for a week.  During that time, we took my niece, Carson, to her first-ever Braves game!  We are a Braves baseball clan, and my nephew had been inducted last year.  Though we only made it to the 8th inning before the kids had to get home and to bed, it was an exciting game. (For those of you in Atlanta, it was the game against the Nats where they tied it up in the 9th and then went on into the 15th inning)

 

What a great family!

 

After that it was back to Vegas for a mere 3 days to pack and head back to AZ.  Though I'm happy to get back, I'm finding that it gets harder to leave at the end of every summer.  My attachments to all my various "homes" are deepening, making every goodbye harder than the last.  But I wouldn't trade the life I've been called to for the world- because it is, in fact, the world. I've left my heart in so many places I'm starting to lose track, but it's a good kind of pain- the kind that comes from loving people and being loved.



Final goodbyes at the airport

So here goes another year! I'll keep you posted. :)

The Other Georgia

This year I have had so many opportunities for fun blog titles, like "Eating Turkey in Turkey." And I seriously considered naming this one "A Georgian Goes to Georgia."  It makes me smile.  It's the little things in life. :)

Anyway, for our spring retreat this year we met our Field Director, Jeffrey, in Tblisi, Georgia for a long weekend.  It was amazing- so refreshing and encouraging.  The city itself is quite beautiful, with lots of old architecture and random, extremely modern additions.  Take, for example, this glass and metal walking bridge right in the middle of the oldest part of town:

 

 

I fell in love with Georgian food when I moved to Kazakhstan the first time, and we were all quite excited to try the real thing.  It didn't disappoint.  We ordered hachipuri (a kind of pastry stuffed with cheese) pretty much everywhere we went- we couldn't get enough of it!  While there, however, we discovered a new obsession: flavored lemonades.  Pear, apple, cherry, mint, even tarragon (really?) flavored lemonades were everywhere, and they were delicious. Except, possibly, the tarragon.

 



 

Starting from those lemonade bottles, I made it my goal for the few days we were there to figure out the Georgian alphabet.  It is completely different from anything we've ever seen, and it was disorienting not being able to even sound out the words on signs.  So I started noting every instance where a word was written in Georgian and again in Latin letters (not translated, though), and I made pretty good progress.  By the end I could sound out most of the signs we saw, although I still didn't get the meaning.  I'll save that for our next trip! ;)

 

We took a day trip out to a smaller town to visit a famous monastery there. The countryside was just beautiful, and we got a lot of great pictures.

 



 

Covering our heads to go into the Orthodox church

 

 

 

The first restaurant we went to, I noticed that they had different symbols to mark the men's and women's restrooms, so I took pictures.  I assumed it was a gimmicky thing for that particular place, until I saw the same signs everywhere. The men's one kind of makes sense to me, but I would really love to know why it is universally acknowledged in Georgia that an umbrella represents women.  Surely there is a story there somewhere!

Men's restroom...

..and Women's.  Obviously

 

Some more fun/random pictures:

 



I'm not sure what we're celebrating, but we sure are happy about it!

In an old fortress on the mountain

In addition to the natural beauty, the old and new architecture, and the delicious food, one of our favorite things in Tblisi was the graffiti! It was randomly quite hilarious.  Everywhere we went we saw graffiti in English, but instead of the usual slew of foul language it was everything from quotes and profound (or hilarious) thoughts on life to stenciled portraits of famous people and even questions!

 



"Sorry, where is the Contemporary Art Museum?"

Xachapuri is the cheese pastry I mentioned earlier

Me and Charlie, just chillin'

There were so many others, but I didn't get pictures of them all, more's the pity. But the moral of the story is this: for delicious food, lovely people, and hilarious graffiti, I absolutely recommend Georgia as your next vacation destination!  I know I can't wait to go back. :)

Flowers, the Zoo, and Getting Out of Baku

In May we celebrated Flower Day. It's actually a holiday for the birthday of the former president, but I guess that springtime automatically lends itself to a celebration of flowers as well.  And boy, did it! I met two of the teachers from our school at a park downtown, and it was truly resplendent with flowers!  How often do you get to legitimately use that word?

Me and Shebnam



The design on the base of this
statue was made entirely of flowers

 

This humongous picture of the former president?
Also made entirely of flowers. I am officially impressed.

Now that class night was over, we were able to relax and do some more fun things with our students, including a field trip to the zoo! Though it was a little depressing seeing the animals in such small cages (I really can't recommend a trip to any non-western zoo to any animal lovers out there), it was great seeing the kids reactions!

Everyone wanted a picture with the monkey (just behind Arslan to the right)

This camel smelled terrible, and there was the additional danger of getting
spit on! These three were the only ones brave enough to go in for the
picture, and I think the results are quite hilarious!

Our whole class with a lion: Farida, Yusuf,
Nasreddin, Muhammed, Arslan, and Yagub (standing)

 

At some point this spring Rachael, Colleen, and I realized that we had not been outside of Baku even once the whole year (aside from Thanksgiving). Which is a shame, because Azerbaijan is really a beautiful country, home to 9 of the 11 climate zones in the world. Fortunately a few opportunities came our way that last month before we left.

 

The first came when the twins' mother invited us to visit their summer home.  It is only about 40 minutes outside of the city, but it was a lovely retreat. Within their walled property, they had some beautiful gardens, and even a small field of poppies!

 

The three of us with the twins' older sisters

We really got out of the city a few weeks later, though, when several people from our home group went camping near Guba, a city in the northwest of the country.  That region is mountainous, and it made for some spectacular views. We simply couldn't get over how gorgeous it was. And relaxing- there really is something therapeutic about beauty, isn't there?

Our camping group (minus Andrea who took the picture) just before a hike

This is the valley we camped in, seen from our hike.  Not bad, huh?

Shepherd and his dad, Mike.  Shepherd and I had something
in common: this being our first real camping trip!

Up with the sun- the silver lining of sleeping on hard stone! :)
(it was super chilly, though, hence the sleeping bag-blanket)

I definitely danced around this field singing "The Sound of Music."
And someone definitely caught it on tape. He is, however,
under strictest orders never to show it to anyone!

One of my favorite things about this, my first true camping experience, was all the everyday things we got to do, not only outdoors, but surrounded by such majestic scenery. Brushing my teeth in the open air, in the middle of what could easily have been a National Geographic spread.  Also, filling our water bottles and washing our dishes in a little spring:



All in all, it was an amazing weekend.  I hope we get to do it again this year. And I hope we'll get to see more of this beautiful country!