The Torture Chamber (aka The Banya)

Yes, my head looks like a giant blueberry. I like it. So what?

Hi everyone! So, this is to catch you up on what I have been up to. Jesse is leaving me (well, at least temporarily). He is fleeing (I mean flying) soon to Moscow to do some work there and then will hopefully be coming back. Since he is taking the computer I figured I should post something since I'll probably forget by the time he gets back. Anyway, I haven't been up to too much different from what he's been doing. You know, language sessions, practicing the language, learning the culture, having a 3 hour torture in the local torture chamber here.

Well, that is what I call it. They call it a healthy, relaxing experience (aka the banya). For those who don't know what a banya is, it is a public bath (men and women are separated, of course). Once you pay you are taken into a locker room where you are told to strip everything. Then they put you into a superheated room and keep you in there until you collaspe of heat exhaustion. They then drag your overheated body out and throw a bucket of ice cold water on it, jump-starting your heart.

After about 3 rounds of this they take a rough surface cloth and literally rub the skin off of your entire body (all the dead skin and even some of your good skin). In case you thought it couldn't get any worse they pour a bucket of warm water over your raw skin causing pain I can't even describe. To add to the "experience" you are not allowed anything to drink or eat during this time. By the end I was confessing sins I didn't even know I had committed. Anything just to make it end!

Of course, that is how I described my bath the day it happened but now I've had about a week to recuperate I can see how they would enjoy such an "experience". Nudity is not a big deal to them so it wouldn't be humiliating. I was telling the friend who took me that it is not really something that is commonly seen in the States and she was shocked and started laughing when she saw I was trying to hide myself with my towel.

The sauna is made to be that hot to make you literally start pouring sweat which cleanses your body of toxins. I was told that the cold water is to help strengthen your heart, so apparently you shouldn't do this if you have a bad heart. While in the sauna they will take either a bristly brush or a branch and beat/rub their skin to open the pores and allow the toxins to drain out. If your skin is not red and blotchy you are not doing it right!

Once your skin is slick, they will rub it until it is raw which means they got all of the dead/bad skin off. A few things that actually did feel really good was that they put honey on their skin in the sauna which soothes the redness. Then, towards the end they will do a mud mask on the skin and then put lotion on it. That part I enjoyed!

Unfortunately, I did not eat beforehand and by the end had such low blood sugar (I'm hypoglycemic) I struggled to make it home. I spent the rest of the day in bed. The funny thing is, I want to go back and do it again. I'll do a few things differently but decided it was overall a good way to get clean, and especially to spend time with the people in a cultural setting.

Moving on to a more pleasant experience, our coworker, Erin, and I were invited to "judge" students cooking the traditional local food here. I add the quotation marks because we wouldn't even know how it was supposed to taste so we couldn't really give a valid opinion on it. We did enjoy the whole thing overall, however.

It consisted of two days, the first being a traditional meal and the second day being traditional desserts. Erin couldn't make it the first day so it was just me. I understood about 20% of what they were saying. Some of it was pretty good but some was, uh, interesting. They don't use a lot of spices and flavorings here so it would be considered bland to most people but they really enjoy that kind of food.

The second day Erin was with me and we were able to see how they make desserts. It all basically consists of jello. Some were tasty, some were not. At the end they asked if Erin and I could come back in March and teach their English students how to make American food. So, if you have an idea, let me know.

And that should about do it. Thanks for visiting, and check back soon for a post on Jesse's trip to Moscow, as well as more on our plans to go live in the village. You can check the Privyet link for some pictures of our coworkers' time out there.

Winter Adventures

Well, we've actually had quite a bit going on over the past week! The first week after our last post had a lot more of the same, with language study being unremarkable and our lives just going along. Thus, I put off posting for a bit, but this past week we've actually had enough of interest to merit a new post.

Let's start with a Bolivian meal, and we'll save the big news for last:

One of my favorite foods in the whole wide world is the Bolivian dish of salteñas. They're like these little pockets of meat, olive, egg, and spices, and about the best thing ever tasted. The problem is that they take massive amounts of spices unavailable in central Siberia as well as loads of time and effort. So Bobbie doesn't often break down and make them.

However, as a special treat, she fixed up a batch (the recipe we have makes 50!) for me last week. This is only one tray out of several. Just looking at this incites me to inappropriate lust for food. ;-)

In other news, it was Bobbie's birthday last week as well. I'll let you ask her how old she is now (but I still have to point out that I'm younger). Her and our friend Erin went to the fanciest restaurant in town for lunch (about $6).

For supper, our friends watched our boys so that I could make Bobbie a special meal. I had intended to get all gourmet, but due to lack of ingredients ended up making steak, baked potatoes, and roasted peppers. I think she liked it, though.

So, what is the big news alluded to earlier? Well, we've managed to make an arrangement to go out and live in a village on a regular basis! Some of you know that we've been trying to/thinking about doing something like this for some time, but it just hasn't worked out.

The problem has been to this point that it's difficult to get time with the people in a natural T cultural context in town. People might invite us over for dinner, but even that is fairly rare and we just don't spend that much time immersed in the language and culture. All of our study is in our office with our helpers, which makes things somewhat artificial.

No longer! Our coworkers left today for their stay out in the sticks, and when they come back we'll replace them, and then take turns. It will hopefully be a really good environment for our culture and language studies, and we can provide a benefit to the people there as well by teaching English in return.

We'll be teaching English at the school shown above. The school is actually one of the "national schools" which run in the T language, so there won't be much Russian influence there, which is good for us. The people in town during our visit spoke little Russian, so there will be a lot of good opportunities for us to be in T situations.

Below is the kindergarten where the kids will go. I think we can get both boys in there, which would be great as it would free up Bobbie in the mornings and get them more exposure to the T language, which we're hoping they'll start learning.

One of the best things about this opportunity is that we'll be living with a T family. Our host teaches music at the national school, and has a place where we can live in their living room. Basically, the kids will sleep on the floor and Bobbie and I can fit onto their futon/couch-thing. Or vice versa, maybe, I guess we'll have to see. Anyway, this is taken outside the house with David and I and our host (in the white sweater) and a few of the people from the school.

This is their back yard! We will get lots of chances to see how to milk cows and take care of sheep and that sort of thing. They even keep chickens in a basement below their kitchen floor! The only thing I'm worried about is getting sick - I don't relish the thought of constant diarrhea (which seems to plague all of us when we eat T food) in an outhouse at -40. But overall, it should be really good, especially for our language acquisition.

So that's it! Please be thinking of us in the upcoming months, and you can start thinking about our coworkers and their kids right now (they left a few hours ago to take the first "turn).

Here's a picture of the boys in some cutesy Russian outfits Bobbie got somewhere, for the grandparents:

Photos

So, we don't have a whole lot to say, in all honestly. Since our action-packed Christmas/New Year's time, things have settled back into a routine. Language and culture study is once again the order of the day. And since I know none of you wants to read my analysis of T kinship terms or hear a practice exercise with domestic animals, we'll go to pictures instead.

Above, you can see the ice slide that is downtown. Steve loves to go down it. In fact, winter is a much better time for slide-lovers in T-land. In the summer, you're apt to get a splinter from going down a wooden slide, but in the winter someone throws a bucket of water down and then it's all ice and works perfectly. This one is not set up that way - every winter they build a few slides entirely out of ice, but the principle is the same. We don't spend a lot of time outdoors due to the cold, but the boys do enjoy a change of scenery now and again.

Does anyone know what this is? It's an abacus - sort of an ancient calculator, and the shops here still use them. Whenever we buy our groceries, it's followed by the lady furiously spinning these beads back and forth, and we just trust her figure in the end. One day I'd like to learn how to read them so I could at least have confidence she's not stiffing me! ;-)

Below is a funny picture Bobbie took the other day. It seems Steven might be following his father down the road to bookworm-dom. He certainly picked out one of the biggest books on the shelves to entertain him on the potty!

This week we had over several guests, one of whom was a friend that our coworkers introduced us to. They enjoyed their time, seemingly, and we got along with them really well. They have children around the same age as ours, and their son Norbu loved playing with some of Matthew's toys, including his sunglasses.

And that's about it. We just don't have any other interesting pictures to put up, so I decided to look through my childhood pictures folder for any that might be interesting. This one is when we lived in Indonesia. My little brother Sam looks so much like Matthew, right down to his zealous attitude when guarding food!

And this is me. I think a few months old - and super cute! What happened?

This is one of the indigenous people my parents worked with in Bolivia. He's showing off the results of his hunt - a jochi (a large rodent, and owner of perhaps the tastiest flesh in the world) and a howler monkey.

And I was going to close it with that one, when I spotted just one more picture that made me laugh from our old days in the US. I didn't dare to post it, but Bobbie said I couldn't leave it out, so here it is. The people in the photo are welcome to take it up with her if they wish.

It's the Most Hectic Time of the Year!

But it's still a wonderful time of year! It's so great to celebrate both the New Year and His birth at this time of year. This year we even threw in few more birth celebrations for good measure, as my language helper invited us to their son's дой (more on that in a bit), and our teammates' son's also had a birthday party.

Anyway, Bobbie's been trying to convince me for some time that the boys' hair needed to grow out during the winter, but Steven was getting just too girly-looking for Daddy and so he got a Christmas haircut. Definitely getting better at sitting still.

Our friends' English Club is always looking to celebrate Western holidays, so they had us over to celebrate with them. We did a word search (I'd brag about doing it the fastest, but seeing as it was in English, I guess there's not much credit to be found there), ate a bunch of food, and even taught them a carol.

So, Christmas morning we did the obvious gift-opening time. Except, being an international family and all, we skyped Bobbie's parents so they could watch the boys opening the gifts Poppa and Grandma had sent. This is the before picture:

And during, with help from Mommy to open boxes:

I don't think I got a picture of the "after," there was too much excitement and playing with all the new goodies. Matthew was kind enough to pose in his new footies. Clearly, he inherited his father's svelte physique, guaranteed to help his modeling career.

This next photo is apropos of absolutely nothing, except that if you can read Cyrillic, you might find it funny along with us. The brand name of this whipped cream spray, which we bought to make homemade egg nog, is "Fitness." Because nothing says fitness like aerosol sugar.

I mentioned above that my language helper invited us to a celebration. It turns out that T people have kind of a baby shower-type thing (called a дой, pronounced "toy") when their kid gets close to 1 year old. They would never have anything like that before the baby is born, since they would think that to be tempting fate that something bad would happen.

Anyway, A's son Aldar was 7 months old, and so they decided it was time. Many of his relatives had never seen Aldar, so this was a celebration of his birth and a time for him to be introduced to the family, basically. They consulted a shaman to find out a good day for the event, and decided that particular Sunday was the right time (not sure yet how exactly that was decided, but it was important that it be on a good day).

We showed up an hour late (A warned me not to come before that) and were the first ones there. I thought Bolivians were slack on time issues; T people might rival them! Eventually, people started trickling in and I think we started about two hours after the time the invitation said to come. They sat us down in a cafe they had rented out, with the Buddhist prayer flags and crest joining the New Year's tree and balloons for decoration.

The tables were standard Russian party fare - decked out. Champagne, vodka, juice, wine, mineral water, a starter salad, fruits, vegetables, bread, and later on out came the two main courses.

The main events of the evening were toasts. One by one, everyone got up and offered a toast to Aldar and his parents, wishing him health and wealth and success, etc. Then we all had to raise our glasses to affirm our agreement, followed by the next person coming up and everything repeating itself.

Gifts were also offered by the ones giving the toasts, often with an explanation. Here the guest of honor is receiving a toy (?) Buddhist prayer wheel from an aunt.

Of course, in between toasts there were some party games and dancing as well. I was called up for what I thought was a "who can blow up the balloon the fastest" competition, but mine burst. I thought I won until the lady on the right claimed victory after slowly, carefully puffing hers up bigger than anyone else's without it popping. Goes to show what paying attention can do for you.

Everyone got in on the dancing. Except me, of course. I am the world's worst dancer, and generally avoid it like the plague. This time I was getting ready to give my toast (my first public speaking experience in T!) so I begged out and just picked up the camera.

A and I post-celebration

Our friends' son Josiah had his birthday party since our last post as well. We had a great time over there celebrating, as they invited over some of the T families that they know that we haven't spent much time with. Here they're playing "Pin the Bowtie on the Puppy." You know the one, right? It's a totally famous game!

One of the guys whom I'd never met before was an avid hunter, so he wanted to see all the photos of our recent hunting trip. You can see Spiderman wandering around in the background if you look carefully.

If I can get it to work, I'll try to upload here a video of an interesting phenomenon we recently observed. I read online that if it's -40° or colder, when you throw boiling water into the air it freezes instantaneously.

Of course, we wanted to try it out, so when it got down to -45° the other day we gave it a shot. It took a minute to get from the kitchen to the street, so the water isn't right at boiling, but it's pretty close. As you can hopefully see, most of it freezes immediately and only a little of it actually falls back down to the ground.

My next experiment is going to be to verify/disprove Jack London's statement that at -50°, your spit will freeze before it hits the ground. Look for a video of that if it ever gets that cold during the day (so far it's gotten down to -50° C, but only at night).

I'll leave you with poor little Matthew, bundled up to go out in all this cold. He looks excited, no?

Judging and a Photo Op

While Jesse was gone on his hunting trip I had a chance to be a guest judge at the "English Olympics" hosted here. This is the panel of judges (including some teachers):

It is where English classes from different schools get together and compete. Erin (Privyet) and I left early in the morning and stayed there all day listening to the different groups do presentations, essays, cartoons, and reading letters all in English. Here are some of the groups (check out the girls' hair - that's normal around here):


Then we would score each group on how they did. It was very interesting to listen to the different levels of English. Some of them had a lot of vocabulary but didn't speak well and others spoke with almost no accent but hardly spoke at all. All in all, I was very impressed with what I heard.

Before the award ceremony, they asked Erin and I to say a few words (let me say here I am not a public speaker). After Erin said a brief statement I got up thinking "Oh good. I only have to say a few sentences to encourage the students and then I can sit down."

Nope. After I said my 4 sentences, they asked if any of the students had questions (that I would have to answer). Well, the questions came. Thankfully they were pretty simple like "Where are you from?", "What are you doing here?", "Do you have any children?", and "What do you like to do?" Unfortunately for them, when I get nervous I talk (A LOT). One of the students even said "OK, you can sit down now". Yet, one of the groups asked me "Do you have a T name?". I didn't. So, they decided to give me one. I didn't understand it so they said it meant "Beautiful Girl" (Charash Kys/Чараш Кыс).

I guess they thought they could suck up to me in order to get some extra points. It worked! ;-) Here is the group:

During one of the long breaks in the morning, Erin and I decided to go do a photo op since we had both dressed up. Here are some of the pictures (which let's face it, this is the real reason I wanted to post :)