The Quarter Century Mark

Within the past week or so, both of us celebrated our 25th birthdays - our first birthdays overseas.  It turns out that here no one here celebrates birthdays because they don't know when they are;  when we ask locals their age or birthday, they'll respond with something vague like "I'm maybe 35 or 38" or "When the roses start to bud, that's when I was born."  Only in recent years have the majority of urban women begun to have their babies in hospitals rather than at home, and it was only a few years ago that the government started requiring those hospitals to issue birth certificates.  

Despite this, we still decided to celebrate our birthdays, but in the way that a local would celebrate the birth of a child or a holiday.  Here in Central Asia, the person celebrating the special occasion throws the party for all of his or her friends, and instead of receiving gifts, he or she would give cheryni to each friend.  Cheryni is a small gift - often candy or sweets - given out on special occasions.  Occasionally it could even be a small article of clothing, such as a headscarf or socks.  Unlike in the US, the locals here get very excited about receiving socks as a gift:  since much of the population barely makes enough money to feed their family, socks are viewed as a "non-essential" clothing item, and only someone with expendable income would spend money on socks.

We decided to hang on to a bit of the US custom - instead of us cooking cheryni for our own birthdays, Laylo would cook for Matin's birthday, and then Matin would cook for Laylo's.   As you might expect, Laylo whipped up a masterpiece that included apple pie, carrot cake, chicken with cheese filling, sweet potato casserole, and fried asparagus.  The locals loved the food, and sat around for quite a while looking a pictures and hearing stories of our previous life in the US.   A week later, Matin proved to be completely incompetent in the kitchen, until he discovered that his true talent was cooking in the dark.   He managed to screw up a "just add oil & eggs" Funfetti cake mix that he tried to cook to bring to language class, but once the power went out later that evening, he did manage to blindly combine the right ingredients to produce a party-sized serving of chicken parmesan.  We're not sure which the local women enjoyed more:  the food, or hearing about Matin's kitchen mishaps!    

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Happy New Year!

We've made it to our new city, and we are loving it! Actually, we made it more than 2 weeks ago, but we haven't had access to the internet so that we could post updates and pictures. Matin's company finally got the internet equipment through customs and set up in the office on Thursday...and then the city power went out that same day and hasn't come back on! The power here in M-town comes from a neighboring country 60 km to the north, and rumor has it that the province we live in forgot to pay their power bill, so the power supply was cut off. Honestly, how does that happen? Hopefully the situation will be resolved quickly...

Despite that, we really are enjoying this new city. Although you can see in the picture that it's no village, it has more of a "small town" feel to it, as shopkeepers and neighbors love to talk or grab tea with you on the side of the road. In the center of the picture you can see the Rouza (the blue shrine) that is the major landmark of our city; all streets lead there, which is the center of the city. We've never been anywhere that is so FLAT, which is especially noticeable since we moved from a city at over 5,000 feet.  The land stretches out seemingly without even a bump as far as we can see, except to the south:  there the city is snuggled up against one of the most beautiful ridges of mountains we've ever seen.  We'll try to post some more pictures of the Rouza and our city, but for now this one will have to do!  (We apologize for the low quality of the photo - it was taken from the window of the plane as we came in.)

Oh, and Happy New Year!  We didn't get to watch the ball drop in Times Square this year, or get those cool "2009" glasses, but we still managed to have some fun.  Who knows what this year will be bring, but we're fairly sure it will be nothing like the last one ;)

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