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I really don't think boiling mushrooms are supposed to smell this bad. If I barf, I'm not calling The Victor, I'm calling a fumigator.

I now understand how locals can call subfreezing weather "teplo." Because compared to heavy snow with a windchill of negative fuck-you, a calm day of "only" -12 or so really is warm. It's still colder here than in Petro, which I think is just wrong, but clearly I'm not a volunteersicle yet.

I even had students today—yesterday, only four out of fourteen showed up for my class, and they were about the only ones in the whole college. After that lesson, we basically closed up shop for the day—Oleg drove me, two students and one of the resource ladies home (his car is fixed! I forgot to celebrate that!) and I spent the rest of the day bundled up in my room with my distiller running, troubleshooting my neurotic cell phone and accidentally calling an OCAP in the process. The distiller, I should mention, is a wonderful substitute for a space heater. So are two cats snuggling on your legs while you knit.

The space heater is necessary because the temperatures in the apartment dropped alarmingly with the temperatures outside. It's not just us, though, but the whole building, and Valya was on the war path for a while. "We pay for central heating and we should get it! I don't know why our radiators go hot and cold. The ones in Germany don't." I didn't mention that the radiators in Germany probably don't have an actual person shoveling coal to run them, while these ones, yes, still do. She still cussed out the landlord when she paid the rent today; I overheard her telling her friend Svetlana about it.

Otherwise my main occupation of late has been New Year parties. The students of the college put on one last night, and tonight Valya invited me to the one put on by the hospital. Aside from getting to see one of my students dance around in drag, the primary interest of the events is sociolinguistic (of course). Highlights:

--One of the Kazakh classes put on a comedy routine that included two bilingual jokes. One was just a list of humorous "translations" from Russian to Kazakh that you really had to know both languages fluently to get (I didn't; Oleg was cracking up, though). The other involved two girls meeting. One greeted the other in Russian—"Privyet! Kak zhizn?"—and got scolded for it. Abashed, she repeated the greeting in Kazakh: "Salem, qalam qalay?" The now-friendly response: "Okay! Vsyo normalno!" (That's Russian, btw.) Oh, the underlying politics of it all!

--Irina, Aisulu, Tanya and Elena Alexeevna also put on a skit to represent the teachers, parodying student behavior. Aside from the usual gags about students trying to leave class and messing with cell phones, they developed a running joke in which Aisulu managed to answer every question in a way that related back to her (allegedly enormous) family, rattling off endless streams of Kazakh names. I wasn't aware that Kazakhs are stereotyped as having particularly large families, but everyone else the audience was rolling, so it must be a familiar theme.

--Not exactly linguistic, but social: the students' concert had the overall plot of Ded Moroz seeking a replacement for Snegurochka, with the help of the Snow Queen and a mouse. (2008 being the Year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac, you know.) One of the skits involved Baba Yaga, the witch whose house walks on chicken legs, trying out for the part; the girl playing Baba Yaga stripped off her mask and went into a dance number basically stolen from Madonna's "Material Girl" video, with the addition of the uncrossing-crossing of the legs move from "Fatal Attraction." Or is it "Basic Instinct?" Whichever movie where the lady shows off her panties, because that's what this girl did. About four times. And, of course, the hospital party had its fair share of inappropriately-clad adolescent and pre-adolescent girls dancing. And the Christmas party from Tuesday featured dancers who were basically wearing halters, panties and tights, and by the end of the dance one of them was precariously close to losing the latter two items. What is it in this culture that says that's okay? It goes beyond treating the female form as a sex object—this is appropriate for all manner of public activities (the Madonna wannabe also waltzed with the college director* during her dance) and there doesn't seem to be a lower age limit for girls to put on harem pants and shake their booties.

*Skippy list: do not speculate aloud on which race of "Star Trek" aliens your director most resembles. (Kazakhstanis have no Rules of Acquisition.)

--Back to the subject of stereotypes, the theme of the hospital concert was "Ded Moroz Around the World." This involved bringing in Santa Claus, who is treated as a distinct character (mostly) with his own iconography, even though it overlaps with Ded Moroz's. The Ded Moroz of the concert wore a blue costume—a tradition, I have learned, started by Stalin*—and he had his staff and Snegurochka and a full beard. Santa, though he wore the same style of costume, was in red, his beard was smaller, and he wore glasses. One of my classes was very insistent on Santa's glasses, in fact. He also had elves, and a dancing snowman for some reason.

*So Ded Moroz never had a traditional color for his costume, until the 1930s, when the USSR decided to allow holidays again. They arranged for a New Year party at the Kremlin, complete with a Ded Moroz to hand out treats to model members of a Party youth group, and Stalin insisted that Ded had to be in blue. Red or green would be too evocative of those wicked religious/capitalist Christmas characters, like Santa. Today, of course, a lot of Santa iconography does double duty for Ded Moroz in the world of international marketing, so his costume is kind of any color he wants. I've seen red, blue and a really gorgeous green worn by a woman, a sort of drag king Ded Moroz.

--They also has a "Japanese" skit, and the East Asian stereotypes evoked were more or less the same as in the US. One person spoke "Japanese" consisting of vocalic gibberish, brand names, and a sort of agrammatical pig Russian for humorous effect, and his entourage of ladies in kimonos walked with super-tiny steps and sang in falsetto. Exemplars of hyperfemininity, in other words. David Henry Hwang would have something to say about that.

--And their "Indian" skit shows that, supposedly, Indian people can't pronounce the cluster "dv." The woman doing all the talking distinctly said "dwadsat," "dwa" and "dwenadsat" (the numbers 20, 2 and 12). This is amusing to me mostly because so many of my students have trouble with "w" in any context, and also—doesn't Hindi have "dv" clusters word-initially? (And incidentally, this same skit also referred to the Kama Sutra as a "gynecological instrument." I don't know if Valya knew why I was laughing so hard.)

Things that got thrown during the hospital concert: candy from a horse's ass, bananas, and a fish. Well, not so much the fish—they gave out gag gifts to some administrators at the beginning of the show, and one woman got a dead fish wrapped in tinsel. Unfortunately, she was sitting behind Valya and I, so when she sat back down she just flipped it over the seat back to hang it on an armrest next to me. This is turning out to be a bad day for my nose. (Luckily I have a scented candle on hand.)

Otherwise, the primary news today is that MA has more host-family drama. Nastya and Dima sent their cat to live with Grandma because MA is allergic, but Grandma apparently doesn’t want the cat anymore, and there's nowhere else for it to go. Since MA doesn't want to spend the next four months in a Benadryl haze, she's got to find another place to live. Apparently all the non-cat-owning families Daria has gotten in touch with either have tiny flats or young children, though. Peace Corps Kazakhstan requires volunteers to stay with host families for community entry purposes, and also because they can confirm we have a place to live that meets PC housing standards before we get to site. But I'm not sure how the six-month time frame was established. Who decided that's optimal? Optimal for HQ in some way, or optimal for us? (Both 18s in the Karaganda metro said they about wanted to kill their host families during the weeks between their IST and their official move-out date.) I think if we were free to move out on our own in, say, February, MA would be willing to tough out the cat; but since Kaz-19 can't move out until May 1, well, that's a fuckton of Benadryl.

Also, my red yarn is slowly turning into a sweater, but at this exact moment it's really more of a nightmare with no less than four (4) needles sticking out of it at a various points. This is mainly due to my habit of using spare needles to hold live stitches for later use, which gets complicated when the only needles you have small enough for that job are the same ones you need to knit other parts of the sweater. Also made two discoveries:

1) When Kitchener stitching goes good, it looks really good, but when it goes bad, well, Jesus H. Christ, let's just burn it. (Is that a purl stitch? There's not supposed to be any purls here. Shit.)
2) It is really quite difficult to unravel something from the bottom when you've got bar increases and make-ones all though the bit you're trying to unravel.

And, finally: Any game with students is enhanced if you can somehow incorporate a stuffed panda. "Where's the Bear?" is a great way to drill prepositions.