Saturday, February 18, 2012

Winter is coming to an end...

The sun is coming up early and setting after five. I definitely feel like spring will come sometime in the future and that's exciting. As you can probably tell-- the cold has been a bit difficult. Definitely not built for cold, long winters, but it feels really nice to have survived it! I now know I can heat a house through a whole winter with coal, that at low enough temperatures glass jars of food will explode, that sleds are the best way to transport water in the winter, and that hats are super awesome.

So as for things that have happened... after vacation we have about two weeks off of school for flu quarantine. That was a super productive time period that I used to work through the details of a lot of projects I want to do. After that we had some school and regular stuff. This weekend we decided to do some research in Naryn City and visit some friends. Turns out, Naryn City is wonderful. Everyone is really excited to hear you speak Kyrgyz, nobody seems all that surprised that there's an Indian in Kyrgyzstan, and the streets are clean-ish and well lit. The road to Naryn was long. We decided to go from Talas to Naryn in one day (two six hour drives) which was kind of crazy but fun. Naryn looks a lot like Talas but the mountains are closer and people seem to take more pride in their houses appearance (matching fences and stuff). Through their mountain pass there are random statues of painted women and silver colored statues of various mountain animals perched atop the mountains. One of the most amazing moments was actually driving into Naryn City, you basically drive towards this huge orange clay cliff and as you get close you see a path winding into it. You drive with cliff towering on either side, curve to the right and see the little city appear in front of you. This city itself is between two mountain ranges with a river running near it.

So things are going we right now. We are more than 10 months in to service and that feels good. New volunteers will be coming in the Spring and I have applied to be a trainer for them, so that might be a cool thing in the future. As usual, I miss you all and look forward to seeing you again.

Athena

Here's a picture of my 5th form...