ugh... drunk men!

I am exhausted. I have been going nonstop for two weeks now. I started with a TEFL (my teaching English program) workshop where we started to plan a one year curriculum for the 8th grade. Then at the same hotel on the beach we had language and cultural training for a week. It was beautiful on the lake and the hotel was an amazing. There were many parts of it that were nicer that most hotels that I would stay at in America. While there I tried to get an updated antivirus on my computer and it deleted its ability to get on the internet. Luckily it happened when I was with someone who knew a lot about computers and was able to reinstall my operating system. Now my computer works better than ever and the battery life is so much longer.
After we finished all our training and planning and whatnot I needed to go to Bishkek to pick up money for a grant. It was passed down to me by a volunteer who has now left. While in Bishkek I took advantage of everything that is there. We went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant. The food was amazing. We had sweet and sour chicken, a spicy tofu dish, something with beef in it… but I’m pretty sure it was intestines and a crispy chicken. It was so nice to not eat sheep and sheep fat. The best part was we ordered family style and split the bill and it only cost me a little over $3. I was also able to find a camera in Bishkek, which is so exciting because I have been living without one for over a month and that has been painful! I was also able to buy beans, dried peas, Pringles, and canned peppers. I am a happy girl.
The morning before I went home I went to the Peace Corps office. That was my first time there and I was amazed by how nice it is there. Free internet, fresh clean water to fill up my water bottle and not have to pay for, a shower if I need it… awesome! I got to the taxi station and got a taxi to go home and my taxi driver told me that he had a full car and that we were leaving right then. NO… I was the only passenger that he had and I had to wait for an hour for more people to come (an hour really isn’t that long, but I was meeting a friend and I just wanted to get home!). The worst part about being the first person to get into a taxi isn’t the waiting part is the not knowing who else is going to ride with you. This time it ended up being pretty bad because there was a guy sitting behind me who got into the car drunk and then proceeded to drink more on the five hour trip home. From what I saw in the car he drank at least 4.5 liters of beer. He proposed to me, offered me to drink with him, kept hitting my arm the whole way to get me to talk to him, he rambled off in Russian every time even though I kept telling him that I didn’t understand him. I really wish that other people in the car would have helped me out. They mostly just laughed at him. Very frustrating.
I finally got home and away from the crazy drunk man. I really missed my family because I hadn’t seen them in over a week and a half. The best part was though… I showed up with 18 large canning jars (about 2 liters each) and massive amounts of vegetables to can the next day oh and a friend. They had no idea… I just said, “maybe tomorrow we can can?” (in Kyrgyz) and that was that. Ha. That is one of the bet parts of Kyrgyzstan… you can just show up with people who need a place to stay and maybe even a project that will take all day and it doesn’t even phase them. It’s normal.
The next day we canned eight jars of tomato sauce, four jars of pickles, four jars of a pickled vegetable mix that we made up (carrots, cabbage, onion, garlic, green and red peppers, eggplant, and really hot tiny red peppers), and one jar of pickled beets and eggs (one lid got messed up and we didn’t put anything in that jar). It took 14 hours to can everything and we didn’t get to bed until 1am, but it was worth it. Now I’ll have some food for the winter. There is so much garlic in everything. I just hope that we were able to get the lids on correctly and that they sealed the way they should. Their lids here are very different. I guess we’ll see. I am so tired now and I’m going to sleep all day!