Novruz Bayram Mübarək!

Novruz Bayram Mübarək! That’s the greeting for today, and it means New Day Holiday Congratulations! It's a spring equinox holiday that is celebrated in all the places with Persian influence, particularly Iran, the Central Asian “stan” countries, and some of the Mid-Eastern countries.

In the Azeri language there are a lot more “stan” countries than there are in English. In Azerbaijani, Georgia is Gürgüstan, India is Hindistan, and Armenia is Ermənistan. India does’t celebrate Novruz, and either Armenia or Georgia doesn’t, but I’m not sure which. They’re both a pretty good mixture of Catholic and Islamic, so it’s hard to remember. Anyway, those are the stans that don’t celebrate Novruz.

In the weeks leading up to Novruz, people do their spring cleaning and cook for days and days. Basira cleaned up a bit, but nothing like most of the people I’ve seen around here. That’s all the women around town have been doing for the last week. She does work full-time (a rarity in Azerland) and she has been cooking a heck of a lot, though, so food is sitting around everywhere. Stacks of baklava, fruit (apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, oranges, tangerines, pears, raisins), salads, walnuts, chestnuts, rosehip cake, and a lot of breads and other rolls and stuff. Everything that takes any sort of preparation or cooking is done at home, except the candy. There’s a lot of candy lying around. That’s pretty normal for an Azeri home, but in January I told Basira I don’t like that stuff and she hid it away somewhere. It only came out for Novruz.

For Novruz she made my favorite foods, like mimosa salad – a layering of thickly shredded beets, carrots, more vegetables, and hard boiled eggs, usually with a little bit of yogurt or mayonnaise spread between the layers. Because of Novruz, I’ve had mimosa salad every day this week, except yesterday when I filled up with a new salad I’d never had before – don’t know its name or what it is, but it’s raw vegetables that Basira says will help clean out my digestive system (whether they’re making things better or worse is debatable).

Here’s a picture of what’s on the table now. The mimosa salad is the round one in front. The cake up in back is rose hip cake. And the little green box is my gift to Basira – some Russian aspirin to help her arthritis:

(Remember: double-click the picture to make it bigger!)

A lot more food is stashed away in other rooms and places I don’t know about. There are times I’ve gone looking for food and can’t find it, but when Basira is home she brings it out from hiding. And when I have people over, she brings out tons of it. Mariel even tried to help me find the food once. We were both hungry and looked all over the place, but couldn’t find anything edible. Then when Basira came home an hour later, it appeared out of nowhere. And there was plenty. Yesterday we went to the bazaar and I tried to buy a few things that I can’t find around the house, but Basira told me not to buy them because we already have them. So I believe her. It’s okay to not know where the food is. I don’t want to cook and I don’t want to eat too much, so I don’t need to know where the stuff is stashed. But I am curious.

I do know where the meat is kept. It's chicken and it lives out in the yard until it’s time for plucking and cooking. There were about a dozen chickens when I arrived in December, and now we’re down to two. The biggest one – Horace – gave his life for Novruz.

Every morning since I arrived in Samaxi I have been awakened in the morning by Horace. He's a huge, loud, obnoxious rooster. Every morning Horace would try to one-up all of the roosters in Samaxi with his loudest crow, screaming for hours on end. He was the leader of Basira’s pack of chickens and, although I kind of liked him sometimes because he had such a distinct and boisterous personality, I was fed up with hearing him crow at 4:30 every morning outside my window and go at it nonstop all day long. Sometimes he was so loud it sounded like he was in my room.

Today is the first day since mid-December that I didn’t wake up to Horace. I still woke up at 4:30, but was able to go back to sleep until 8am. Horace will be part of the Novruz dinner celebration. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat Horace, though…I know him too well. But it’s very good to know that I won’t have to listen to his squawking and yelling anymore.

Here’s Horace – you can even tell from the picture that he had a real attitude: 

I sleep a lot here. In the States I usually went to bed around 10 or 11pm and woke up around 6am, or whenever sunrise was. Here I go to sleep around 9pm and wake up at 8am every day. Even when Horace was alive I would go back to sleep in the morning, but he wouldn’t let me keep sleeping as soundly as I did today.

So I get about 11 hours of sleep every day. Today I took a two-hour nap, too, so I’ll have 13 hours of sleep. I never thought I was capable of sleeping this much, and I attribute it to the cold (the extra sleep today is due to my ailing digestive system) and the exhaustion of translating language all day. It’s hard to get out of bed in the morning without heat, but we’ll see what happens in summer. I always awaken with sunrise, so if things go the way I hope they will, in summer I’ll get out of bed early and go for a walk every morning like I did for the last 20 years before coming here. That’s the only routine I really miss.

Here’s where I sleep. It’s the nicest room in the house and not at all typical of Peace Corps Volunteer living quarters. Most PCVs have a tiny little bed like I had in Jorat. This is a king-sized bed covered with my Peace Corps sleeping bag:

In this corner, with the blue plastic pan and bottle of water, is where I brush my teeth when it’s too cold to go outside to do it. When the pan is clean I wash my face here, too, by heating water in my electric pot and mixing it with filtered water:

And this is unusual for a PCV’s bedroom, too – most of it is filled with Basira’s stuff, but you can see my black wool coat hanging on a door, and behind that door is where I hang the nice clothes that can’t be stuffed in drawers:

It’s nighttime now and it looks like all anyone has done for the holiday today is eat and lay around at home. A couple of people have visited, but that’s fewer than we see on any normal Sunday. Basira has spent most of the evening over at her brother’s house, not far from here. I don’t feel like eating because my digestive system is a mess, so I’ve stayed here at my computer all day. A little while ago Basira came home with a couple of grandkids or nieces/nephews or something (they’re hard to keep track of), and they sat and watched me type into my computer. They think it’s pretty cool. Basira insisted on feeding me, so I told her I won’t eat anything that’s not cooked until my digestive system is back to normal, and she made me some dolma.

There were some fireworks tonight, but real action was last night, on Novruz Eve. I could hear firecrackers most of the day and there were people all over the place, shopping and visiting. And last night three kids came to the door – knocking and running away several times to cajole Basira into bringing them treats to eat. She gave them lots of baklava, buttery rolls, and fruit. But today not many people are out. They’re probably all pigging out at home, watching TV, and sleeping. The power has been going on and off all night, so TV wouldn’t be great. Thanks to its backup battery, a laptop computer is a far better box to stare at.

There were lots of celebrations on Tuesday, too. One thing that people all over town did was build a bonfire and jump over it three times. We did that at work after eating a Novruz dinner on Tuesday (I’ve had four Novruz dinners so far this week). The fire the guys at work built was made from office trash. That’s something we have a lot of – the garbage hasn’t been picked up since January, so there’s plenty of it for hosting bonfires whenever we want.

It was a pretty big fire and the guys jumped over it three times when it was chest high. I waited until it was about knee high before jumping over it. My clothes aren’t flammable or anything; I just wanted to be on the safe side. I never want to do anything stupid that would make me have to go to an Azeri hospital. Someone told me that when you jump over the fire you’re supposed to say something special and all the cares and worries of the previous year go away. Well, the Azeri folks I work with didn’t say anything when they jumped, so I didn’t either. But I did let a few wishes flit through my mind.

I’ll have to use the Internet Club to check my email and update my blog this week. Our office is closed for Novruz until a week from Monday and I haven’t seen my email since Thursday, so it’s getting backed up. The Internet Club I’ve been going to gets more difficult to visit all the time. It’s a bunch of guys smoking cigarettes, playing online poker, and watching Internet porn. And, as I mentioned a couple of months ago, kissing and hugging each other whenever they meet (and then some). This week I’m going to try a new Internet Club that’s closer to my home. All of its computer monitors face the window to the busy street outside. That must minimize the poker and porn, so it might be a bit more comfortable for me. One of these days I’ll let you know how it is. (Update - I visited that Internet Club and they wouldn't let me use one of the computers that faces the window and door - they would only let me use one that costs twice as much and sits behind a set of curtains, away from public view. I insisted on using the less expensive, visible computers, but they were adamant. So I left and will not return.)

I get a lot more email from Peace Corps than I ever anticipated, and a lot less from the States. When I used to send my blog entries via email, I received a lot more email. Lately I’ve been getting so little from the States, I’m sending the Novruz blogs via email and putting them up on my blog.

At the same time I post the Novruz blogs, I’ll also be posting my blogs for The Ides of March and St. Patrick’s Day, which are all in the same week. I've been traveling around Azerbaijan so much this week I haven’t had any time to log on the Internet to post anything, so I’m putting all three holidays up at the same time. It’s a lot of stuff to read, and not everyone will read all of it. Take your time. And if you have anything questions or responses of any kind, be sure to send me an email.