Last year, I covered WeAreThe99Percent, a blog where people held up signs to express dissatisfaction with life in America during the recession. So it’s been interesting to see the patamushta (патамушта) meme arise in similar ways. When I first saw Hyperbole and a Half redone in Russian, I didn’t get the punchline: Huh? I thought. Must be…
Қара Жорға (Qara Jorga) is a popular dance song in Kazakhstan. My first connection with it is when my infant host brother was trained to perform it for houseguests. Snapping his little fingers and moving around, he’d dance around on his little toes and everyone would clap and give him…
Қара Жорға (Qara Jorga) is a popular dance song in Kazakhstan. You can see a great “traditionalized” version made by Kazakhs in China below: So watching this on TV recently during the spring Nauruz holidays, I decided to try and translate it. I’ll talk more about the song in…
Nauruz is a spring festival celebrated across Central Asia, often with multi-day parties in smaller towns, and concerts and state-organized festivals in larger cities. And due to the generous guidance of a local friend, my sister and I got to explore the festivities in Kazakhstan’s capital city, Astana, for…
When people ask me about Kazakh sports, the first thing that comes to mind is kokpar. Often described as Central Asian polo, kokpar is a competitive sport on horseback for nomads (Kyrgyz kokboru and Tajik buzkashi are similar: see a great buzkashi film trailer here!). Now, I haven’t yet seen the game in person, but the piece below is a…
Children have been bringing in lavish flowers, chocolates, perfumes, and presents for their teachers over the last two days at Bilim-Tilim* school, and today we have the day off work. The Soviet holiday to honor women’s domestic roles, Vosmovo Marta (8 March) is still well-loved here, and outshines the…
So I have to say, one of the perks of working here in Central Asia is that you get some pretty cool job titles. And if there’s flexibility in your organization, you can take your pick. Unlike in America, where you would be laughed at for trying to take…
As I’ve written before, I love learning about people’s names, and I ask people about their names at every moment that might *possibly* be culturally appropriate. So this summer, I met a woman with two daughters. “Who named your children?” I asked. Gulnar* tells me that an elderly relative…
[[My first travel article is out at Matador Network! Follow that link for audio recorded vocabulary, or read the text below, preserved here for posterity…]] You’re running late to meet with a friend – you’re always running late. So you tromp through the snow to the edge of the…
The video below lets you listen to perhaps the most famous Kazakh song, which I’ve caught myself humming recently as I’m doing the dishes, rather surprising my housemate. The song is called “Kozimnin Karasi,” which literally means “pupil of my eye.” I believe the words and lyrics of this…