It Snowed!

Hi All! So it snowed here last week and although it was wet, maybe a little annoying and didn't stick it was absolutely BEAUTIFUL! So I thought I would share.

My house, I tried to kind of get the same picture as before, but with the whimsical snow.

Roses, you know I love them and they are all over here and some are still blooming now! They look pretty in the snow :)

Marie, who lives in a town close to me, and I made enchiladas a couple weekends ago. One of the greatest accomplishments of my life. It took two hours, people you know I don't cook and we made everything from scratch!

Do you know how hard it is to hand make refried beans!

This is the view from the highway near Marie's house. Isn't it beautiful!? The day that I took this picture, I was waiting for the bus to go home when my host dad passed in his car going the other direction. He told me to get in and he ended up taking me to his work, a hazel nut factory.

This is my dad outside of his work. They shell hazel nuts and then bag them to be sold, I think.

This last weekend we had quite the crew of people come visit us up in our northwest haven. It's not necessarily easy to get in or out of our finger so it was great that we had so many visitors. We all spent the weekend in Tovuz at one of the AZ 6's houses. School is going well for the most part. It's definitely not as overwhelming as I was afraid of. I'm getting a lot closer with my teachers. The other day when I was ill two of them came to bring me tea and make sure I was OK. The weather has been very cold here. Our pipes froze last night, but don't worry there are other ways to get water. Today, however, the sun is out and it is wonderful! Next weekend I am going to Baku for some meetings on girl camps here in Azerbaijan and to hopefully see the Super Bowl :) Thanks for thinking of me, I love all of the comments.

Walking Tour of Qazax

Hey guys! It's me, Jessi. Well actually thats Miss Jessi to you now that I have offically started teaching.

So, here I am. I've been living in Qazax for a month now and I figure it is time for you all to get a tour of my new home.

This is the sun rise this morning from my front door. Those small mountains in the distance, those are the Lower Caucacus.

You probably figured, but this is my bedroom. Messy as usually, although I do try to keep my room clean here, I made my bed at least! I know, I need to take the Christmas decorations down, that is my next goal.


This is my house. You may regocnize the pink towel, blue sweat-shirt and random array of socks hanging out to dry, yeah, they're mine. I live on a family compound with three houses; my house, my dad's mom's house is the one next to mine and his Uncle lives in another. My room is in the back of the house.


This is my gate, I walk through this bad boy multiple times a day.


Once I walk through my gate I am out on my street. Here it is...


These geese guard my gate every morning. They are very nice and try to attack me everytime I walk past them.


Usually when I am leaving my house it's because I am going here. This is my school. It only takes me 10 minutes to walk here.

After school I like to walk around the city. This street is full of hardware stores :)


This is something like a bus stop. You can see the main street after all the buses and the city bazar is just on the other side.

This is one of the parks in Qazax. It's sunny today.

Most of the time after school I also meet up with my site mates. This is Connie.

And this is Amanda (and me, if you have already forgotten what I look like).

Sometimes my site mates and I go exploring. Last week we found a canal behind my house and eventually made it up this little hill that over looks the city of Qazax. Somewhere down there you can see my house.



Then I go home. I walk down this street...


and pass this van, which I really like.

So I hope you enjoyed this little make shift tour of my new home. I'm going to leave you with this picture of the Greater Caucasus. It doesn't fit into my tour because I didn't go over to that part of the city with you today, but I think it is beautiful. I hope all of your holidays were wonderful and your new year is off to a great start! I know mine is :) Talk to you soon! Miss you all.

Merry Christmas from Azerbaijan!

Hello everyone!
I just want you all to know how thankful I am for all of you! Your phone calls, emails, blog comments, texts and letters keep me going here, especially during the holidays. So I hope you can all feel the love and best wishes I am sending your way for Christmas and New Years! And, obviously, I hope Santa brings you all that you asked for. So eat lots of food for me and think of me when you read "The Night Before Christmas!"

As for things in my new home, I am learning my way around here one day at a time with the help of the AZ6's and the other AZ7'z around me. This past weekend a few of us explored Ganja, the biggest city next to us. We found a lot of good places to eat, an old Russian Orthadox church, a carnival, a zoo, and santa. In Azerbaijan New Years Decorations some what resemble American Christmas decorations.

One of Santa's reindeer got lost in the Ganja Zoo.

I'll be spending Christmas Eve and Christmas day in Tovuz with most of the other PCV's around this area. New Year's we will all be in Baku together and after the New Year Holiday I will start actually teaching at my school. I'll let you know how things go. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. I miss you and love you all.

It's Official!

As of last night, I'm officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!!! I'm sitting in the Baku Peace Corps office right now, waiting to take the train out to Qazax (aka my new region!). Last night we had our swearing in ceremony-- our host families and some of the current volunteers (AZ6's) came to see as we were presented certificates and pins by our country director and the US Ambassador to Azerbaijan. The life I have come accustom to in Azerbaijan is about to change drastically, but I am ready for the challenge. Shakira and Mo, I appreciate your support about Gilbert-- he was a good friend. And check out my name address! Yaxsi yol, we'll talk soon!

I Waited Too Long To Update My Blog

I don't even know where to start right now. My life as been full of adventures in the last few weeks. Ups and downs--laughter and frowns. So I'll just try to update you through pictures of what has been making me smile.

My younger host sister and I have found magic in the garden. Colorful flowers have become pieces of art, confetti and even snow.

This was the chicken feed I told you we were going to have. I needed the fun time in the garden with my sister before this :) (PS I didn't eat any chicken)

Beauty can be found in any situation. We spent one of our off days explore the beach of Sumgayit.

Last week we found out where our permanent site will be for the next two years! We were called up to the map in the front of the room, found our site and put a pin there.

These are most of the other English teachers that will be living around the same area as me.

And THIS is Khayal. He is the coolest!

I have had the chance to explore Baku a few times now. I met Amanda (on my right) the AZ 6 who will be my new site mate. This is at Martyr's Lane.

Maiden's Tower in the Old City of Baku.

And finally our Thanksgiving.

I told you my cluster was practicing for the Turkey killing on Thanksgiving...

I stuck to peeling potatoes.

But the meal turned out wonderful and I have to admit, I ate the Turkey and it was good.

And obviously no Thanksgiving is complete without an Azeri dance party.

I hope you have some sort of random idea of what I've been up to. A week from today I will official be sworn in as a volunteer! And then its off to my new rayon. I am pretty excited for the change, though leaving the friends I've made here and my host family that I have grown so close to will be hard. Thank you for all of the messages on Facebook and here--you keep me going. Miss you and Love you all!

The Day I became A Vegetarian

Today my cluster and I set out to find two chickens to purchase. Thanksgiving is just around the corner and my cluster wants to kill a turkey to eat for our celebration. Of course, in order to do this right they need practice, hence todays chickens. We knew of a place near my teacher's house that had a crap load of turkeys and chickens in their yard, so we started there.

They willingly sold us two chickens-- but first they had to catch them. This really didn't take the owners very long (I'm sure they do it all the time) but it gave me enough time to make friends with both the group of turkeys and the shy chickens hanging out in the corner.

After befriending these little gems the cries of the two chicken we bought made me that much sadder and as all my friends walked back to my teachers house to do "their business," I walked home. We are having the chicken feed tomorrow-- I might bring myself an eggplant. Now some of you might think this is really cool, as does the rest of my cluster, but if you know me at all, my reaction most likely doesn't surprise you, and so today I came to two conclusions: one is that I will become a vegetarian (of sorts-- I don't eat that much meat here as it is and I guess in reality I might keep eating the little bit that I do) and two, that turkeys are totally the most awesome things ever! They make such a cool noise and they look so funny when they don't have all their feathers puffed up in defense. I definitely took a video of them today, and all these pictures!

Besides the sadness at my new friends' loss of life (just so you're not totally confused, I mean the chickens), Mary, one of the AZ7 group of trainees had to go home, back to America, yesterday. She had been battling a bad case of bronchitis basically since we got here and it just turned into serious asthma. You see the air quality here isn't necessarily the best (I know what you are thinking, I am fine-- I came prepared). It happened so fast, she went to the doctor, they decided the best thing for her health was for her to go and then she was gone! A bunch of us got together the night before and the morning that she left to say our goodbyes. Its crazy, even though we have all only been friends for a little over a month we have already gone through so much together and it was really hard to see her go. If you're reading this Mary I miss you like crazy and love you!

Life is good. Wednesday the 18th I find out where my permanent site will be-- get your maps out people, we'll have to look it up together! Sag ol- talk to you soon :) Mom, Linda, Linnea, Grandma T, Aunt Debbie and Melissa, thank you so much for the letters! I'm taping them all up on my wall and it makes me smile whenever I look at them :)

Streets of Chocolate Milk

OK. Sorry for the lame post Sunday, I just wanted to let you all know that I’m still here! I just haven’t had time to get to the internet café for a while; I just got over the flu (typical Jessi move, having some kind of illness, I know) and it just gets darker so much faster so finding the time to make it to Sumgayit to the internet just gets harder and harder. But here I am now, ready to give you more of an update and hopefully more explanation of the pictures I just threw up on Sunday.

When it rains in Azerbaijan, which seems to be more often now, the streets turn to chocolate milk. My walk to school slows down to avoid the creamy stains on all of my dark colored clothes and while there may have been great debate over to bring or not to bring my north face coat, it has in fact shown its face many a time by now. The paradox of weather here is hard. Streets are made of dirt, therefore turn to mud, and when I say mud I mean wet clay, when it rains and this obviously gets all over your shoes and flips up onto clothes, you get it. But it is very important to be clean here and even at school there should be no sign of the chocolate milk that you just had to fight your way through on your clothes or shoes. We have found this to be impossible, but therefore have had to put up with sometimes more then just funny looks at our somewhat stained professional fashions here in AZB.

While learning how to manage the weather of AZB we have also started to do practice teaching, so many new experiences at one time! The picture from Sunday of Lori, Beka and I with our scarves on our heads is in fact not only the first day of rain for us, but also our first day of teaching. As I said, we were not prepared for the weather and the scarves were our only possible attempt at keeping our teacherly domineers from dripping away in the rain. As it turns out the school was not prepared for us either, so we ended up killing time drinking tea and playing word games at Mike’s house, hence the next picture below of us lined up on the couch. Eventually we made it to school, through the flooded streets and thunderstorms to try our hands at teaching English. I was scared out of my mind to get up in front of those kids, but it ended up OK, and by the end of the week I could envision many fun ways of teaching that I could do with the students. I guess the point of this little story is that even in the rain the laughter has kept on coming, sometimes laughter is all we have here

On Halloween we had no power so the night of pumpkin carving and bobbing for apples that was planned did not pan out, but we improvised with the one flashlight and battery powered ipod speakers we had to have a makeshift American Halloween in Azerbaijan. They do not celebrate Halloween here, but a lot of people, at least around here, knew what it was and knew that it was in fact a national holiday in America J That same weekend is where the candle light tea party picture comes from. The day after Halloween my sisters had a get-together with their friends at my house. We ate a beautiful meal outside that my mom spent all day preparing and then moved inside to chat and drink tea by candlelight. Mary, another volunteer, got to come because her host brother is a school friend of my sisters. The two of us had a good time trying to understand all that was being said and just experiencing this younger generation of Azeris.

This week brings on another set of teaching practices in actual classrooms and the usual language lessons, among many things that I could never predict, as everyday does here in Azerbaijan. My focus is on getting better because I really don’t want to get the flu again and on figuring out one-how to say cornstarch in Azeri and two-where I would find it. Miss you all and appreciate all of your letters, messages and support- it keeps me going here!