First Weekend

Saturday


Much to my chagrin, despite going to sleep at midnight, I woke up at 5:30 on Saturday. After many hours, at about 8:30 am we departed for the school. Instead of being driven to the school, we used Almaty's buses.

The buses in Almaty work in an incredibly rushed way.  Tickets are not bought upon entering the bus but rather after you have jumped on and the bus is already moving again. Due to this, taking a guitar on these buses proved to be rather difficult for this day.

Still, we arrived at the school in good time, and were much more prepared to give the kids a solid plan. Each of us printed out paper activities for the first hour, prepared projects for the second hour, and planned on uniting the kids outside on the third hour.

Marko, Bretislav, MJ, and Grace preparing for the day

In my own class, the first hour consisted of a fill out sheet on action verbs followed by a game of Bingo. Bingo was played somewhat differently here than what I have seen in America. Rather than a 5 x 5 grid of words that one announcer presents,  each was given a single straight strip with only 5 words. Instead of a single announcer, each kid would name one word from their sheet until someone crossed out his or her entire paper. Bingo seemed too easy in the first game, but I soon learned that if you had them tear the  writing off their strips, the game became much more challenging.

Examples of the sheets used

For the second hour, the students had a project. The day before, we passed around the "Question Ball" asking which country each student would like to visit. As Saturday was "Flag Day," the second hour project was for each pupil to draw the flag of the country they want to visit most and add sentences about what they would do there.

To what I saw for the next hour, they loved this activity. The complexity ranged, from one who simply filled the paper with the Russian colors and wrote haphazardly on the back "I want go to Russia. I want see Moscow," to a girl who wrote out how she would try sushi in Japan and see all of the exotic traditional dresses. Though I allowed them to use their phones to look up the spelling of the country and the design of the flag, some were less than accurate.

Close Enough

One girl drew the Austrian flag, and rose her hand for me to come and help her with something. She then asked about how to properly spell a word I couldn't understand. She kept repeating what I understood to be "I want to see where 'Moter' is from." Clueless and somewhat confused, I asked her to write it the best she could and I would come back to check it later. Every kid around her looked at me like I was primitive for not knowing what 'Moter' is. I realized why when a few minutes later I checked back on her to see this on her paper:

"I want to see where Motsert is from. He is towering harmonizer." 

After the project hour and break, the groups of all four of our interns (and Grace, who was joining only for this day) took our groups outside to play. During this time outside, I played guitar for them on the grass. Unfortunately, I did not have Disney songs or any other easy to sing English songs, so it was mainly just entertaining them with classical songs. Still, when I played "Poker Face" I could hear muttering in Russian with interjections of "Gaga." We stayed outside until a picnic afterwards in a nearby park.

Grace (far left) and MJ (second on the right) with some of the students

Playing guitar for the students

MJ & Marko playing volleyball with students during the picnic

After an intern meeting, meeting yet another lovely new intern, Martinka, from the Czech Republic, we left for a nearby park where we had the usual ice breaker and team bonding games, including "Ninja," "Smile," "Hugging," and "Crocodile" (Charades). It is worth noting how confused I was when Friday, after trying to explain charades to my students, they all started shouting "Crocodile" when I was using the example of a penguin. Suddenly, that makes a lot more sense.

Apparently the story, or at least the name of "Jack and the Beanstalk" is not common in their countries,  because by far the most stressful part of the last game was me trying to get them to finish "Jack and the Bean..."

Pictured above: Desperation

Close to the curfew, we afterwards rushed to the dorm where, using eye covers, I desperately hoped to gain more than 5 hours and 30 minutes of sleep.

Sunday

Naturally, that meant the next morning I would get less sleep. With eye covers and everything I woke at 5:00, despite having gone to sleep at midnight. As the day was generally free, with nothing planned until 2 pm, at 10:00 am or so later my room decided to go to the mall. Of course, we knocked on the other interns' room, waking them up to ask that they join us. They weren't too pleased at the wake up call, but agreed.

After one hour of preparation we headed to the mall which was hardly a fifteen minute walk away, seeing a quite beautiful monument above it.

The mall was surprisingly empty at first, with us being almost the only ones there. At a food court, I had the pleasure of trying "SFC," "Southern Fried Chicken" with Marko and Grace. Much to my joy, the water from SFC was as cold as the norm in America (ice is rarely put in drinks in Kazakhstan, and water and other drinks are usually just served somewhat cool.)

After the food court, we joined Marko in his search for flip flops to buy, finally finding a suitable pair in a womans' store.

Hey, if it works.

It started raining, so our planned event at 2pm was cancelled. To pass this time, the group decided to go to a major mall closer to the mountains. However, MJ learned about a major opera performance happening in the city's oldest theatre, the Abay Opera House, in celebration of its 80th anniversary. She decided to go there instead with another AIESECer and his sister. Not one to pass on such an opportunity, I joined.

The Abay Opera House, founded in 1934 (Wikimedia Photo)

The opera was rather a compilation, alternating between dance routines and individual opera performances. The show ended with an opera duet between a woman and a man playing a forbidden relationship between a woman and a priest, followed by an amazing traditional Kazakh dance.

No pictures were allowed in the theatre, but this online promotion matched the final dance

After the opera, we went to the "Esentai mall", which the AIESECer that joined us explained was largely for rich people. There, we actually caught the end of an orchestral flash mob there.

 The mall was incredible. I have never seen a so modernly designed and technological mall in the United States or any other country. It was clearly designed to look bright and futuristic, with smooth lighting, curved pathways, and incredible amounts of tech, including a section of dozens of Xbox Ones, PS4s, and gaming computers set up for children to play in as a sort of technological playground.

Also, other activities such as this "astronaut simulator" for kids

After eating at the food court and resting some, we finally walked back to the dormitory and arrived at 10 pm, wherein I immediately collapsed onto bed, hoping for a much longer time of sleep.

It is clear that this internship will be exhausting with the English school and other duties, but it's certainly going to be exhausting in the best way.

Notably, this post was fairly late, due to a constant tiredness on my part. However, even in better circumstances I don't believe I will be posting daily, but rather expect to post every three or so days.