![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
merchimerchWell unless you all have australians on your friends pages, I think I get to be the first to post Happy New Year!
Boy was ours chaotic and for R especially, vodka filled. Actually, thanks to our commissary privileges we brought people scotch and chocolate liquor as gifts, so it was a multi-beverage evening :)
New Year is an odd holiday here. They wrap up all the capitalist smarmy santa claus Christmas stuff into New Years here, since the atheist Soviet Union and secular -Islamic Uzbekistan both don't observe Christmas. New Years celebrations, like everything, are steeped in Uzbek ideas of hospitality, family values (no no it's not just the religious right that has those), and salads with lots and lots of mayonnaise. What is with all the fricking salads with SO MUCH mayonnaise? Everyone I know has been informed that I have an allergy to eggs and thus a mayonnaise allergy. They conveniently forget every holiday because those salads look just so lovely on the table. There is the meat and egg and potato salad with mayonnaise, there is the beet salad with mayonnaise, there is the wierd green radish (called ukrup) salad with mayonaisse, and then there is the piece de resistance - the 7 layer salad with (you guessed it) mayonnaise. I spend so much time during every holiday or major guesting-outing pushing mayonnaise salad around on my plate, I think I should be given a medal.
This year however, with the addition of the husband, my mayonnaise avoidance tactics have changed, much to R's chagrin. Now I vociferously refuse all mayonnaise salad (meaning I only get about half of them forced onto my plate). That meant that poor R gets double portions - the same goes for whenever I refuse to let my shot glass be filled. Since this is R's first time in UZ, he is a newer guest and gets priority in terms of hospitality-harrassment. He gets "olinged" 3 or 4 times more than I do at this point ("oling" translates to a respectful form of "take it."). This means that when we go guesting R is a vertiable whipping boy of food and alchohol consumption.
Becuase it is New Years, he is in the middle of 3 days of gluttonous (and mayonnaise saturated) guesting. It is made worse by the fact that we are foreigners, both in terms of how much food is forced down our neck and how many people we are expected to visit. In Uzbekistan, New Years is a family holiday. All the university students get 2 weeks off to go home to their families and everyone is expected to sit at home with their families and watch the special TV programs until the stroke of midnight (what a good little capitalist nation, huh?). Foreigners complicate this system, especially when you add Uzbek hospitality ideals into the mix. EVERYONE we know wanted us to spend new years with them and wait for midnight with them. Being a foreigner in Uzbekistan during new years means negotiating the tenuous social hierarchies and inevitably insulting and slighting half of your acquaintances. Rich and I visited 3 families tonight and we have 4 more to visit tomorrow, all of whom will chastise us for one reason or another. 2 of the 3 tonight were cranky because we didn't stay there until midnight and the family we sat with for the stroke of twelve was cranky because we left fairly soon after (i.e. 1 AM). Uzbeks also like to stay up all night on New Years Eve/morning. It reminds me slightly of the last days of Ramadan where people are supposed to stay awake and pray all night and if you succeed then your deepest wishes will be granted. Well, except there doesn't seem to be any superstition about wishes, and instead of staying up all night praying, people are staying up all night drinking.
Oh and the fireworks. Have I mentioned how CHEAP fireworks here are? The little exploding cherry bombs cost about 5 sum a piece I believe - that's about half a cent. Even the poorest kids can scrape together five sum to terroize folks. And New Years gives them a lovely excuse. It sounded like a war zone walking home from our neighbors and we had to dodge thrown cherry bomb things. So dangerous and so disconcerting.
Anyhow, it's late and poor R is sleepy and sickly from all the alchohol. Hope he's prepared for round 3 tomorrow.
Boy was ours chaotic and for R especially, vodka filled. Actually, thanks to our commissary privileges we brought people scotch and chocolate liquor as gifts, so it was a multi-beverage evening :)
New Year is an odd holiday here. They wrap up all the capitalist smarmy santa claus Christmas stuff into New Years here, since the atheist Soviet Union and secular -Islamic Uzbekistan both don't observe Christmas. New Years celebrations, like everything, are steeped in Uzbek ideas of hospitality, family values (no no it's not just the religious right that has those), and salads with lots and lots of mayonnaise. What is with all the fricking salads with SO MUCH mayonnaise? Everyone I know has been informed that I have an allergy to eggs and thus a mayonnaise allergy. They conveniently forget every holiday because those salads look just so lovely on the table. There is the meat and egg and potato salad with mayonnaise, there is the beet salad with mayonnaise, there is the wierd green radish (called ukrup) salad with mayonaisse, and then there is the piece de resistance - the 7 layer salad with (you guessed it) mayonnaise. I spend so much time during every holiday or major guesting-outing pushing mayonnaise salad around on my plate, I think I should be given a medal.
This year however, with the addition of the husband, my mayonnaise avoidance tactics have changed, much to R's chagrin. Now I vociferously refuse all mayonnaise salad (meaning I only get about half of them forced onto my plate). That meant that poor R gets double portions - the same goes for whenever I refuse to let my shot glass be filled. Since this is R's first time in UZ, he is a newer guest and gets priority in terms of hospitality-harrassment. He gets "olinged" 3 or 4 times more than I do at this point ("oling" translates to a respectful form of "take it."). This means that when we go guesting R is a vertiable whipping boy of food and alchohol consumption.
Becuase it is New Years, he is in the middle of 3 days of gluttonous (and mayonnaise saturated) guesting. It is made worse by the fact that we are foreigners, both in terms of how much food is forced down our neck and how many people we are expected to visit. In Uzbekistan, New Years is a family holiday. All the university students get 2 weeks off to go home to their families and everyone is expected to sit at home with their families and watch the special TV programs until the stroke of midnight (what a good little capitalist nation, huh?). Foreigners complicate this system, especially when you add Uzbek hospitality ideals into the mix. EVERYONE we know wanted us to spend new years with them and wait for midnight with them. Being a foreigner in Uzbekistan during new years means negotiating the tenuous social hierarchies and inevitably insulting and slighting half of your acquaintances. Rich and I visited 3 families tonight and we have 4 more to visit tomorrow, all of whom will chastise us for one reason or another. 2 of the 3 tonight were cranky because we didn't stay there until midnight and the family we sat with for the stroke of twelve was cranky because we left fairly soon after (i.e. 1 AM). Uzbeks also like to stay up all night on New Years Eve/morning. It reminds me slightly of the last days of Ramadan where people are supposed to stay awake and pray all night and if you succeed then your deepest wishes will be granted. Well, except there doesn't seem to be any superstition about wishes, and instead of staying up all night praying, people are staying up all night drinking.
Oh and the fireworks. Have I mentioned how CHEAP fireworks here are? The little exploding cherry bombs cost about 5 sum a piece I believe - that's about half a cent. Even the poorest kids can scrape together five sum to terroize folks. And New Years gives them a lovely excuse. It sounded like a war zone walking home from our neighbors and we had to dodge thrown cherry bomb things. So dangerous and so disconcerting.
Anyhow, it's late and poor R is sleepy and sickly from all the alchohol. Hope he's prepared for round 3 tomorrow.
