Novruz 2008 in Mingechavir Part 1

The Novruz festivities ended with several large gatherings in Mingechavir. Early on Thursday the 20th of March, the vernal equinox and the official Novruz day, Mike and I hopped out of bed in Ganja and sped up to Mingechavir for the big party there. We arrived just on time. Like last year the main street had been blocked off and all of the schools had set up Novruz displays around the square in front of the police station and municipality building. We found Mike's awesome sitemates Jesse and Carolyn at Carolyn's school's display. She is a TEFL volunteer at school number 13. We said our hellos and then made our way around to look at all the other beautiful displays. We were treated like royalty, and every school gave us Baklava, nuts, fruits, cookies, kete and anything else they could hand out to us. Since I know quite a few teachers in Ming and Mike just knows everyone- and everyone knows him. We had photo ops galore. Some of the displays were really very beautiful. The children were all in bright colored clothes. There were lots of flower and bright green samina plants. Many of the girls were making traditional food and there was a log butter maker. I liked the lamb shaped cookies ( or bread) can't remember. I also got to play the traditional hard boiled egg game with some school director. Each person takes an egg and then they tap the eggs together and the one whose eggdoesn't break gets to keep both egges. and they go on and challenge the next person with their winning egg. It was kind of fun- low output entertainment. When we were done touring around we went back to Carolyn's school and awaited the coming of the mayor. Carolyn's school director asked us to say good things about the school to the Director, in Azerbaijani. We practiced a little and when he stopped by to assess the display we gave our best performance. I think we did OK.
At the end of the morning we were stuffed with food and still did not have enough hands to carry the left over. We got a couple of plastic bags and then on our way back to Mike's place we gave most of it away to some street children, who even after we gave them a bunch of food still asked for money. We got back to Mike's place and dumped our remaining platter of food on the table. The mother of

one of Mike's co-workers had seen us in town and bestowed upon us an entire platter of cookies, sweets and nuts. We were overwhelmed with food. As we were going guesting in the evening we busied ourselves with making sweets of our own to give to our host- one of the teachers I work with. In the midsts of the baking hubub the neighborhood children were knocking on our door with empty caps hoping we'd fill them with sweets. This is very similar to trick-or-treating. We thought GREAT we can load some of this stuff off on the kids. So Mike filled their hats but then a few minutes later we got another knock and sitting outside our door was a new piece of Baklava in return for the sweets we had given. We were not making much headway on our pile of food.
With make-shift chocolate chip cookies in hand (we make them without brown sugar and with m&ms to keep the cost down) we headed to Sevil's apartment, where again we were stuffed full of food. We met her mother and two children

and I drank wine- which Sevil pounded like a vodka shot , much to our amusement. With left-over plov, dried fruit and more candy and baklava we waddled back to Mike's place and then went to Caroloyn and Jesse's place for a little more socializing. Their host family has built a chay xana/restaurant and they open it up for them to have friends over. So we sat for a while drinking tea with their host father. He's a really nice guy, and he loves to sit and talk with us and make toasts. We called it a night fairly early and went back to sleep off all the food to prepare for the next day of feasting.