Nauryz

Nauryz

On March 20th, Kazakhstan celebrated their New Year, which involves the tradition of everyone cleaning their home in order to start the new year off on the right foot, a tradition I elected not to partake in. I was an unwilling participant in a social experiment where I learned that I can mispronounce Nauryz (pronounced now-riz) for 8 months before someone will finally correct my pronunciation. True to Kazakh punctuality we waited almost one month into the new year to celebrate it, but despite the long wait and confusing pronunciation the celebrations and opportunity for me to glimpse some authentic Kazakh culture did not disappoint!

Upon arrival at school I was immediately impressed to see some of the awesome traditional clothing my students donned for the occasion.

I spent much of the day soaking up the culture with an English teacher colleague (Elena, middle) and her Italian husband Elkana (the only Italian looking one)

Where can I get me one of these vests!

Our student tour guides who patiently answered our endless questions full of fascination for what must seem like the most mundane things to them

Our school principal in the middle (maybe the youngest principal in the world) and his wife (in the outfit that is definitely not Kazakh Santa Clause, but if you thought it was, understandable)

For some cross cultural comparison traditional Canadian New Years outfits mostly include onesies. 

Some of which even have moose on them

The celebrations opened with some performances including song and dance, and more traditional Kazakh costumes dating back to nomadic times. 

You can see a short clip of their opening dance if you copy/paste this link: https://youtu.be/FfLIJB87pAc

The students have attended these type of performances many times so they came up with many creative and productive ways to entertain themselves and others.

 

This student performed at least ten different magic tricks, each one more mind boggling than the last, giving Elena a headache and prompted her to accurately declare that this student should be on TV!

I had to google how to correctly spell Rubik's cube, meanwhile seemingly every student at my school can solve one in under a minute.

There were over 1000 students, parents and teachers who joined in the celebrations, and it took the contributions of 100s of people to help set up, decorate, cook and prepare for the massive event. 

No Kazakh celebration would be complete without a yurt, the highly portable houses used in nomadic times. 

Tons of games for entertainment including arm wrestling,

chess,

and whatever this game is (perhaps a very early ancestor of backgammon?)

But the most interesting game of all was one that I thought only took place in fantasy novels. Now I know better, that fantasy authors just steal ideas from Kazakhstan. In this game, resembling marbles or billiards, players use actual sheep knee bones to compete to knock each other's actual sheep knee bones out of the actual sheep knee bone playing area. 

I wasn't able to gather if this stance (which all players used) is a rule of the game, or if through thousands of years of practice this has been demonstrated to be the most technically sound throwing form

For another cross cultural reference, New Years in Canada involves games like Codenames and Settlers of Catan

No Raz, I don't care how many sheep you're offering, I'm not trading a brick for useless sheep

The best part of every Kazakh celebration is the food. And there is always more than enough to go around and for people to take home grocery bags full after the meal. If I had to prepare food for 1000 people about 4 people would be eating not very good pasta and the rest get to eat bananas or water, so seriously, thank you so much to everyone who helped prepare food for this gigantic event. 

We sat by department so here I sit with the biology department. We could probably have sat here for a week and still not finished all the food on the table. There were close to 50 other tables just like ours. 

One of life's great mysteries is that the dried hard salty cheese rock known as kurt has survived generation after generation as a Kazakh staple. 

This water bottle with the mysterious looking contents contains kumys, fermented horse milk. Is fermented horse milk a) when you ferment milk before feeding it to a horse, b) when you ferment the milk of a horse before drinking it, or c) something else, anything else because it couldn't possibly be either a or b?
The correct answer is b. Its not the worst thing I've ever tasted, but locals absolutely cherish this slightly alcoholic beverage. 

Nauryz has its own special soup, cleverly named "Nauryz soup". It contains 7 ingredients because I'm not sure, the seven kingdoms of Game of Thrones? I now assume all fantasy authors have stolen their ideas from unique Kazakh traditions

Nauryz soup contains horse meat with an extra emphasis on the fatty part

After finishing my meal with the biology department I wandered around to check out how the other tables were making out. I received a very warm welcome from a table of my grade 12 students where I was quickly provided with another bowl of Nauryz soup, and of course another cup of kumys. Kazakhstan definitely has the nicest students imaginable, and exceptional hospitality is ingrained in the DNA of everyone in Kazakhstan. 

For a cultural comparison our delicious but comparatively modest Canadian New Years meal consisted of the not so Canadian dish, tacos!

As well as vintage Busch 

Like any Kazakh celebration the event also featured a lot of dancing. I've got the 10 Kazakh dance songs basically memorized by this point and although I (rather intentionally) took no pictures of the dancing, I wasn't able to avoid finding more videos than I'd prefer of myself dancing on social media. 

One neat tradition for Nauryz is that all of the 12th grade students plant a tree on the school property, a cool way to leave behind another contribution to their school. And finally, the event featured some sports and entertainment. 

These ridiculous horns were probably once used as a call to battle

Some very impressive acrobats

Who can do double decker juggling

I suppose when you're a nomad there isn't much to do in terms of entertainment. The whole school was super into this traditional competition where contestants do as many squats as they can with a heavy sandbag on their shoulders. 

Even the principal got into it, doing a very impressive 30. The winner was one of the students (Wow!) who did 70, and his prize, the most Kazakh prize imaginable, was a tea kettle. 

Taraz isn't always the most exciting city in the world, but days like Nauryz, where I get to experience first hand age old traditions that have shaped an entire culture's way of life, certainly remind me why I embark on such adventures in the first place. Thank you NIS staff and students for sharing this experience with me, and for making it one that I'll never forget!