Internet technology here

There's a device I use here to get the internet that I'd never seen in America. (Maybe Comcast has me believing that it's the only source of internet. I don't know.) Here I use a data card, a small device like a flash drive that I simply put into a USB port on my computer and just like that I have an internet connection without needing a connection to a modem. There is a sim card inside of it which periodically needs to be “loaded” with money to pay for my internet usage.

Adding money is in itself a rather complicated process. First I need to buy a specific telephone company kontur card at a nearby store. Kontur is a unit of usage and these credit card-size cards have specific monetary value. That is, I can buy cards of different value such as 1 manat worth of kontur or 5 or 10 or even 20 manat. The higher the value, the cheaper the kontur rate.

Then I take the tiny sim cards out of both my phone and the data device, and put the sim card from the data device into the phone. Using the kontur card I bought, I scratch off the numbers unique to that card and enter those numbers into my phone (which now has the data device sim card inside of it.) If I've entered the numbers correctly, I get a message that I've added, ie, loaded 5 manat of kontur, for example.

Next, I need to take the device sim card out of my phone and put it back into the data device – and of course, put the sim card for the phone back into it. This really doesn't take much time, and it does get me 3G internet without using a modem.

The first time I needed to add kontur to the device was last night, so I asked Georgie to go with me to the nearby store. I thought it would be a simple transaction and I really could have done this myself. But it's nice to have Georgie with me and he wants to be sure I can manage.

Well, I should have known that the shopkeepers and customers would start questioning him about me. In fact, they think I am the reason he speaks English so well. The truth is Georgie began learning English when he was in a good school in Moscow and he is a very motivated language learner.

According to Georgie, one of the men offered to build me a house in Masalli so that I would stay and teach his children English. Apparently they thought I was a private tutor and didn't realize that I teach at Digah school. (Also a surprise to them because the school does not have a good scholastic reputation.) Georgie kept telling them that I was living with his family for only a few months. But several of the men were persistent and kept offering to build me a house if I was ever unhappy living with Georgie's family. When we got home we had a good laugh about their offer.

Later that night, we were visited by women relatives from Baku who had never seen an American in person. I'll add a photo showing how tea and nuts and sweets are served for company. This time they didn't bring out the pillow cushions, so everyone and everything is on the floor. And yeegads they stayed until after midnight – way past my bedtime!