Telling it like it is.

Azerbaijanis have a way of straight up telling it like it is. In some ways, this is awesome. The directness puts you in a place where nothing is left to the imagination. If I am doing something one way, and my host mom knows of a better way to do it, she will take the knife (or rag or pen or nozzle) right out of my hand and show me how. If my host sister spots a mistake in my language homework--and this NEVER happens--she will inform me that I am wrong, cross out my error and write the correct response above it. If I walk into school with mud on my boots, the women sitting around by the door will stop me, point at my shoes, and lead me back out the door in the direction of the fountain where I can clean the dirt from my feet before re-entering the school.

On the other hand, this directness can be brutal. Coming from a land (and by land, I mean America) where most of us, if we're feeling particularly honest one day, might say "you don't look your best" rather than "you look bad." No matter to what degree our thought actually takes, we tend to present our opinions, about people particularly, in the most-likable fashion without totally lying. And it's not that we're being purposefully deceptive. We're just doing the best we can to not offend. In Azerbaijan, this is not the case.

My relative: "Did you ever have braces?"
Me: "Yes. I had them for two years."
My relative: "That's strange. Your front teeth are uneven."

Same relative, different conversation.
Me: "What happened to your fingernail?"
My relative: "I crushed it while I was grinding apples for jam." [She holds up her hand.]
Me: [I carefully take her hand to survey the damage to her nail.] "Ouch, that looks like it hurts. I'm sorry that happened, I know these take a long time to heal."
My relative: [quickly withdraws her hand] "Why is your skin so dry?!" [then touches the back of my hand and then my cheek] "Don't you moisturize?"

Only with the help of my host sister could I really understand what was being said during these exchanges. I can only imagine some of the other things people have said that I don't understand yet. I find myself laughing when I'm talking to my host sister about someone, and she, in all honesty and innocence, identifies who we're talking about as "the fat one." Earlier on, these expressions really surprised me and I didn't know how to react.  Now, I explain to her that I'm laughing because in America, it's very impolite to identify people by their appearance. But in Azerbaijan, people use fat, skinny, ugly, pretty as identifiers like Americans use blonde, brunette, tall or short. I realized in my explanation to my host sister that Americans do identify people by their appearance, but we choose non-offensive adjectives. On some level, there's a culturally embedded agreement that it's okay to identify someone as the "tall, dark haired guy with freckles." All of these identifiers are part of the man's physical appearance. However, to throw in "fat" would be quite rude. Americans, either consciously or sub-consciously, tend to avoid the more subjective adjectives because of their potential to offend. I totally get that.

What I'm also coming to realize is that the directness I've experienced here in Azerbaijan generally doesn't come from malice. On the flip side, the directness often times comes in a string of really nice compliments. People simply say what they mean. Sometimes it's more subtle than other times. And of course, like any opinion, it's all subjective. The funny part is the recognition of the inconsistency.