Mountain Exploration

It's hard to believe that our second week in Kazakhstan is rapidly coming to an end - and that only 3 weeks ago we received our travel dates. I wasn't even home when we found out with 9 days notice that we needed to be in Almaty on March 18th! I was out in Tulsa teaching classes and just happened to check my voice mail at lunch to get the news. What a surprise! I had to tell my class what was going on, or they would have thought their instructor was a real space cadet.

We have settled into somewhat of a routine here. We wake up around 7am and eat breakfast while watching the news. Our TV gets a number of English stations (thank goodness), so we tend to watch Fox News. By 9 or so we head out, either on our own for a walk or with our driver. We normally stop back at our apartment for lunch before heading out to the Baby House for our 2:30 to 4pm visit. Then we go back to the apartment and sometime later take a walk. Sometimes we go out for dinner - we have been going out to various restaurants on average every other day.

Today was a very exciting day, however. Andrei, our driver, picked us up at 9:30 this morning for a trip into the Tien Shan mountains. We drove about 10-15km up a rugged, snowy 4X4 road up a river canyon. Luckily, he had a vehicle that could handle it (Toyota Land Cruiser). We drove up to Big Almaty Lake, a natural lake which had been dammed as a reservoir. The entire river channel was manmade, in fact. There are a lot of landslides in the foothills outside Almaty, and there are a lot of precautions taken for flood and landslide control. The views were absolutely incredible! Similar to Colorado, but the mountains were much steeper and more jagged overall. Had we followed the road only 90km farther, we would have been in Kyrgyzstan. Although Almaty is about 250km from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan we have not seen any of their political unrest here.

On the way down from the mountains we stopped at a cafe called Saule and ate lunch outdoors. Today's menu was shashlyk - ie shish kabob (we had chicken, lamb, and beef liver) with onions marinated in vinegar, manti, tomato and cucumber salad, a blini (pancake) with cheese, onion, and potato, and tea with milk. Yum. But those of you who know me (Barb) well know that I only ate the chicken shashlyk. I'm really brave with all the rest of the food, but not so much with meat!

Then it was on to the Baby House for visit number 10. We were a bit disappointed that we were shorted today! At 3:45, someone came into the music room and must have told us that it was time to leave. A few minutes later a group of about 15 3-year olds marched in for what must have been their music class. Our visit today was good. Bryce was in a much better mood than he was yesterday, and we noticed that his nose was not running like it was yesterday. He was also very vocal. We're sure he was telling us the story of his life - again in Kazakh so we weren't sure what he was saying. Today we did a lot of knocking down the water bottle. He is getting to be an expert at various techniques for knocking down water bottles. We also fed him more Cheerios and tried to teach him how to use the sippy cup we bought for him. Unfortunately he could not figure that one out. I think he only drinks out of a bottle so far. He is also trying to stand, so we practiced standing a bit too. We think he will be standing by himself before too long. He definitely seems a lot more comfortable with us that he did at the beginning. That is one of the benefits to the 14 day bonding period - he will know who we are when we take him home on our second trip. And he definitely knows and recognizes all of his caretakers. Judging by the way he is attached to them, we feel that he is getting good care at the Baby House. We hope our visit is not shorted again tomorrow!

That's all for today. We'll let you know what's going on again tomorrow.