May 13 and 14, Part Jen

May 13th and 14th

I did not get out to an internet cafe yesterday, so we missed a day.

Yesterday with Junior was filled with more 'throw the blanket over my head and I will squeal with laughter" action. We made a couple 15 second movies of it, but without sound, you would not know he's laughing. But movies without sound are soon to be a thing of the past.....I left the camera on the floor, ready to capture a kodak moment, and rob stepped on it while walking around with Junior. It made a really bad cracking and breaking plastic sound, so I think our camera, circa 1997 has met it's untimely end. I was able to jiggle it enough to get the pictures and movies of the day off of it. But we don't have any legal pictures from the day of photography to post, so you will be photoless today.

Last night I went out with the Kazak Sisters, our translator and her 2 sisters that are in college in Astana, to go camera shopping. Do you think i stood out like a sore thumb-- if you add up the weight of all 3 of them, you get what I weigh. After 3 or 4 stores we had found the camera for me..... a PURPLE Cannon that can make movies with sound. I did not have enough Tenge, and the 3 sisters could not negotiate a better price with teh droky sales men, so I had to go back today to get it. Hopefully it will be all charged up and ready for action tomorrow. I will also be learing some Russian, as teh manual is only in Russian. Who needs manuals! After our night of camera shopping we were walking around town and along the river and they said "It's getting late, we should get you home to Rob" (I guess I was starting to lag behind even though I was not wearing Kazak pointy toed Stiletto boots). I didn't realize it was close to 10pm because it was so light out it looked like about 5pm.

Today I went for a walk in the morning with the woman from Bethlehem who was here a week ahead of us. It was nice to hear that other familes have the same kind of process we are. We are eager to find out when their court date is, so we will have a better idea when ours will be. We are still guessing Rob will be travelling Memorial Day.

Today we had some lunch before heading to the aquarium. I wanted to try something new so I got the Ball Of Meat Mixed With Rice. I am glad our translator was there to tell me what it was, because Rice often looks like unfavory bugs that are crunchy. The cashier lady at lunch is new on the job, and I think was not felling up to the task today. It took her quite a while to put a carrot salad and ball of meat on 2 plates, realizing one gets microwaved and the other does not, then get Rob's salad and chicken, again on 2 plates, and micorwave Rob's hunk 'o chicken leg for 2x normal so it's acutally warm, and then use the calculator to add it all up. There were 2 people working and one used the other's caluclator in the middle of the order, which caused an interesting cat fight. Then they needed the food that we brought to the table to be re-weighed so they could figure it out. In the mean time, the line was growing and people were angrily waiting and pointing to their wrist where a watch would be. We thought they wanted to know what time it was so we showed them our watch which made them madder. Then to top it all off, the bandof gypsies, yes they really do exist, that works the street outside the cafeteria decided to move their business inside. It was quite a stressful meal time, but we got a plate of 3 awesome looking desserts for the table for about $1.75. At home, each would have cost about $6 becuuase they were so fancy looking.

Tonight I took a new way to get to the internet cafe. After about an hour later I finally got here, but I did see many new things along the way.

Chow.