May 18th, Part Jen PICTURES ADDED

May 18

I got up early today and took over the laptop again, and lo and behold, I plugged in a wire and Windows worked again! Yesterday during our visit we were in the music room, named because it has a piano and this drum. And having the maturity level we do, we had to take a picture of it. Junior was using his Propecia brush/mirror toy to bang on the drum, then he decided to try to put his hands on the side and try to stand up, and found out what happens when you have all your weight on one hand and remove the other.....gravity happens. But when you are wearing Pampers, plopping down on the floor does not hurt too much. Then we flipped the drum over and showed him how it could be used for a little bucket to put things away. Well, ok Rob did not participate in that, it was just me and my tidiness. He played along and let me put about 5 or 6 things in the drum, then we proceeded to lift it up and toss them all out. Oh, he has so many things to learn!

This morning for breakfast i was not in the mood for cereal, so I had honey and some weird kind of bread for breakfast. It looks like Boboli pizza shells, but had some weird seed on it that makes a spooky sound when you accidentally grind it between your teeth--- like fingernails on a chalk board. The other night on TV i was watching Russian Infomercials. Actually they were American Infomercials dubbed into Russian. And let me tell you, The Magic Bullet chopper, is even more excited in Russian. Although I don’t think they grasp the idea of Fruit Smoothies or Salsa over here since I have seen neither. Maybe Potato and Mayo smoothies, but not fruit. in case you need to do some ordering, here's the site: http://www.top-shop.ru/

The orphanage also has some pretty scary looking stuffed animals, like these 2 lions/tigers. If you look really close at the little guy on top, he has Mona Lisa eyes that follow you everywhere. And the big guy doesn't look too friendly either. We were waiting out in the hallway with junior yesterday for a room to open up and junior got a glimpse of these guys. He did not seem too scared, so we should be ok with Tigger and Fluffernutter when we get home. Speaking of Tigger, he has really taken to the house sitter.....and has been sleeping on his bed. I guess cats aren't real loyal, they'll take any warm body that talks to them :-)

I am still on my quest for a phone card, the Sprint one we got before we left does not work in Kazakhstan, although it does in Afghanistan and Pakistan according to the Sprint lady. As if that really helps me any. I tried to buy an ATT one on line because then they just email you the PIN, but after 4 attempts on the ATT site and getting denied, I gave up on them. Then I tried another one, SpeedyPin, which was cheaper than the ATT site, and am waiting 12 hours to cover the time delay. We called Rob’s parents a couple times from the apartment phone, but we think it might be $5 to $10 a minute to originate a call from here. Hopefully in the next couple days I’ll get the calling card thing straightened out.

We just lost power in the apartment for the first time today. Rob had to jinx it because a couple days ago he said we hadn’t lost power. It’s a good thing I was sitting here typing instead of in the elevator! Rob is sitting here reading words from the Russian Phrase Book. I am sure we are mangling the language, but we are getting by.

We had a good visit with Junior. We were outside for an hour, checking out trees, leaves, flowers, rocks, dirt, and touching all surfaces of interest like rock, marble, drain pipes. It was quite exciting. Then indoors we played with the stacking cups, more like the destruction cups—we stacked them, he whacked them. Then it was on to the indoor slide. We hold him less when he slides down, but I think he will be a daredevil because he likes to slide down with one leg hanging off. The phrase “both feet forward” does not mean much to him.

After the visit we had lunch at a Turkish fast food place. They made a wicked carved meat in a wrapper thing. I think it might be called a Donner. Whatever it is, it’s about $3 and very tasty.

After lunch we checked out the big ball in the sky. It’s on the ‘new’ side of the city across the river where all the government buildings are. We could see a lot—the old part of the city, the new part and lots of green. The space ball was really cool. they call it the Tree Of Life, and you can see the whole city, old and ne, and farm land and barely the airport. Before we went up the big elevator, these cool tiles were on the floor.

Once we got to the top you could see everything, including a bar :-) So here's rob and his beer at the hghest point in Astana.

Once we got off the elevator, there was another slight of stairs to get to the tippy top. There they had 2 things: one was an imprint of the president’s hand, where you could not only see how you size up to the president of Kazakhstan, but also pick up all germs from thousands of other visitors. So this is Rob’s hand in the president’s imprint.

They also had this cool looking ball which showed all of the religions that are in Kazakhstan, showing the contrast to the Soviet era. If I zoomed a little more you could have seen all the religion worlds. And those fingers on the right are some Kazak guy who refused to move his hand. He wasn’t looking at the ball thing, he was looking out the window but for some reason had to touch the focal point of the exhibit.