June 15 (Kaz)

June 15

Today is day 47.....if I were on Survivor the final Four would have been a week ago, but we are still going for another 2 weeks.

Today was a super short visit with Andrew, only 30 minutes because they were preparing for a visit from the Health Dept and did not want me anywhere near the orphanage. We had enough time to cruise around the grounds in the stroller at break neck speeds...strolling at a walking pace is far too boring now. We zig zag, do wheelies and hit all of the bumps and puddles to make it more interesting. Today we also got clearence from the director and the Bun lady (lady who wears her hair in a bun and watches you come and go) to come and do yard work Sunday when we do not have any visits. I could spend a month in the yard here and still have work to do. So a bunch of the families will be cleaning up the yard a bit on Sunday. It wil be interesting to see what 'tools' they provide for us.

On the drive after the visit we drove by this new building. We think it is a restaurant or maybe a nightclub. It has quite ornate elephants in the front of the building so it really stands out from the soviet style building. As an added bonus there was a naked man in one of the windows. And someone thought they saw a naked lady behind him, but I did not zoom in on the picture enough to see that.

After the naked man we went to the Fed Ex office to pick up Andrew's plane ticket which was Fed Ex'ed to Kazakhstan. Fed Ex is not really popular here and the 'office' is in a tiny strip mall, down a hallway, up some rickety stairs, down the end of a dark hallway and behind a door whith a cheap photo copy of the Fed Ex logo. It looked like a shady deal.. Unfortunately they were out to lunch and our co-ordinator called them on her cell to rip them a new one. The package was delivered to her door witin an hour or 2. The co-ordinator, Baheet received the package and wanted to know why we tried to Fed Ex the package to the DHL office. in case you ever try to do this, it's a bad idea that the Russians or Kazaks just don't understand.

After the visit we went walking for a couple hours to a store where I bought a $4 polo shirt for Andrew. It is quite stylish, even for me who has no ability to match clothes.

I took out our co-ordinator and translator for dinner to Ali Baba. We were supposed to do it after court before Rob left, but we never got around to it, so Natalie 'stood' in for Rob. Here's the menus that we ordered from--- they were shiny silk fabric covered. I was tempted to add one to my souvenier pile, but Natalie stopped me before I did something really wrong.

On our walk after dinner we ran across a car that had this on the windshield. As taunting as it was, we chose not to KNOCK HERE for fear that we would be hauled off to a Kazak jail.