Monday Night Update

Its Monday night here and Jesse and I met our match this evening… we went in search of a Greek restaurant Zhenia told us about. After walking around the place a few times trying to figure out where to go in, we see two young men standing outside and they motion us into a restaurant. There is nothing Greek about it, it looks like an upscale sushi restaurant. I have a very wimpy sushi palate, a fresh spring roll suits me fine and that’s about it. Jesse has now perfected the “do you have an Engliski menu?” question in Russian…NYET! No English and no pictures on the menu. Oh No. I start to panic a little… a sushi place is not where you want to take a wild guess at what to order. I start envisioning them bringing out something live with tentacles. I’d rather eat horse meat! We decide to leave and save that restaurant for another day (or another year as far as I’m concerned).

Instead we went to Address, a local Turkish restaurant. The food is great but later in the evening it turns into a scene from the Sopranos. Every man (and it’s only men) that walks in gives every other man in the place a pat on the shoulder and a handshake. They sit and smoke and drink tea together. I wish I could understand what they were saying … well maybe not, I wouldn’t want to know the name of the poor guy who’s going to get his legs broken.

So now we’re back at the room preparing for movie time. We brought about 30 DVD’s from home. At night we position the laptop and external speaker between us on the bed and enjoy our English entertainment. Coming from a home with two huge HD TV’s, I’m surprised at how happy we are to watch our movies on this tiny screen. Ahh Kazakhstan.

We do watch some local TV. They have Cartoon Network here and today Scooby Doo was on, in Russian. Oh and we saw Dora the Explorer on TV in Russian, but here she speaks Russian and teaches Spanish words instead of speaking English and teaching Spanish words. It cracks me up to watch it for a few minutes. We also like the Euro Sport channel. Today they had on a Karate tournament. We found ourselves torn between who to root for, the Russian guy or the Kazakhstan guy. Only a problem in the Moore family, good thing there wasn’t an American team as well.

And to save the best news for last we had a nice visit with “The BOY”. Today is the first day we got some recognition from him when they brought him into the room. I’m sure he’s thinking, “Oh, hey look that goofy American couple is here again today. “ We gave him a bit of a workout by forcing him to crawl or walk to his toys instead of handing him everything. It’s helping – he’s getting stronger and stronger each day.