Current mood:

nervous

Hi again
It’s beautiful again here in sunny Kostanai, and all are rejoicing. Birds are singing, cats are multiplying, and squirrels are factoring polynomials. I’ll bet you can never guess what we did today. C’mon, three guesses and no peeking. Wrong! We walked to lunch at café Knick Knack. I can’t believe you guessed we went antiquing. I had a rather ridiculous amount of food, but a father-in-training needs to maintain a 4000/day calorie intake. At least, I hope that is the case, because I’m meeting my goal if it is.

So then guess what we did… Wrong again! Have you been paying attention at all? I mean, snorkeling in the Caspian Sea? Do you know how far a drive that is from here? Sheesh. No, we went to the orphanage to visit Asella. We think we may have done something wrong with the feedings because again we did not get to do so. Oh well, she’s only theirs for 2 more weeks, and then we really get to ruin her. Asella was a bit sleepy today and just wanted to alternate between standing up and being very proud of herself, and reclining in mommy’s arms and being very content. Laying on the floor was not an option today.





Okay, last chance for the guessing game. Huh? Really? That’s your guess? That we broke into the Auto parts store and stole a bunch of vegemite? Weird guess. Nope, we walked to the town center to do some grocery shopping and still more souvenir shopping. A funny thing happened at the mall today… the souvenir store that we went to last week and wanted to revisit has vanished from the face of the… mall. There’s a black hole where it used to be. They are doing tons of remodeling so we just assumed the shop was somewhere else in the mall, which is about 5 stories and rather large. So we enlisted the help of a kindly woman from another shop to help us search. Thankfully the Russian word for souvenirs is “souveniri” and the Russian word for Kazak is “Kazak” so I could easily explain what I was looking for. She ran all over the mall asking people if they had seen the shop and finally caught up with mall security who told her that the store indeed had gone missing. We’re going to check back next week to see if it reappears.

For dinner we went back to the castle to celebrate DJ’s last night in Kostanai. He’s heading back home after court tomorrow to look after his business, so Kim will be on her own from here on out. Dinner was again pretty good, and this time we were treated to appropriate music in the form of a live string quartet that was quite enjoyable. They played the classics (Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach, 50 Cent, Yanni). We tagged along again on the tour, this time done in silence. Here’s Sarah in the creepy doll room.



So that was our exciting day. Thanks for playing. Tomorrow we’ll get gussied up and head back to the courthouse for the “real” court session. One more step closer. We’ve prepared ourselves for off the wall questions by finding out the state flower, bird, rodent and tree. I’ve also brushed up on how to make a béchamel sauce and memorized the days of the week in Portuguese. One of those should come in handy.

Have a swell day.