Regrouping on a Sunday afternoon and actually working on emails and not just evaporating into cyberreality for an hour. I am amazed by how conservative my new family is, especially my host father. He says prayers in Arabic before and after meals. When we drove by a cemetary on the way to the bazaar, he placed his hand over his heart, which is a respectful Muslim gesture. He has this Arabic verse placard hanging from the mirror where the fluffy, hot pink dice would normally go in the United States. I think that my classes were sort of a bust last week. I need to figure out how to make grammar interesting. I'm sure that thousands of years of Latin and Greek teachers (mostly monks) pondered this question standing in front of a room of naughty children. I am making chili tonight at home. Cooking in a Kyrgyz kitchen always requires improvization and imagination. I really like the pool in the nearby village, and I am going back there today. I was thinking yesterday about how where I am living now was restricted to Russians and other Soviet people. It is a hidden paradise. I swim in a pool from the seventies and imagine the hoardes of Soviet vacationers who must have come here twenty or thirty years ago. I was swimming in a pool where no American could have before the USSR fell. Weird, eh? I am running out of minutes on the computer. With love. -MJ
