Court Delay

We ended up not having court today as the head of the court had to go on a business trip to Almaty. She will be back tomorrow and we'll have court on Wednesday. This gives us a one day delay in our overall plan. We have to have Guardianship Court before we can get a final court date. We can't apply for our final court date until after our 14 day visiting period ends, which is Tuesday. So we were going to file for final court Wednesday morning but since we have to wait for Guardianship Court we won't be able to file until Thursday. It is fine since we have a few extra days built into our travel time but we were hoping to get a final court date for the 21st or 23rd (the 22nd is a holiday) and be able to come home a few days earlier than we had planned as we are really missing Sam. However, it looks as if the 27th is a more likely return date for us.

Alex is getting stronger by the day. We are trying to teach him to roll over from back to front and hopefully he will have it perfected before we leave so he won't spend so much time on his back while he is in the nursery. He does pretty well rolling front to back, but a lot of times that is accidental. We are also trying to teach him to take a regular bottle. The boy does not know how to suck, which I know all babies are born knowing how to do. He'll chew on the bottle and get a few drops in his mouth and swallow them (I guess) but he doesn't know how to take a bottle otherwise. I think it is because the holes in the nipples of the bottles he is used to are so large the milk just pours out of them. We may just move straight to the sippy cup, which is fine with me. Sam never took a bottle either so we skipped the aggravating stage of moving from bottle to cup.

We are trying to venture out a bit in the eating department. There are about 4 restaurants here that have menus in English and they are all owned by Turks and they all have basically the same menu, save the Georgian restaurant which is FABULOUS! Anyway, we decided to go into this nice looking place today to see if we could stumble through a menu entirely in Russian. And stumble we did! I decided that I would order some kind of soup since that seems a pretty safe choice no matter where you are. We started out confusing the waiter by ordering water to drink and then asking for a minute to look over the menu. Every place we've been they want to take your entire order practically the minute you sit down. We mimed that we needed a minute to look at the menu and we couldn't figure out much since it felt like we were under pressure to choose something. The waiter came over and we said, "Soup?" and he pointed out the soups on the menu, then started reading them off the menu. The only soups we know of in Russian are borscht and solyanka, neither of which he said. When we heard "Goulash" we decided we had a winner. We ordered two bowls of goulash and waited.

Waiting is usually a fun-filled time for us because we are bombarded by either Kazakh rap, Russian pop or American tunes. Once there was even a DJ singing karaoke for the entire restuarant. This time we heard an instrumental version of Lionel Richie's "Hello" followed by the original version, which is more Lionel Richie than I've heard since 1985. We also heard a live version of "Hotel California" and some oldie I can't recall along the lines of "Blueberry Hill". About 10 minutes later our goulash arrived. It wasn't like any goulash I've ever known--clear chicken broth with potatoes, carrots, green beans and a few chunks of beef seasoned with plenty of dill. It was really good (the dill made is especially tasty) but not the thick, hearty goulash we were planning on. Oh, well. We'll take our Russian dictionary along next time and try harder.

We were convinced that the hotel housekeeper was mad at us because for 3 days she left only one big bath towel and 2 smaller hand towels for us. I had a theory that since we were using some of the towel hooks for drying socks and such she didn't leave a second large towel because we were hanging stuff on the hook it usually hangs on. Not that there isn't plenty of room to leave a big towel somewhere--on the bed, desk, back of the toilet, perhaps. We tested out the theory by removing all the drying laundry from the hooks before we left the hotel this morning. Et voila, a second towel appeared in the appropriate spot!