hey, this is gonna be a quick one

hey all. i'm in beautiful metropolitan shymkent as i write to you now. i'm on an adventure with my fabulous site-mate ann. she has to buy a train ticket, and i wanna watch her do it. yes, life in the stan is so exciting that this is my sunday entertainment.

so, yesterday i had my ''halloween party'' with my english club -- but i can hardly justify calling it a party because it was just me, ann, two girls from my club, a history teacher and the guy that runs the little shop at my school. but here's what i learned from my holiday experience: if you don't have an oven, it's impossible to bake pumpkin bread. and pumpkin bread dough makes very tasty pancakes (or in russian: tickvei blini). i also learned that when you bring pumpkin pancakes to a school, random strangers sit down to eat them and insist that you drink massive amounts of congac because, after all it is a holiday somewhere. but all in all my holiday was fun, even when my host mom thought halloween was over and cooked my jackolantern for dinner. i ate some of it, but i couldn't enjoy it. i felt like i was eating a steak made from the little calf that i raised from infancy.

so, anyways, i said this was gonna be quick, and i wasn't lying. i gotta get to the train station (or vakzal as we say in russian) and watch a foreigner buy a ticket to uralsk!

much love! (and i promise the next post will be longer and full of witicisms!)

ps-- i wrote this post last week, but for whatever reason, the internet cafe that i went to sent me to the blogger website in german, and instead of trying to go to an english version, i convinced myself that i could in fact read german. that being said, i accendently saved this post as a draft instead of publishing it. oops.

update, ann didn't buy her ticket on sunday, she waited until tuesday and hence, i did not get to watch her buy it. that made me sad. conversely, i did get to watch ann buy a coat at the bazaar, which made me happy. she bought a grayish coat. i helped her by speaking russian. i think that the coat-selling guy thought i was her keeper or something. i'm not though, i'm just a nosey, back-seat coat buyer. just wathcing wasn't enough for me -- i'm totally hands on at the bazaar!! ok. . .anyways, now i am in shimkent again for martha's housewarming and then to 'watch' some of my students take an english test.

next week is my fall break for school. i don't have to teach anything to anyone for a whole week! hoorah! i do, however, have to go to school every morning, from nine until one for. . . i don't really know why, but i have to go. but i have all afternoon to put the spices sent to me by aunt marla, gramma lyn and dad to good use. i hope i can do some justice to american cuisine (if there is in fact, such a thing. . . )

anyway, that's about it, for now. i hope that enough exciting stuff happens to fill another post soon!