Condalisa Rice: Calendar Girl?

A photo album from Turkey is up... Thank you for your patience!

Mikey and I have had a lot of fun this week!

We have started our language lessons with Dr. Abdul Rashid, aka Bobo (Grandpa) Abdullo. Dr. Abdul Rashid is a Persian language scholar/ translator. His English is so-so, which makes him a great teacher of Tajik. With his basic level of English he was able to share with us his love of Condalisa Rice, whom he has a framed photo of. Did you know Condi speaks very good Russian? Commonalities between Condi and Putin: they our loved by Dr. Abdul Rashid and they both speak Russian.

Another funny occurance was after purchasing a very large melon (Harbooza) in the green market we had some arrands to run around town. As we were walking I queried to Mikey, do you think people are staring at me or the melon? This fostered the idea for us to draw a face on the melon. The melon was transformed from fruit in to Baby Harbooza. Baby Harbooza got a lot of smiles from people. As we are minorities in a city of predominately Persian people we stand out. Standing out results in being looked at. With many people looking at us they couldn't help but look at the giant melon we were carrying, when they saw the melon had a face, there was lots of instantaneous laughter. Without language we communicated: not only are we different, we're a little bit odd too, and this we can all laugh about.

When we made it home with Baby Harbooza, our housemates were not home yet. Baby Harbooza was put into Uncle Imimyor's bed... more laughter. Baby Harbooza was delicious!