A day in the life of.....

Sorry no pictures today, since it wasn’t a Zeb day. So we just slept in, talked to the parents and finally got our passports back, which makes Wayne feel like a whole person again. He really didn’t like not having his passport.
So we decide we would bundle up today and at least get out and walk somewhere to eat. We ventured out to the Guinness Pub where I had the buffet and Wayne had the grilled chicken, the food is interesting to say the least. Just some fun facts about Almaty: 1) no ice in your drinks and you only get one small drink with your meals and they don’t ask you if want a refill, 2) you typically don’t leave a tip because they include this in the price (but we just can’t get past that and tend to tip anyways), 3) they call their malls supermarkets and are set up like flea markets (small cubicles), 4) the grocery store next door is smaller than most of our quick marts, 5) the traffic is horrible-cars are everywhere (and we mean everywhere) and they honk non-stop, 6) to cross the street you just walk out in the middle and hope for the best because there are cars everywhere, 7) when you take a taxi you might just be getting in someone’s personal car and they will drive you for a fee, 8) all the women wear tall black boots with stiletto heals even on the snow and ice, 9) every place you go there is a security guard at the doorway, 10) work day starts at 10 and ends at 10 and we are not really sure when their lunch hour is, 11) people are not friendly at all, even waiters, 12) people from Almaty speak Russian and most people outside of Almaty speak Kazak, 13) the president of Kazakhstan moved the capital from Almaty to Astana because he feared earthquakes (or at least that is what our translator told us), 14) you only tip the bell boy 200 tenges (which only is $1.60), our poor bell boy carried 100 lbs of luggage up a flight of stairs for $1.60 you wouldn’t find that in America, 15) our hotel staff works 24 hours on and 48 off, 16) in the grocery store they have Pringles, m&m’s, skittles, snickers, kit kats, twix, starbursts, pepsi, coke and instead of diet it’s called pepsi light. We go to the store almost daily and buy all of the above and that’s it, those people probably think we are junk food junkies, but we don’t know what anything else is so that is all we get.
Good news this afternoon, the babyhouse director has agreed to let us visit tomorrow so that made our day. We are so excited about this since they typically don’t let you visit on the weekends here. So tomorrow there will be more posts and pictures. I just wonder at some point if you all will get tired of hearing us talk about our little guy and seeing all those pictures.
Something else of interest today. We brought our playstation portable with us and only brought the USB cable for charging, well come to find out if you let the battery completely die then you can’t charge it this way and need the AC adapter, which we left at home because it was so big. Yesterday, Wayne was watching a movie on the psp and the battery died so we thought that there was not going to be a way to get it charged back up since we only had the usb cable and it didn’t work. When we were walking through a mall up the street, we came across a booth that sold PSP’s and they actually had an AC adapter for only 2000 tenges, that almost is a God thing, because let me tell you it was in a mall like a flea market, not radio shack or best buy. Of course we bought it immediately and were very proud of our purchase, so Wayne is now watching the Dukes of Hazards on his PSP while it charges. It is amazing what can make us happy when you don’t have the conveniences of home.
Keep those prays coming, we continue to be grateful for each and everyone of them.
Love, Crystal