Tuesday, June 16th

We were able to sleep a few hours before we got ready for breakfast. The hotel has a wonderful breakfast with a variety of things to eat…eggs, meats, cheese, breads, fruit, milks, cereals, etc. We loaded up for breakfast to prepare ourselves for the day. I also had some wonderful hot tea with breakfast.

We went changed some money to Tenge and went up to our room to wait for ‘the call’. Our phone rang a little after 10am and our facilitator had us meet her downstairs. She was still trying to reach the contact person at the MOE (Ministry of Education). We ended up driving over there while she went in to try and get the right person and set things into motion. We need to have someone from the MOE to accompany us to the Babyhouse and it is a busy time of year for them with the end of school and graduations. Our facilitator also needs to get the chief doctor there at the same time. We ended up waiting for our facilitator outside the government office. We talked to Dimitri for a while, he told us the big white building was the President’s residence (one of many).

Waiting for 'the call'


President's residence


After our facilitator came out, we learned we will have to wait till 3 and hope that everything will fall into place then. On the way back to the hotel, she pointed out a couple of restaurants, Venezia, a pizza place, and another Russian restaurant she recommended. We asked where we could buy some things, like water, fruit and she pointed down the street and said there is a supermarket 2 blocks away. So we ventured out to the supermarket and it really wasn’t difficult to figure out some things. We bought bread, cheese, fruit, something that looked like yogurt, but I’m not exactly sure what it is! We also bought a jug of bottled water and some soda.

A monument on the way to the supermarket