Friday March 30th in Arkalyk

I am going to the orphanage every day at 4 o’clock, but after April 12th I am going to be going at 10 o’clock and 4 o’clock. I also made this girl friend at the orphange who must be like a volunteer or something. I have been visiting my little brother daily now. It’s going good, but today it took 40 minutes for little brother to stop crying. He’s been crying every time he sees us. I don’t know what they’re saying, like if they are saying “here’s your mama and papa, they’re going to take you and you’re never coming back”, and “here’s your big brother” or something, he just doesn’t like it and every time he sees us he’s like “Wah, wah, wah.” By the way, my little brother’s name is Timorlan. He was named after a very famous king. But his nickname is Tuma.

There is a space capsule outside this museum that the Russians landed in from the moon at some point. We see it every day, and we even got to see the hatch today, two hatches actually, and we also saw numbers on it. At some point it had a 1, 2, 3, and 4 on it, at least it had it when they launched it up there. There is also a big dent in it. I must of landed on a rock. They used to land the space capsules on the Steppe near Arkalyk, because it’s far away from people and everything, and it won’t hit anything. It was small, I couldn’t even imagine having having 4 people in there or 3 or something, I could only imagine having 1 person in there.

We also saw a big mining bucket that they used in the mines. There was once a pulley system attached to it. I even got inside it and my mom took a picture with me inside. They do a lot of mining around here. They mine for a lot of bauxite, which they use to make aluminum. It’s a kind of mineral my mom thinks!!!

I have been digging a hole in the snow, two holes actually, on this path we walk on. In my second hole, we found a dead bird. On the side of the hole. It probably is still there, but it’s covered with snow again, good thing. I don’t like looking at it, it grosses me out. We’ve also seen an animal skull on the way to our flat, which I am sitting in doing this blog, and it looks kind of gross. I can see some bony string stuff in it. I don’t want to talk about it too much to gross you out.

What’s different about their stores here, is that they are teeny weeny tiny. Like, let’s say Whole Foods is huge, humongous, compared to that, especially with the bookstore and the movie theater added to it. There stores here are like an ant compared to Whole Foods. They don’t really anything different in them. They have a lot of water and juice and tonic and vinegar or whatever.

We also saw this movie theater at the end of the path. I wonder if there’s any movies playing in it right now. Even we did go watch it, we wouldn’t understand, because it’s either in Russian or in Kazakh! It’s near the big ripped up ferris wheel. The seats are ripped, and it’s not closed in, and it’s very rusty. I don’t even know if it works. It seems too rusty to be riding in it, or maybe it even doesn’t work, so I just don’t want to go in it. We also saw this big Mosque in the distance. We’re going to go check it out a different day. It looks HUUUUGEE. Maybe it’s as big as 10 of our school. And I’m talking about my school, ESA. We’ll let you know what we find over there. It looks very pretty, it might also be pretty inside and cool inside. Get it. ‘cool’? Like I’m cooling off, but really it’s ‘cool’, like ‘looking cool’.

Paka! That means ‘bye’ in Russian.