Bonding Day #15

We awoke around 9am this morning to find...TA-DAH....our internet is working again. Yay! So we quickly called Natasha to cancel the second round of Geek Squad guys who were supposed to arrive at any time between 9 and 10am. So glad that we did not need to go back to the cafe to access the web.

We had a "fun" excursion today. Natasha and Tolgat took us with our Alaskan friends to the Aktobe museum. We opted for a guided tour which was supposed to take 45 minutes to go through the 7 rooms. After an hour and a half, we had gotten through three rooms and Jenny and I had to leave to go see Max for our 15th and final official bonding visit. Since we will be here tomorrow, we are going for an unofficial 16th day, but our bonding time is now over. Jonathan and Shannon stayed with Natasha for the remainder of the museum tour and they said it was grueling. Very boring to look at pictures of national heroes for another hour. Our part of the tour wasn't too bad. It was interesting to see the prehistoric and natural history of Kazakhstan as well as the cultural things, but we got out just in time.

It was a very hot day today and Max had no hat, and only two layers on. We removed his jacket so he was not too uncomfortable today, though he does have a cold. The caregivers asked if we gave him cold water on one of our visits (apparently, they think cold water might cause a cold). Anyway, he has the sniffles but we had a nice fun indoor visit. We are hoping to go outside again tomorrow.

For some reason, the bonding room has two pianos, so we thought it would be fun to let Max bang on the keys. He was a natural.

For dinner, we met Jonathan and Shannon at Kemer, our internet cafe/restaurant. We finally had shashlik (kebobs) and they were delicious. We were mad that we only just now found a dish that we loved on our second last night here. At least we'll know what to order when we return on our second trip. Not only was it delicious, but it was also reasonably priced at just 900 tenge (6 dollars) for our entree. And beer was reasonably cheap as well. Our third of a liter (about 11 ounces) of Karagandinskoye beer cost just 200 tenge (which is about $1.33). All in all it was a very nice dinner out and much better than the pasta with chicken we tried to make two nights ago (oooh, that was bad red sauce).

After dinner, we made a quick stop at the AHBAP market for our last 5-liter jug of drinking water. I have lost count of how many of these we have gone through (maybe 10-12?). We have to use this water for cooking and brushing our teeth as well or we would come down with a bad case of Abul Khair Khan's revenge (at least that's what I'm calling it).

That's it for today. It is 10pm and we are off to enjoy our Maxi-Bon ice cream treat from the market. One final visit with Max tomorrow morning!