February 14, 2014

I spent a quiet morning at home going over the presentation for the day, emailing the corresponding handouts and catching up with my emails and Facebook postings.

My sister Esther wrote to inquire about my troubles using my MasterCard here and trying to offer a solution. I might be hard pressed to pay my rent at the end of the month if the local ATMs continue to refuse to process my card.

It was a relatively mild day and I took a marshrutka instead of the trolley to get to the Bishkek Humanities University. It dropped me right in front of another large Narodni supermarket and I went in to try their ATM, but this one too only accepted Visa cards. I did notice that this store was offering wine for sale for the Valentine’s Day celebration and I quickly bought two bottles of a white and red variety.

Once at the university, we had the usual technological problems as apparently the university doesn’t have a laptop available with PowerPoint or even a PDF converter for my presentations. We finally got underway at twenty minutes after and they seemed to enjoy the variety of grammar games we played and requested that I emailed them all the handouts and cards to be laminated.

I walked home once more and this time I was able to locate the little bakery where the flat bread is baked in a tandoor oven. The young guy was unable to tell me what specific hours I could come by to buy the bread fresh off the oven.

Madina called me and we settled on next Wednesday to have coffee when her classes are over. She is the very talkative young teacher who was present at the winter professional development session, and with whom I developed an instant rapport.

I spent the rest of the evening in some kind of funk. Not quite sure about the reason, but just felt out of sorts. I watched a few episodes of “Two and Half Men” to try and cheer mysefl up.