End of a hectic week

I’ve somehow survived one of the hardest school weeks here (I have over 500 new words to memorize by Monday just from this week alone). School on Friday was great – my teachers were so exhausted from an extra day this week that I ended up watching old Soviet comedy films for 3 hours of the day. Very enjoyable – until, of course, the teachers pause the film and ask what the characters were saying. In one memorable scene a character gives a traditional long drinking toast in which he tells the story of a bird that leaves the collective and flies into the sun and is burned to a crisp. The message of the toast was to celebrate the Soviet collective and to warn against having individual thought or action – lest you also be burned to a crisp. The scene directly following the toast was dead birds on kabobs over a fire. Classic stuff.


We celebrated Friday night with beers and Rambo 1 and 2 (with Russian subtitles). Party time indeed.

For ease of uploading, I’m going to break the Naryn posts into 2 – it was a very full weekend.