A whole new world...
Jul. 26th, 2008 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpToday's day off almost didn't happen.
About a half hour after my previous post, I got a call to come into the office, and since my time off is discretionary (and it's more important to launch a satellite than be available to interpret for other visitors to town), I skedaddled into the полтинник, just in time to be told that the job I had been called in for had been canceled, and I had just enough time to get back to the hotel and grab my going-into-town stuff if the van was willing to wait for me for a few minutes.
It was.
Alex P. and I made our rounds of the market in workmanlike fashion. I went back to get some more of the Samarkand tea, and the seller tried to sell me a kilogram bag, which is a lot of tea! Alex stopped by the market's meat "pavillion," where he bought some smoked fish. I wandered around, absorbing my surroundings, and even managed to snap a picture of a young woman who sells eggs.
Eventually, Alex and I met up, as we had planned, with our customer's senior representative, and while Alex went off to get a haircut, I accompanied our customer as he bought some souvenirs and then went off with him to find a rumored Korean restaurant located not far from the train station.
I was not aware of it, but apparently, there are a number of ethnic Koreans who live in the area. Alex says he has no difficulty distinguishing between Kazakhs and Koreans, and while I am in no position to dispute this, I also wonder about the extent to which the groups have intermingled, which might make any unabiguous classification dubious.
In any event, the Korean restaurant was very nice, and we preferred sitting outside to the relative comfort and sterility of the inside dining room. As a complete tyro with respect to Korean cuisine, I can only report that the beef хе (transliteration: khe, which Multitran suggests is normally a fish dish), which turned out to be fried pieces of beef with raw onions in red pepper, on rice, with a fatty boullion on the side, was pretty good, though the Uzbek plof wasn't bad, either. All of this was washed down with a couple of steins of Karagandinskoye beer, which seems better than the Shymkentskoye beer that was my preferred libation during previous campaigns.
In any event, tomorrow, we go over to fuel loading, and I'm the early guy. I should probably go clean up my room and get ready for tomorrow.
Cheers...
About a half hour after my previous post, I got a call to come into the office, and since my time off is discretionary (and it's more important to launch a satellite than be available to interpret for other visitors to town), I skedaddled into the полтинник, just in time to be told that the job I had been called in for had been canceled, and I had just enough time to get back to the hotel and grab my going-into-town stuff if the van was willing to wait for me for a few minutes.
It was.
Alex P. and I made our rounds of the market in workmanlike fashion. I went back to get some more of the Samarkand tea, and the seller tried to sell me a kilogram bag, which is a lot of tea! Alex stopped by the market's meat "pavillion," where he bought some smoked fish. I wandered around, absorbing my surroundings, and even managed to snap a picture of a young woman who sells eggs.
Eventually, Alex and I met up, as we had planned, with our customer's senior representative, and while Alex went off to get a haircut, I accompanied our customer as he bought some souvenirs and then went off with him to find a rumored Korean restaurant located not far from the train station.
I was not aware of it, but apparently, there are a number of ethnic Koreans who live in the area. Alex says he has no difficulty distinguishing between Kazakhs and Koreans, and while I am in no position to dispute this, I also wonder about the extent to which the groups have intermingled, which might make any unabiguous classification dubious.
In any event, the Korean restaurant was very nice, and we preferred sitting outside to the relative comfort and sterility of the inside dining room. As a complete tyro with respect to Korean cuisine, I can only report that the beef хе (transliteration: khe, which Multitran suggests is normally a fish dish), which turned out to be fried pieces of beef with raw onions in red pepper, on rice, with a fatty boullion on the side, was pretty good, though the Uzbek plof wasn't bad, either. All of this was washed down with a couple of steins of Karagandinskoye beer, which seems better than the Shymkentskoye beer that was my preferred libation during previous campaigns.
In any event, tomorrow, we go over to fuel loading, and I'm the early guy. I should probably go clean up my room and get ready for tomorrow.
Cheers...
