Update from March 19th

This is actually the entrance to the mall part.

In between our visits, Eric and I spent about an hour cleaning the apartment getting ready for Lincoln to come home. We wanted to make sure the living room was baby proofed. We vacuumed and mopped floors now that we will have someone crawling around on them. At 2:00 we meet up with Biyanna and the rest of our group to take a tour of the Mosque (the one attached to the mall). As we entered the Mosque all of us girls had to put scarves on our heads to cover up our hair, we were expecting this but it was a little funny since none of us knew what the appropriate way to do it was. Then everyone was asked to remove their boots/shoes. We were introduced to the Imam and his assistant. They took us on a tour and spent sometime to explaining Islam to us. It was a very beautiful place. The main room had a gigantic chandler that was amazing and they explained that it was made from Turkish glass and it weighed 3000 pounds. They were both quick to denounce terrorism in the name of Islam and stressed that Islam is about tolerance and peace. In the end they asked us a few questions like where did we live, what religion we are, did we enjoy the tour, etc. The Imam thanked us for stopping by and invited us to convert to Islam. To our surprise they did allow us to take a few pictures.

After our afternoon visit with Lincoln we all went out to celebrate our last evening of being baby-free at our favorite Kazakh restaurant with Biyanna, Gen & Joel, Ben & Karla, Bernadette, and Agnes. Since this is the last night most likely we will be going out as a group we were also pre-celebrating Bernadette and Ben & Karla’s court hearings. We ordered our usual traditional Kazakh dish, bisbamark (sp?) with beef and we ordered an appetizer of horse meat. Yup we finally had the opportunity to try horse meat. The appetizer came out with three different parts of the horse (meat, intestine and tongue) doesn’t it sound yummy? I tried just the meat part and honestly it didn’t taste too bad but it was hard to get over the fact that I was eating horse. Eric tried the meat and tongue and he said the same thing, if he didn’t know what he was eating then he liked it but he couldn’t get over the fact that he was eating horse and horse tongue. Once again, we had good food and great company so it was a successful night out.