Sorry, this picture of Mochon doesn't do justice to his hunting skills, nor does it testify to his raggedy condition. In fact, he looks downright cute. The other day he caught, killed, and ate a mouse and left its head as a prize for Bakhtior. Nonetheless, he still gets "tssked" consistenly, and Malika loves to step on his tail. I'm telling you, this cat gets no respect. But he does get stray bones at dinner. And for this reason he sits at Bakhtior's side constantly.
My dinner at the US ambassador's house was interesting. The house is designed to compete with the megalomanical pretensions of political leaders' residences, thus the large fountain of the lion leaping through a hoop of water. The ambassador is a very nice and very sharp woman, and she dates a higher-up in the BRitish embassy. On the piano at the entrance is a glamour-shot photo of the Brit that he apparently gave to her as a birthday present. Awesome. The dinner was designed to allow American and Tajik students to get acquainted. But most of the Tajiks were in high school or in college, and most of the Americans were/are awkward. Put that together, and you get a pretty tame affair. I did meet a few nice embassy staff members who got me reexcited about embassy work.
Unexpected treat of today: our conversation teacher took us somewhat randomly to the philharmonic theather. We assumed it was for dance lessons (since word got out that Charles couldn't dance, and this was deemed impossible and immediately demanded fixing). Instead we got an impromptu tour for the "dear American guests" of the shoddy facilities and a peak at the practice rooms of various "national ensembles." This was actually quite a treat. A "national artist" on accordion played a few bars and showed us some traditional Uzbek (Persian, by the way) musical instruments. Then we went into a string of practice rooms and saw, by turns, a modern group (syntehsizer, drums, guitar, sax); girls' ballet class; young women's "national dance troup" doing a sort of spiffed up traditional dance, and a choir. My personal highlight was being invited to blow a few bars of sax: sight reading a song with five sharps on an insturment that had seen better days, with a totally dry reed. the first few puffs were totally and embarrasingly mute, then I tried to follow along, with limited success. Finallly I figured ti would be best if I just did my best Bill Clinton and did some blues scale riffing. Applause.
People are so welcoming of foreign guests here (cliche of the day). I'll return with a camera, I promise.
Charles
1 comment:
mochon needs more affection!
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