The (not so) triumphant return!

20:35 08 October 2009

The (not so) triumphant return!

So, my friends, I apologize for the long absence from this electronic forum. Actually, that isn’t true. I’ve spent the several months I haven’t been writing here spending time with Saori. Sorry guys, but I was a bit too busy falling in love to keep up with my blog. Unfortunately, Saori is gone. Certainly not from my heart, but from this glorious and increasingly cold country. Her two years finished up a few weeks ago and she is currently back in Japan. Of course, on the net, this is a negative thing for me, I miss her terribly and can’t wait until we are together again. But it does have some positive side effects, one of which being that the time I am not spending with her can be used for other pursuits- like updating my blog for the first time in three months.

I promise you now that I will do a better job of keeping up with this open electronic diary in the future, but I figured a bit of a recap of summer was in order to start things off.

Summer was fun. A lot of fun. And not only fun, it was actually a pretty productive time for me too. While I didn’t have classes, the leadership club that Saori started and that I currently run was still meeting and we had some things going on even then. The most impressive, I believe was a 300 kilometer walkathon between the cities of Balykchy and Karakol. The walkathon was staged over ten days and was staged to raise awareness of the plight of the handicapped in this country (no ADA laws exist here and ramps, good pavement, and wheelchair friendly areas are hard to find even in the capital city). The kids didn’t participate in the marathon, but we partnered with the Kyzyl Suu orphanage to have the kids prepare the welcoming event for the participants. We prepared a huge mural for the welcoming party to write their dreams about the future on (The theme of the marathon was Куда мы идём? “Where are we going?”) and so the wishes for the future were written on slips of paper resembling animal tracks and then pasted on our mural of the world. In addition to this, the kids helped organize the crowd at the finish and half walked the final 5 kilometers (we brought some disabled children along with us that were excited to participate and see how many people lead rich and fulfilling lives despite their disabilities). So that was a really positive experience for me and I believe the children got a lot of benefits from participating in it.

On the fun side of my summer, apart from my trip to Russia, I spent a lot of time at the South Shore beaches, hosted some friends from Switzerland for a week, and went on a horse trek with Saori. The horse trek was a really great time, we went up very high into the mountains behind our village and even got to a glacier and got to hike around on it for a while. It was cool to think that while we were in a completely different landscape (despite the nearly 6,000 ft. altitude, my village is relatively flat) even though we were only about 25 kilometers from where I sleep! I’ll try and put up some pictures of that in the future.

Well, I think that is enough for now, I will have to get used to writing these things again… But know that this is just the first of more frequent updates.