Today was another overcast and windy day in Astana. Despite the weather, we really needed to go to the store, so we bundled up Katie in a few different layers, put on our coats and headed to the store. At one point, we were walking between two buildings and the wind was pushing us so hard from behind that we had to run so we didn't fall on our faces. It's amazing how the weather can go from so hot to so cold in only a day!
We spend the rest of the day around the house (wow - it's getting repetitive to write that). Aside from catching up on e-mails and working some more on editing our video, we mainly spent the time trying to keep Katie happy. We think that Katie has finally realized she's not going back to the baby house and the newness of being in the apartment is wearing off. We also think it's hard for her not having multiple babies and multiple caregivers around at all times. (Grieving for lost caregivers and fellow orphans is something that happens with almost all adopted children, regardless of how young they are.) We are going to try and make some adjustments now to help her along the grieving process and to make it even more clear that we will take care of her. We just hope the shock of leaving the apartment next week won't make it harder.
This evening Dinara and Erken came over because Dinara wanted to say goodbye. She is leaving tomorrow for Almaty where she will be studying for her master's degree at a prestigious English-speaking college. Since we wouldn't see her again, we prepared the gifts we'd brought for her, as well as the ones for Erken (since we needed Dinara to translate for us). We think they were both pleased with what we got them.
To our surprise, when we gave Erken and Dinara our gifts, they also presented gifts to us! Erken got us a miniature Dombra (traditional Kazakh stringed instrument) and a bottle of Kazakh cognic (a very common gift). Dinara got us a cute wooden statue of a Kazak woman in traditional dress. We were so blown away that they had each bought gifts for us. This country seems to be big on exchanging tokens of friendship and hospitality, something we seemed to have lost in America.