The hot air balloon turned out to be imaginary. It’s being advertised but the people advertising don’t actually have a balloon. They plan to buy one soon, though. Welcome to Turkmenistan.

We may go horseback riding on Saturday. There is a farm where they have about 90 horses, and can’t really afford to feed them, so they have a program where you can lease a horse and no one but you rides it. If it’s not too expensive, we’re going to lease two horses and try to ride a lot. If it is expensive, we’ll just take the occasional lesson. I wish we had helmets, but we’ll just have to do our best not to fall off. It’s not like I wear a seat belt when I ride in the car here; I don’t know why I’m worried about a riding helmet.

Kir, Rani, and I had lunch today at the arch of neutrality, a 150 foot tower with a rotating gold statue of the president on top(it turns to face the sun) commonly known as three-legs. It is not in any way an arch, and it celebrates Turkmenistan’s recognition by the UN as a permanently neutral state. There are a restaurant and bar on top which are always closed, and a balcony where you can walk around and see the city. We ate our lunch in the closed bar, ignoring the workmen who tried to tell us that sitting there wasn’t permitted. Once again, the language barrier works in our favor. After lunch, we walked around the balcony and looked at Ashgabat. This really is a pretty city.

It’s interesting to look down at Ashgabat; the city is small enough that on all sides you can see where the city ends and the desert begins. There are enough monuments that you always have a good idea of exactly what part of the city you’re looking at, and we can always almost see our house.

At some point in the last week they put up street signs with the new street numbers. It has been decided that the streets of Ashgabat will no longer have names, except for a few major streets. Instead, we’ll have numbers. The US embassy, for example, is on street 1984. Our office, luckily, is on a street that kept its name. Since everyone is still using the old Russian names instead of the new (10-year-old) Turkmen names, I doubt that the numbering will have much effect on anybody. This is good, since the numbers do not appear to go in any particular order. It has something to do with which side of the palace streets are on, but nobody seems to understand the system. They just made the announcement about the numbers; everyone is surprised that the signs went up so fast.

In extremely funny news, the embassy just got evicted. Not the whole embassy, just the public affairs section. Also IREX, ACCELS, and Carana. This is extremely funny because they just moved into the new space two weeks ago. It’s a building jointly owned by a Pakistani company and the city government, and the city government made the decision to evict. The Pakistanis must rue the day they ever got involved. Especially since the build-out for the new office space took almost two months. (Kir suggested at one point that we bring my dad out to Turkmenistan so that he could yell at the Pakistanis in their native language. The embassy, I believe, was tempted.)

Last night I briefly forgot I wasn't white. We were talking reparations for past crimes, and I was making my argument that the kind of crimes which require reparations are also so severe that making appropriate reparation could destroy a nation and an economy. I was feeling pretty crappy about being a middle-class white girl and saying something like that when I realized that I wasn't a middle-class white girl. I am a bona fide suffering woman of color. My dad was personally oppressed by the British.

On Saturday night we went to a charity ball to benefit the Maternal and Child Health Institute of Turkmenistan – they want to build a better playground. As far as we can tell, it was a ball in name only since there was no dancing. There was, however, dinner, a raffle, a silent auction, a live auction, and a wide variety of staged entertainment. Kir won pool passes to the pool we go to in the raffle, and Rani won an inflatable airplane and two CDs of jazz classics played by German musicians. (Lufthansa provided many of the raffle prizes) Other prizes included almost-expired 50% off coupons, Lufthansa t-shirts, and Disney sing-along videos that did not appear to be new.

About halfway through the evening, as three little girls danced to techno music for our entertainment, Kir pointed out that the whole thing was exactly like a Diwali celebration, except with bad food. We stuck it out until the end of the raffle, and then fled, along with most of the other people there. There could, I suppose, have been dancing after we left.

I was kind of nervous about going to the charity ball, because the ex-friend was there, but we had to go. I work with the MCH institute, and Kir works with the organization that hosted the ball. Staying home was not an option. It turned out well, though. I was all prepared to be extremely polite, as per Suspect Granger’s advice, but the ex-friend avoided us so effectively that I never had to. And it was fun to get dressed up and flirt with the Marines (it’s not a party without marines to flirt with). Especially since I finally seem to have found eyeshadow that does not slide immediately off my oily eyelids (I am not actually complaining about the oily eyelids – all the grease means I don’t wrinkle) so I felt glamorous all night. Kir said I looked like an alt-rocker going to the Grammies.

And now I am the proud owner of a painting done by a 9-year-old orphan named Vassily, for which I paid the princely sum of ten dollars. I’m going to hang it at the office. I have no idea what it’s of. The general office conclusion is that it maybe has something to do with a mosque. Tomorrow I’ll take a picture and post it for you all.

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USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.