Well, I had a very satisfactory weekend. Saw Mike and Gulnara off on a trip Friday (helped them pack, mostly), did a lot of shopping on Saturday, and spent Sunday lying around on my new lawn furniture and putting books on the new bookshelf.

Various notes about the weekend:

1. As expected, the new furniture is entirely acceptable yet there is something subtly not-quite-right about it. The bookshelves are varnished only on certain sides, apparently at random. The TV stand is slightly the wrong shape. But they do their jobs, so I won’t complain.

2. My new lawn furniture is something that foreigners refer to as a teabed. There are a whole variety of Uzbek and Russian words for it. It’s a big wooden structure, much like a bed, covered in mattress-like pillows. Some of them have a little wooden table on top. You lounge on your teabed, supported by pillows of various configurations. If you have the table, you can eat and drink tea there, too. This weekend I mainly lay on it and read while the dog napped beside me. This is my favorite piece of furniture ever, I think. I’ve wanted one since I first got here, but I never had the yard, the space, and the money for it before. Seriously, this piece of furniture makes all my life choices worthwhile.

3. Kir and I own a whole lot of books. I love them very much, and I have been talking to them affectionately as I set them on our shelves. I started out sorting them into lots of weird categories (cross-cultural novels, interesting non-fiction, boring non-fiction) but then I realized only Kir and I would ever be able to find a book that way. So I settled for fiction, non-fiction, and books in Russian, with the pulp paperbacks shelved separately and divided up by genre (mystery, romance, science fiction/fantasy).

4. I could not for the life of me manage to change money on Friday night or Saturday morning. I went all over the place, and a taxi driver tried calling his relatives for me, but nobody had any som to sell. I had to pay with a credit card at the Turkish grocery store, and they had to run my credit card thirteen times before the charge went through. Not because of my card, because of line noise that kept the computers from making contact. The Turkish grocery store is one of the only places in the country that takes credit cards, and aside from the problem of getting through, it’s a time consuming process because you have to leave your groceries at the checkout and go up a flight of stairs to the special desk where they do credit card charges.

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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.