Joyce and I have been working on our risk taking skills this week. We were invited out to a shashlik (meat kabobs) restaurant with some Peace Corps friends. The only hitch was that we had to get across town on our own. Since no buses headed where we were going, we had to "hire" a car. In Almaty, everybody is a potential taxi driver. You just put out your hand and very soon someone pulls over to offer you a ride - for a price. Once you communicate where you are going but telling the driver your desired cross streets, he makes you an opening offer. Then you negotiate. Of course, if he can't understand where you want to go, you've got a problem! We did pretty well butchering the street names in Russian and managed to convince the driver that we knew where we were headed. However, the price he quoted was just too high. There is an "English Speaking" tax on most negotiated prices in Almaty, but we thought we should fight back. We did manage to get the price down to about 1.6X what it would have been if we spoke Russian, so we felt pretty good. Now all we needed to do was find out host's house based on one visit I had made there a week earlier. We actually made it! Another evening we decided to try the Kazakh specialty beshbarmak (see photo.) We carefully selected the restaurant from our guidebook - and then couldn't find it! We did find a restaurant that looked like it could have been the right one, so we ate there. 100% Russian/Kazakh menu, and the waitress spoke no English. So, with poorly drawn pictures of animals and some odd attempts to make animal sounds, we managed to order our authentic dinner. And for the record, horse tastes pretty good!
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