A full day

With only a few days left in Tuva, I'm cramming in as much as I can. Zhenya got back from the taiga last week, and we had a great stretch of 4 days straight with lessons (that's now over, since the orchestra is working again this week). Yesterday, Bady-Dorzhu called while I was still at Zhenya's place, and asked if I wanted to go with him to Khayrakan, a village about 100km or so from Kyzyl. Ayan-ool's parents live there and we had to pick up his mother, son, and wife, her
sister, and a whole trunkload of produce from his parents' garden.

Hearing that Bady was in the doing people favors mode, Zhenya convinced him to drive a carload of stuff out to his relatives' place out in Kaa-Xem, at the outskirts of town. We ran that errand, dropped off Zhenya and his wife, then set off for Khayrakan. On the way, Bady's stereo was blasting music I'd given him the day before-- he is a voracious consumer of new music styles and wanted some jazz and interesting world music from me (in addition to traditional Tuvan music, which is impossible to find in Tuva). Bady is also a ferociously fast driver, so we roared down the two-lane road to the west listening sometimes to Huun-Huur-Tu and Andrei Mongush, sometimes to Chick Corea, sometimes to Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, and sometimes to raucous Hungarian gypsy music.

During the trip there, I attempted to engage Bady in a conversation about Tuvan music-- it's roots and contemporary practice, and where igil styles came from. I didn't have much success, often getting the reply 'Nu, trudno obyasnit' (Well, it's hard to explain...).

I really enjoyed meeting Ayan-ool's parents. In personality, he very much takes after his father, who can sustain a conversation without even trying. They're also both very good about remembering to include me in conversations by speaking in Russian or telling me what people
are saying. We ate a little lunch, drank the obligatory bowl of tea, helped gather the vegetables and load them into the car, and headed back to Kyzyl.

Along the way, Bady got stopped by the police, who took about 15 minutes to give him a 100 ruble ($4) citation for having the front side windows of his car tinted. Apparently, you're only allowed to tint the *back* windows of cars, one of those Russian laws that is enforced when police feel like it.

Bady dropped me off at home, and I decided to go to the banya. Sveta agreed to cut my hair if I went and washed it. But after gathering all my banya things and making the 10 minute walk, it turned out the power was out at the banya and they'd closed up early. To be expected, really. Sean and I had one stretch of time before the symposium where we tried every day for about a week to go to the banya, only to be foiled by technical problems, repairs, lack of hot water, etc.

I came back home and decided to work on the windows. In preparation for winter, one of the chores in a Tuvan home is caulking up all the windows and installing a second window on the inside of the frame to make the equivalent of a double paned window. In our case, we also had
to install new glass in several windows, which were to this point getting by with patchworks of poorly fitting smaller pieces of glass.

Yesterday, we'd tried to cut a large piece of glass down to size for one of the windows. Neither of us had ever cut glass before, and all we had was a little tool for scoring a line on the glass and a knife. We finally figured it out, but not before breaking the pane into two big pieces, which Sveta taped back together. I decided to try to install one of the big pieces of glass in my window. First, I had to pull out all the nails holding the old glass in place, and scrape off all the old caulking. But when I went to lift the new glass into place, it wasn't quite fitting. Trying to finesse it into place, I lost my grip on it and it fell, breaking along the way. I very nearly ended up with a slit wrist, as one of the broken pieces caught me at the very bottom of my right palm and cut a little slice out of it. Another cut through my sock and punched a little hole in my right big toe.

We patched up my wounds and the window. We'll buy a new piece of glass today.