Letter from Sept. 7

I'm very full of food as I write this. Last night, I went out to an Alash concert (at the tourist yurt camp outside of town). I was the official group photographer, since the group has replaced one member and needs publicity photos that show the new lineup. At the concert, the guys decided that they wanted to throw a new baby / going away party for Sean at his house today.
Thus, one of the errands I ran this afternoon was to pick up ingredients for chili. Sean's specialty is Cincinnati chili (with cocoa powder and cinnamon, served over spaghetti). We cooked a big batch of it and grilled 5 kilos of shashlyk. Miraculously, this was enough to feed the horde of people and babies who descended on the house-- we totaled 19 in all. All the Alash guys but one are married with kids, since they all started in their teens. It was a baby convention, and Shonchalai had lots of similarly aged friends to play with. The new Alash member, Nachyn, is also married to a Shonchalai (a badass female throatsinger-- Sean's daughter was named partly in honor of her).

It was a raucous evening, hardly dampened by the fact that the guys couldn't have picked a worse night for grilling. When I got home from the market, they had the grills fired up and it was lightly sprinkling. 15 minutes later, it began raining harder, and within an hour we had a full blown thunderstorm. Sean's yard/driveway got flooded and he had to build a makeshift bridge out of wooden planks to get across to the garden, where the grilling was happening. The grillmasters succeeded in moving one grill to safety, under the roof of the lean-to where the woodpile sits. The meat ended up fine, though the grillers were all soaked. I lent a 'Virginia is for Lovers' t-shirt and my black basketball shorts to Ayan-ool to wear while his clothes dried a little.
All through the evening, Sveta's 5th grade cousin Yumen ran around taking pictures of everything with my camera. We had a fun slideshow after the party ended, which everyone enjoyed a lot. Sveta's 70 year old grandmother (who speaks only Tuvan) had an uncharacteristically joyous evening, which included getting a little tipsy on a glass of wine. Her inhibitions lowered, she unleashed an off-color tirade against Mao, a Japanese friend of Sean's who is now trying to relocate permanently to Tuva. Gramma thinks she is a hussy and that she wants to sleep with me.

I am practicing igil seriously at least 2-3 times a day now, and can see improvement happening. I am really trying to get the most out of my last few weeks here in Tuva, which in my mind means getting as much khoomei and igil instruction as I possibly can. Zhenya is supposed to be back from another stint in the taiga any day and I'll take lessons from him, take a couple from Ayan-ool and Bady-Dorzhu (Alash guys), and maybe get a lesson with Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, the leader of Huun-Huur-Tu. Next week, HHT gets back to Tuva for the first extended period of time since I've been here. Supposedly, they were here for four days while I was off in the taiga.
It's hard to imagine that it's already nearing time to pack up and move on for good. Time that I used to spend trying to learn some Tuvan is now spent trying to brush up on my Chinese.