Kow Ata, Talkuchka and Russian Kareoke

Last week we went to Talkuchka. One of the places in the book "10,000 things to see and do before you die". The best way that I can describe it is think of what you would imagine the silk road with enough people to fill a professional football stadium crammed into an area the size of 4 soccer fields back to back. It was amazing to see and haggle with the sellers for jewelery or chai or sweets.

We went yesterday to Kow-Ata aka Father of the Caves. It is a naturally heated underground lake that is 1,000 feet below ground level. You have to walk down about a 1/4 mi of steps to get to the lake. They lake apart from having guano (bat) droppings around the cave was very cool, there was actually one volunteer that was hit in the shoulder by some guano. It felt so nice to have a good swim for the first time since I have been here. There is a legend supposedly that you can swim your way to Iran through the lake. Iran is 3 mi south of the cave. Needless to say I didnt try.

We also had a great time last night as we went to a performance of students of Joseph and the Amazing technicolor Dreamcoat directed by some volunteers. Then we went to a bar and sang some quality kareoke (Scorpions' Winds of Change and Whitesnakes "Here I go again") The mostly russian crowd loved us, we actually had one Russian woman that came up to us and with some help of a translater told us that we were the first Americans that she had ever seen and that it was a pleasure to meet us, then she helped us pay for our bill which was great.