In Essik

I'm about 50 minutes into my hour of Internet right now, so I'll keep things brief. I'm currently in Essik, writing from a small Internet Cafe across from a school named after Абылай Хан, and I just bought the entire collection of Star Trek movies (including the most recent one) in Russian, for 400╤ (or about $3). (I probably got ripped off, but I don't really care.) Unfortunately, I fell pretty ill after my trip to Almaty; probably something in the noodles I ate for lunch, but now I feel much better. Now that we have more freedom to travel around a bit more, life seems a lot brighter also - though we weren't long in Almaty before I started missing my host family. Bota is a great teacher - she's not afraid to interrupt me and correct my Qazaq if I say something wrong. I'm still having trouble mixing up the locative and dative suffixes (like saying 'to' instead of 'at' or vice versa), but I'm getting better, I think.