Soccer, Vodka, and Ice Cream, oh my!

With plans to do the Hash this afternoon, possible a hike on Sunday, and a day off on Monday, I figure I'd better post some recent events or I'll end up with a record length post by the end of the long weekend.

The weekend is off to a great start. On Friday after work, the GSO team won the semi-final match in the embassy soccer tournament. Of course, I don't play, they probably wouldn't have won if I did, but as it's my section, it was very exciting. The game was the most exciting of the whole tournament so far, remaining tied through overtime and coming down to the best of 5 penalty kicks, which we won by one point. I should mention that it didn't need to be such a close call. The Facilities team was ahead 2-0 at the end of the first half and by the end of the second half GSO had tied it up. But in OT, one of my guys scored on our own goal and we were fortunate to then score another, correct, goal to tie the score before the end of OT. Nonetheless, it was a great time and we can look forward to the championship game on Tuesday.

After the game, Stephanie and I went out for dinner with my staff at a local restaurant. Only in Dushanbe could you go to a Korean restaurant to eat Russian food, drink Tajik vodka, and watch a belly-dancer in between bouts of Russian karaoke - some of which was quite good I might add. The food was very good, including a variety of cold cuts and vegetable dishes, pickled herring (which was way tastier than I would have expected), bread and shashlik. And there was so much food! Dinner consisted of conversation, broken up every few minutes by a vodka toast, which we all took turns giving. Being local, I was surprised that the vodka was fairly drinkable. And fortunatley, I was told that they don't usually do the whole shot every time or I would have been in trouble by the end of the eveining. All in all we had a great time.

To make it three out of three, we finally found the mysterious ice cream factory today on the way home from the bazaar. I asked around for directions and we still almost missed it except that a man showed us exactly where it was. We got about 4.5 lbs of chocolate flavored, 4.5 lbs of pineapple flavored, and about 2.25 lbs of plum flavored. I think it should last us awhile!

Our only misadventure so far was that when we got home, there was someone parked in our driveway. The nerve! We called the mobile patrol to be safe, and then I started asking around to find out who's car it was. There is a makeshift auto shop next door to us and they called the owner. When he came to move it, he didn't apologize but asked if he could park on our lawn instead! Of course, the answer was no, and he did move it. Just after that, the mobile patrol came and said they'd make sure that the man understood that he couldn't park in our driveway and block our gate. I have to admit I was sort of pleased that I was able to resolve the problem myself in Russian. It's not exactly a subject we spent a lot of time on in class!