Visiting Day at the Akai-Bata Restaurant

Finally its time to meet our host families, with whom we'l be living with during the three months of training. All 65 of us volunteers are piled into busses from the hotel and drive to the town of Tokmok. As we pull up to the restaurant Akai-Bata, we see all the host mothers (and some fathers and children) waiting outside for us. We all get out of the busses and file in procession style with host mothers smiling on both sides of us. We seriously feel like orphans as they stare and point at us. Pick me! Pick me! we think. Ainura, my LCF, gives each of us in our group a slip of paper with both our name and our host mother's name. She gives the same to her and we must find each other among a sea of Kyrgyz families and American volunteers. The experience is quite strange. Finally we find each other out of the crowd and after a nice but very awkward lunch consisting of lots of gesturing and opposing languages, we drive back to Koshoy to get settled in.
When we get back, of course, its time to eat again. They call it chi (which literally means tea, but actually means the act of having tea/ aka eating and visiting with each other.) We sit down at the kitchen table (the kitchen is outside) and feast on some eggs from the live chickens in the back yard, which operates as a small farm complete with a rooster and two cows.) My host father looks a lot like one of the chicken farmers from Napoleon Dynamite and I had a flash back to that lunch scene in the movie when he served me eggs. Anyway, they taste good and swallow them down. Later that afternoon I take my little brother into my room and set up the laptop. I throw in the Grateful Dead movie and he is amazed. I've done well I feel.
A couple of minutes later these two Germans come by riding in bycicles. Turns out they are on vacation and doing a biking tour of Kyrgyzstan. Naturally. My host mother (oppa) sees them and ushers them inside to meet their new american. The Germans speak Russian so they are speaking that to my host family. I speak German/English to them, they speak English to me, and I speak whatever broken Kyrgyz I've learned in one day of classes to them. It seemed like a true peace corps moment. Welcome to Kyrgyzstan.