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I had dinner last night at my Malika opa's house and my first dutar teacher (and professor) from London was visiting. It was a combo social event/editing session since she is the guest editor for the journal that is publishing one of my articles. I was stressed about how heavy her feedback was going to be, but it was really pleasant and she was very encouraging. Plus I got to have an intellectual discussion about ethnomusicology for the first time in 6 months. It was such fun and a nice stroke to my ego. After my prof from London left, we sat around with Malika opa and her family and had great conversation with lots of laughs. R also fixed their VCR and the computer that we're loaning them. All in all it was a very successful night :)

Of course I went shopping for dinner at the bazaar and should have known better than to hit the bazaar on the day when R and my program was going to be on the morning TV show. I had 2 or 3 different people say "Hey you're the American who plays the dutar!!" I don't think it helped my bargaining ability. It's hard to say "Yeah I'm American" then try to convince them that you can't bear to pay 1000 Sum ($1) for a kilo of apples.

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I got reconized in the subway station today - ha! As I was walking toward the escalator, one of the station employees in uniform started calling to me "devochka, devochka!!! Mozhno s vami govorit?" (the equivalent of "miss, may I have a word with you?") My first thought was oh crap, since when are the subway employees allowed to do police-style document checks? (They happen all the time by the police who have to hang out in each station). Turns out she had seen the show that featured R and I yesterday and recognized me and wanted to tell me how wonderful it was that I had learned Uzbek so well (she said all this to me in Russian, BTW), and that I learned to play that "rubab thing" (meaning my dutar. It was really quite sweet and she kept patting me on the arm and calling me a "molodetz."

I've also been harrangued into correcting the english for the Conservatory's museum catalogue. They don't have the money to publish a hard copy of it, so I suggested a web version. The only problem is that the conservatory doesn't have a website or server space. Any ideas for where I could acquire that for them?