shopping at ismailovsky park

Levin accidentally posted these pictures to my blog thinking they were on his family's blog. So they've been here for a while before I had time to come explain them. Saturday we went shopping at Ismailovsky park. It is the outdoor market to buy all your souveniers and other random things. It was so nice and clean and more "orderly" than a market in Nigeria. By that I mean if we left a stall no one followed around trying to get us to buy and no one was grabbing at us begging us to look at their stuff. It was relaxing instead of stressful.
Here Oliver and I are modeling some of our purchases. We said we wouldn't buy anything the first 6 months, but hm . . . and maybe we didn't keep the exchange rate as clear in our mind as we should have. Oh well. We got an Uzbekistan plate for me. Oliver and Leah got this matroshka doll. We figured we'd buy them a cheap one now and let them play with it, i.e. destroy it and then buy them a nicer one to take home with us towards the end of our time here.

Here i am at th market. Looking at fur hats. Yes it was hot, and strange to be trying on fur hats, but we wanted to get them off-season for a better price, or so the sales man told us. Levin and I were talking to each other in English and the guy kept dropping the price. Nice.

Here we are picking out m plate. The kids were quite well behaved. Behind me you can see a stand selling matroshkas. There were several of those. I think that one is actually the one we bought our doll from though. Sadly they don't sell many "manly" ones so we just had Oliver share Leah's girly one.

We did see one that had football teams. They had the University of Utah so Levin asked why they didn't have BYU. They said that the men in white shirts that pray to God always come and buy them. We assume he meant the missionaries. Maybe next time.