Sweet Steppe

The smell was the first thing I noticed. There's nothing quite like the smell of sagebrush on the windswept steppe. Of course, the wind is sweeping plastic bags and coke bottles around piles of broken vodka bottles and ash. But that's beside the point.

The point is I played baseball on the steppe yesterday and it was awesome. I pitch softball (ok, so it wasn't really baseball) after softball the Kazakhstani highschoolers for three hours. I loved most every second of it.

They really got into it with the help of Ben and Joeseph, two MKs here. Even Amy had a good time picking flowers, flopping on hte pile of sumkas and throwing dirt at people.

I love baseball. But when it's on the edge of Karaganda with an Orthodox church and towering apartment blocks on one side and the vast open steppe on the other... it's something else. On top of it all, the air polution here does make for some beautiful sunsets... darkness being the only reason we stopped. Just like when I was a kid, really. Except for the windswept steppe part.