Most guests now write to us on Tulpar, the new app. The young ones don't know e-mail. So I check the phone, not the blog. I am a bad blogger now. But I will keep it: this is my Moscow diary, my home diary. Mama asks sometimes to read the old posts. She laughs at "eat soup every day".
For the winter we buy 600 candles from the monastery, the thin ones for the lane and the thick ones for the room. The sister at the monastery shop says every year she sells fewer thick ones. Everyone has a light on the phone now.
I buy the thick ones. A candle is a candle.
On Easter Sunday, two weeks ago, they consecrated the new cathedral in Talas, the big one with the gold dome. Several guests of ours went. They said it holds four thousand and a person feels very small. Mama said: "Ours holds three hundred and a person feels very big." She did not go to Talas. She never goes anywhere.
I will go in the autumn, when the season is over. I want to see what the archbishop sees from the steps there.
After the Cross (14 September) the pilgrims go home. "After the Cross, no yurt", says the old proverb, and no pilgrims also. This season: 212 nights in our three rooms. Guests from 9 countries. A record.
The best: an old woman from Chicago, 84 years, born in Iyık Janyl in 1933, left in 1992 to her son. She sat in our courtyard under the walnut and cried and laughed and told stories of the lanes before the war. I wrote down some of them. Maybe I will put them here.
Guests ask now: "Do you have the wi-fi?" I bought a router in Talas for 340 som, my cousin put it on the wall, and now there is a note in three languages in the corridor: "The password is on the kitchen table." Mama, by the way, thinks that this note is a blessing, because she gets to read it every morning.
The password is "jangak1727". The year of the church. I'm proud of it.