With all my respect and love for Americans, I could never understand what they are taught in school... okay, maybe they don't know where Kazakhstan is, but have they really never even heard of the existence of such a country? Very often, clients and just people on the street would ask where we were from, and our dialogue always looked something like this:

-Where are you "from", guys?

-Oh, we are from Kazakhstan!

-What? Kazakistan?

-No, no, Kazakhstan!

-Kazakistan? (complete bewilderment in their eyes)

-It’s near Russia!

-Oh, Russia! I know!

-But we are from Kazakhstan...It is another country near Russia.

-?! (again, complete bewilderment)

-Ok, Russia...We are from Russia!))))

Or some people would immediately recall the painful-to-all-of-us movie "Borat" and try to see something of him in us... And so, we had to explain to them that the whole movie is just a bad joke and in reality, our country is just as normal as America... and our people are normal... and sheep don't run around the house! It's annoying, damn it!

Most of all, I liked meeting students just like us... On the very first day of our stay in Cody, we met a girl from Kyrgyzstan, Nazgul. It was from her that we learned that there were a bunch of students in town from Jamaica, Ukraine, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey, and so on... It was very nice to talk to someone else who knew Russian. Then we met her friend Nargiza, girls from Romania, a guy from Georgia, Serbia, guys from Turkey (well, more on that later). We worked together with guys from Macedonia and Bulgaria. Hearing them speak for the first time, it seemed to me that it was some kind of Tajik language) But in reality, it turned out that our languages were actually quite similar. The Macedonians and Bulgarians themselves communicated with each other not in English, but in a mixed Macedonian-Bulgarian. But despite the similarity of many words in our languages, neither we understood them, nor did they understand what we were chatting about... Although, having learned that our languages were somewhat similar, Aseka and I became more careful and didn't talk about certain personal topics in front of them) But in general, it was cool to walk down the street, calmly chat loudly about all sorts of nonsense, and be sure that no one would understand you anyway)