Festival Fun

This morning we left the mountains and headed to our next stop in Bokonbaevo. On the way there we went to a Birds of Prey festival where there was a lot of traditional Kyrgyz sports. There was a lot of sports with men riding horses. My favorite one was the one where two teams of men (one red team and one blue team just like Uk and UL) rode horses and tried to pick up a dead goat and then throw it in a big ring like a goal in soccer. There was also a game called Kiss the Girl. A girl riding a horse gets chased by a man on a horse. If he catches her he kisses her and they have to get married. And then she chases him with a whip. The other game was two men wrestling while on horses. Even their horses tried to start wrestling. It looked very hard and was very aggressive. After that here was an eagle hunting show that was awesome. A horse dragged a dead animal with a rope and the eagle trainer gave his eagle a command and let him go and the eagle would swoop down and grab the dead animal. There were also girls doing traditional Kyrgyz dances. I bought a little felt snow leopard. The festival was so so hot I felt like I was boiling but it was fun. Then we went to our new yurt camp at the beach. We went directly to the beach to swim and the water was freezing as always. My mom didn't come because she had to go to the hospital to check on her ankle. At this camp there was no electricity or water. There were no beds so we slept on the ground on a small blanket. The floor was sand (since we were on the beach) and there were lots of holes in our yurt. We also found a wasp nests in our yurt they had to come and remove. It was hard to sleep because bugs kept crawling in and there was a major thunderstorm in the middle of the night. Our doors kept flying open and rain was coming in the holes in the roof. After the rain the entire camp smelled like wet sheep from the yurts. It was not a very fun night so I think we are going to move to a different place tonight. This is definitely an adventure.