Gouda?

May 10, Salinas.

Attempt to shoot some of the backstage area ambiance today, without much luck: shooting with the new professional camera I've bought, the Nikon D70s, has proved to be impossible while carrying the baby in the BabyBjorn, my arms bump against him, and shooting with the little pocket Canon yields out-of-focus pictures in such low-light situations.
The only photograph I could salvage is that of Genia getting a back massage from Shu Ma, one of the Chinese girls.
We have no idea what her real name is, and call her and all the others by the nearest approximation of the way they say their name sounds like for us barbarians. We're learning little bits of Chinese along the way, basic words and expressions like hello, good, bad, thank you and you're welcome, and they've learnt some English. Only they pronounce everything with an 'ah" sound at the end, the way I remember hearing it in Hong Kong. So "good" becomes "good-ah," with a strong emphasis on the "ah," for example. The name of that Dutch cheese is all you hear around the Ekaterina, Sasha and Fridman gang now. Needless to say it gets old.