Cheesy!

As those who know me well can attest, my life revolves around food.  When I am not actually eating something, I am often planning my next meal.  I like to have quality ingredients to cook with.  If I spend money at a restaurant, I want the food to be both very tasty and very different from what I cook at home.  I loathe skipping meals, and I usually eat several snacks throughout the day.

Planning snacks was a struggle when we first arrived, and to a certain extent, it still is.  One thing I liked to have for a snack in the US was raw veggies with bean dip.  I do not have a food processor here, so the bean dip is out for now.  I also enjoyed bananas with peanut butter.  Until very recently, I could not locate sugar-free peanut butter, so that snack was also out.  For a while last year, I was also making homemade granola bars, but any number of ingredients and equipment are missing here.

As a result, I tend to default to fruit (fresh or dried) and nuts as snacks.  Once I discovered that we could get good quality nuts in the bazaar, I was pretty happy.  But I still wanted more variety.  Happily, I've come upon two local cheese to fill the void.  The first one is a drained yogurt cheese known as kurt.  Unlike Middle Eastern labneh, it is not spreadable; rather, it is formed into fairly hard pellets that can keep for a long time.

Bag of kurt!

I don't actually know the name of the other cheese I've started eating, but it's some sort of smoked string cheese with a chewy texture.  Our neighbors shared some with us recently, and I've been obsessed with it ever since.  It's fairly dry, so I have a feeling that it would keep for a long time, as well.

Smoked cheese, pictured in all its glory with kitchen table clutter

The area where we live is somewhat of a food desert, but these cheese discoveries are at least helping me to continue my usual snacking schedule.  With luck, I'll discover more interesting foods, and have many more snack posts to come.

Happy World Birding Day!

When the same organization that took us on the Ereymentau trip sent an email about a birdwatching trip for World Birding Day, we jumped at the opportunity.  It would be another chance to leave Astana and go someplace that would be difficult to visit on our own.  Plus, I had read that Kazakhstan's flamingos live in the same general area where we were going for part of the year.  I had read that they usually migrate to warmer places starting in September, but thought since it was only early October, we might be lucky.

Alas, the flamingos (very wisely) had already decamped.  This was the best evidence of flamingos we saw all day.

Gate at Korghalzhyn Nature Preserve Office

Yesterday's trip  had a couple of unusual difficulties even before we set out.  The first one is that Scott has been battling a cold, so we wondered if we should really be getting up at 5:30 AM and going out into chilly temperatures.  The other difficulty was that I stubbed my toe pretty badly on Friday.  It became pretty bruised and swollen, so we wondered how successfully I would be able to walk on Saturday.

We ultimately decided to go.  The first sign of trouble was light snow in Astana as we headed downtown to join the trip.  The second sign of trouble was that our bus left Astana about 30-45 minutes late due to waiting for a local TV crew to join us.  We had been duly warned that there would be a TV crew, but I hadn't realized that they would actually travel with us, forcing us to wait for them.

Finally, we headed out of town.  Kazakhstan (or at least this part of it) has an incredibly flat landscape, which does make it relatively easy to spot birds.  We learned a little bit about its birds on the way there.  We learned, for instance, that the crows in this part of the country are gray and black, and that the large, completely black birds we sometimes see are rooks.  (This may not come as useful information to people who know much about birds, but I know very little, so found it interesting).

We finally got to the lake we were going to observe.  It was bitterly cold and windy there.  Scott and I had dressed in layers, but we were both wishing we had worn our down coats.  I told Scott that the cold weather made up for the fact that I wasn't at home icing my injured foot.  We had assumed that we would be walking around more and would warm up, but it turned out that they intended for us all to stay in one place and watch the birds from there.  I have no idea if this is typical of a bird-watching expedition or not, but I definitely prefer to walk around more.  Meanwhile, I was trying to avoid the local TV crew because the idea of being on TV stopped being appealing to me sometime in elementary school.  I hid in the minibus once I heard that they were looking for English speakers to interview.

We did see some swans and ducks, albeit from a great distance.  I didn't get to take pictures of any of them, unfortunately.  I do have a couple of other pictures from the trip, though.

Lake we were watching for birds

Cows on the steppe

We were under the impression that the trip might have been more successful without a TV crew and in somewhat warmer weather.  We'd be willing to try bird-watching again under those circumstances.  In the meantime, our next trip will probably be to Almaty, where the weather should still be significantly warmer.

Karaganda

Over the weekend, we made an overnight trip to Karaganda with one of our colleagues.  We had a great time, and we are so glad he suggested it

It took us about three hours by train to get to Karaganda, which is southeast of Astana.  Until Astana became the capital of Kazakhstan, Karaganda was the major city in this region of the country.  Interestingly, our colleague told us that Karaganda features in a Russian saying that refers to the middle of nowhere.  However, this is how the owners of the hotel where we stayed view it:

Look for the large, red letters here.

This was our first time on a train in Kazakhstan, and it was quite nice.  We had a compartment with two sets of narrow bunk beds and a table, so it was possible to nap comfortably or do work.  This picture isn't great, but it gives some idea:

Picture taken from the facing lower bunk

Karaganda had a much more established feel than Astana does.  Astana sometimes feels startlingly new, particularly with some of its more creative architecture.  One thing I particularly enjoyed was seeing more trees.  Some parts of Astana don't have very many trees, and a good number of the trees are pretty short.

Fall colors in Karaganda

We got in around dinner time on Saturday, so we strolled around the city a bit and went for some food. The next day, joined by our colleague's friend who was visiting and traveling around Kazakhstan, we visited the KarLag Museum in the nearby village of Dolinka.  This museum gives the history of the KarLag, a very large Stalin-era prison camp, that was situated in the region.  The museum was very informative, and even had some displays translated into English.  Our colleague speaks Russian and was able to fill a lot of the information gaps for us.  This is an era of history I know very little about, and I think this museum trip provided a good base of knowledge for me.  Photography was not allowed inside the museum, but I did take a picture of the building itself, which was the old KarLag hospital.

KarLag Museum

After visiting the KarLag Museum, we headed back to Karaganda, where we strolled around and got a bite to eat before our train back to Astana.  Here are a few more pictures of Karaganda itself:

I told my colleague's friend that my mom is from Alaska, so she pointed out this sign to me as we passed it.

A Surprisingly Productive Afternoon

We've had our share of odd setbacks this week.  I forget which day it was, but I found myself suddenly unable to unlock our apartment door with my key.  Apparently, I bent it very slightly (but enough to render it unusable) with my superhuman strength.  Then, on Wednesday, our water was randomly cut off for a few hours, making all sorts of things difficult.

We partially made up for all of this today, though.  I had made an appointment at the clinic we're supposed to go to here, mostly to get some blood work done, but also to have a chance to scope out the clinic.  Scott came along with me, since he doesn't teach today.  I would say we accomplished three separate things there alone--we found out where the clinic was (about a half hour cab ride from our apartment), I got my blood drawn, and I filled out a health information sheet at the clinic.

We were planning to meet some friends at a Georgian restaurant later on, so we decided to stay downtown and run some errands.  We walked from the clinic to Artyum Bazaar where we proceeded to get extra apartment keys made (to replace my old key), get Scott a haircut, and buy a few groceries.

When we were done with all of that, we figured we had enough time to walk to the restaurant from Artyum Bazaar.  We were marveling at our good fortune in taking care of so many errands and getting exercise to boot.  We had a lovely time at the restaurant--the food was good, and we were celebrating having recently been paid for the first time.

The one small setback we were left with in the end was that one of the keys we had made doesn't work.  The other one does, though, so it's a setback I can live with.  I was so glad to have an afternoon in which I accomplished so many things.

Searching for Time

Scott and I finally signed up for Russian lessons today.  There is a woman who arranges private lessons with people who are interested and comes to the university on a predetermined schedule.  Our class meets late Sunday morning and Thursday evening.  We'll have to study and do some homework in between sessions.

This is probably a necessary expenditure of time at this point.  Very little English is spoken here outside the university.  We need help completing all but the very simplest transactions around here.  Even trying to arrange fun activities is difficult.

But…we are not sure where we are going to find the time.

We had been optimistic about having more time for research here.  Really, though, we are finding that bureaucracy takes up most of the extra time we have.  Last week, none of my students could access the websites that accompany their textbooks.  This led to me testing the websites out in different locations to see if the problem was with the websites or the university (it was the university), contacting IT to see what the problem was and when it might be fixed (they did ultimately fix it, but they were quite vague on the schedule), and not being able to complete my lesson plans in my office because I needed to be able to reference said websites.

Also last week, the powers that be decided to stop providing free, but unreliable internet service in our apartments.  That would have been fine, except that they shut off their service before the paid service guys could come around and set everyone up.  This led to our not being able to work at home for several days, a lengthy email exchange between Scott and the manager of our building, and me having to rush home after teaching, only to sit around for an hour and a half, unable to work, waiting for the internet guy to arrive.

I would also be remiss to not mention the latest trip to customs.  I wrote here about our last trip there, which was lengthy and tiring, but at least resulted in the acquisition of more of our belongings.  Scott went again on Friday with a university employee.  They spent a couple of hours there, only to be told in the end that the computer system was down there, and that they'd have to come back again.

So, at this point, I don't know what to think.  Stay tuned--will we learn any Russian, or will our attempts be subsumed in teaching/meetings/customs visits/internet woes?

Things to Come

When I woke up this morning and checked the weather on my phone, it showed that it was snowing in Astana.  I looked out the window, and it was true.  It was light snow mixed with rain, but still, it was snow in September.

I am very afraid of what the winter will bring.

Ereymentau Trip

We finally got to leave Astana today!  Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with Astana, but there are only so many shopping mall trips you can make.  Plus, we live on a dusty construction site that isn't even near those.

We signed up for a day trip to Ereymentau, which was about 2 hours northeast of Astana.  We headed out relatively early in the morning, and stopped at a small restaurant near Buyratau National Park.  The food was great, and Scott and I were talking later about how it wouldn't have been out of place in a trendy breakfast restaurant in the US.  We had fried eggs sprinkled with scallions and parsley, sausage, some sort of interesting pickled cabbage, and blinis with jam and clotted cream on the side.  The trip over also gave me a chance to reflect how uneven development is in this country.  The roads outside of the capital were in very bad repair.  Also, the restroom at the restaurant where we ate was literally a hole in the ground in a small shed outside.  Not an outhouse (where one might sit down), and not a  Middle Eastern style toilet (where the pit is in the floor, but accompanied by plumbing), but an actual pit in the dirt.

On today's trip, we saw ancient burial mounds, ancient Turkic worship statues called "balbal", Zhalshoky Mountain, and various animals.  We saw lots of steppe marmots.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture of any of them.  I saw all of them from our minibus, but could never find any when I was out walking around.

After hiking and seeing archaeological remains, we had a picnic lunch.  A Kazakhstani family was picnicking near us, and invited us over for tea.  They had been drinking kumis, and were cheerful and friendly.  Maybe a little too friendly (or at least a little too physical) with some of us, but it was still a good time.

All in all, we wish we could do something like this every week or two.  It was good to get far away from work and see something completely different.

Balbal

Flock of geese near the park

Hiking to Zhalshoky Mountain

Rock formations

More rock formations

Flowers on the mountain

Some sort of lichen?

More rock formations

Balbal and burial mound