For our upcoming trip to Britain and Amsterdam, we ended up finding the cheapest deal was to buy tickets from two separate suppliers (travel o city and ex pedia (without the spaces, but I’m not giving them free keyword advertising without knowing how their service turns out first )).
Anyway, one supplier just sent an e-ticket, as is normal, however the other decided we couldn’t pick up the tickets from our airport, or have handy e-tickets, so we had to pay an extra 60/70 pounds to get them DHLed. DHL have just phoned Ira, and stated that the courier is on his way, so in a few minutes, I’ll hopefully have the tickets for TSE>FRA>AMS AMS>AMA>TSE (Astana - Frankfurt - Amsterdam and the return trip of Amsterdam - Almaty (the old capital, still better served by international flights) - Astana) in my hands. The AMS - CDF and later CDF - AMS (Amsterdam to Cardiff, Wales and return) tickets were electronic, so they are already sorted.
As the apartment owner in Amsterdam has already confirmed receipt of the required deposit via PayPal, this trip is slowly coming together Just Ira’s visas for Britain and the Netherlands (a schengen visa) left now. If only Kazakhstan would accept dual citizenship, such holidays would have been so much simpler if we both had UK passports. There you go

The last couple of days have been reasonably mild here in Astana - and with the lack of fresh snowfall today, some of the ice and snowdrifts are starting to melt. It does not look so pretty, as you can see all the dust and car pollution in the grey snow, however, the lack of ice leads to more stable walking, and hopefully shorter breaking distances - so I don’t need to worry about looking up my life insurance rates straight away

Irina found a pizza place that delivered, so we treated ourselves to a film and pizza last night. A little pricey (1 litre of coke/fanta cost 800 tenge (about quadruple the cost in a shop), pizzas were 1600-1950 tenge (around 7 pounds/$15) each), but mine was tasty. Without going into gory details, if you happen to use Napoli (or ‘Neopol’ depending whether you trust the pizza boxes or the bill) pizzeria, you may want to ensure you have a supply of Immodium to hand (the severity was enough to wake me at 3am and send me running to the loo!).
That said, the pizza was good enough for me to hope it was a one off, and so I hope to try them out again in the future - will post if it turns out they should be avoided

Oh, and I know that pizza delivery isn’t exactly ‘Eating Out’ but I don’t have a category for ‘Eating In’

Whilst researching something, I came across this Wiki on Astana. I’ve made a couple of suggested amendments on the discussion page, and added a few new entries to some empty sections. If you get a moment, please do head on over and see what else can be put there - I didn’t fancy copying out whole sections of the posts you can find on my Kazakhstan 101 page, and don’t know which facts are most pertinent to people who don’t already live here. Check around, and see what the site has to say on your own town - if there isn’t an entry yet, you can create one

PS Not a sponsored post, just thought I’d give people a heads up on this resource.

Nothing at all concrete yet, but it looks as though Ira and I may be going to Amsterdam for my birthday, hopefully fitting in a short hop over to Britain as well. I need to start looking at the cost of apartments, canal houses and hotel rooms, as well as the flights. Last time I went to Amsterdam, it actually turned out cheaper to buy one return ticket to Amsterdam from Astana, and then a completely separate return flight from Amsterdam and back again to London. Dialaflight have many cheap flights on offer, and if we fly to Britain first, their site could help out with the flight to the netherlands. They also cover a lot of other destinations, with a flight to Cyprus easily discovered. Whilst some may find Cyprus exotic, I prefer Holland myself, and this time I’m hoping to actually make it to the sights I missed last time, such as the Anne Frank house, the Escher museum and maybe take in a canal boat trip.

At some point, Ira and I need to pop into some furniture stores here in Astana, and try to find some suitable bed-side tables. Although we have an alcove in the wall behind the headboard, it would be more convenient to leave some items on a table, though given our kitten’s natural curiosity, we’ll need to figure out which items are safe enough to put on the table, and which need to be semi-hidden still. When we first moved into the flat, we ordered a couple of bed-side units from a shop, however, some 18 months later, the shipment hasn’t arrived; time to get realistic and check out what else is available.

We arrived 22 hours ago, so forgive me if this post is not entirely well written. All fine with the trip, and no problems with passport control or customs either.
Looking forward to seeing friends here in Astana, but missing family and friends in Britain already. Hey ho. Hope to visit Britain again sometime this year.
Will try and publish posts on our time in Britain (and my previous Amsterdam/UK trip from back in last September and October) soon.

I should have learnt from previous experiences buying hardware here in Kazakhstan, but I somehow just hoped that things would have improved.
Anyway, yesterday Ira, her Mum and I went to a couple of computer shops to order a new computer as an early Christmas present. I had got a copy of a PC spec that her work colleagues had designed for someone, made a few tweaks and improvements to some of the components, and then got a price for a complete system. Once we had all the details, I returned home to research some of the parts (if you’re intending to spend a fair whack on a large monitor, for example, you want to make sure that hundreds of people haven’t had serious issues with it.)
Eventually we had all the details, and returned to the one shop that had all parts in stock. Apparently. To cut a long story short, the suggested motherboard would only take DDR3 memory (which has a HUGE price premium, at least over here), not the DDR2 memory specced, the CPU wasn’t in stock, nor the case, nor the hard drives. All of this after starting our conversation with the (very nice) sales people by explaining we were hoping this shop wouldn’t muck us around, as Ucon had done last year. Anyway, after confirming we wanted a legal, licensed Windows XP installed, and that they could not source a specific A3 photo printer, we finally had an invoice printed (about the fourth or fifth version, after finding lots of parts were not in stock, despite being present on the stock/price list we were working from).
Anyway, I am getting picked up by my father-in-law’s new driver in a few hours, to go and check out the new PC, and make sure all is well with it. I wonder if I can suggest that they should swap their 24″ screen for my 19″ - purely for, ummm, hmmm, nope I can’t think of a valid reason. Life’s hard

I was originally going to post a selection of the photos Irina took whilst in Britain, but realised her work colleagues might not appreciate having their faces plastered all over this site. Anyway, her hotel room was apparently quite nice, and you can also see the newest addition to our flat back here in Astana - another cat, though this one doesn’t seem to require feeding
We have yet to think of a name that we both agree on, so any suggestions would be welcomed. (The maid actually placed the toy on the bed in the hotel room, after making the bed, which was a nice touch )