Jul 19 2012

Car Videos Coming Soon! Maybe?

Category: Kazakh DrivingChrisM @ 2:26 pm

In case you are not the sort of blog reader who notices when a tag cloud changes, this site has had a few hundred old posts properly tagged recently. That means I only have a few thousand left to trawl through! Why make this effort? I hope that when Google (other search engines are apparently available 😉 ) next crawls this site, and comes across the tags pages via the sitemap, it will lead to me picking up a few more visitors who are interested in the same topics I write about. Traffic has dipped a little bit recently, from around 10,000 unique visitors a month to just 6 or 7,000.
Also on the To Do list for this site are the Anna and Tim photos that are always piling up waiting to be published (I was reminded just how far behind I am when tagging some of the older Anna posts). There is also a huge pile of car videos (from our in-car recorder) that I would like to go through and either delete (most of them), or edit and upload to YouTube for embedding here. I don’t know how well some of the recent WTF! moments were caught, but there should be a few.
Recently we have seen a lot more Suzuki SX4s (the same as our Kazakh car) here in Astana, and we occasionally exchange thumbs up or waves. It is good to finally see a little diversity in the cars on the road, as although all the Toyotas mean that should you buy one yourself, spare parts and expertise with repairs will be in abundance, it does get a little monotonous. We do see nicer cars around, like Mercedes SLs, various AMG tuned cars and 4x4s and full on super cars, but our budget didn’t run that far when we bought the car!
On Tuesday we saw a bumper sticker that read “Astana Street Racing” on a car in front of us, which didn’t seem like a great idea, should they get stopped by an English language reading traffic cop during an illegal street race…

Hello officer, why did you stop me?

You were racing your friend

Me? No, I am just on the way to pick up my granny from hospital

Points at the bumper sticker

Oh… Yes… Umm…

Ignoring the issue of self-labelling oneself as a street racer, we know some people use the local car park to impress their friends with high powered engines and much squealing of tyres, but I hadn’t realized that Astana does actually seem to have a real established street racing scene, as a friend was invited to attend such an event in a suped up Scooby.

I would be interested to see if any local drivers (cars and golf clubs) would be up for trying to beat that record, though I’m guessing it would need to be at the airport, not one of the golf range/courses outside of Astana in the Steppe somewhere!
Right, I am going to go away for now, I need to drag my body to the gym and try not to collapse or break anything 🙂

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Oct 27 2011

Falling Off And Fitting In

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 12:52 am

Yesterday Tim’s umbilical cord stump finally fell off, meaning putting his nappy on will be a lot quicker (they won’t need to be folded down around his now-forming tummy button) and I’ll not be convinced I’m torturing him each time we have a hug!
One of the other changes to everyday things due to the brilliant arrival of a new baby (still no middle name selected just yet) has been our car. Previously if I was driving, Irina would be in the passenger seat, and Anna’s car seat occupied one of the three seats in the back. Tim has a lie-flat car seat, which takes up two car seat spaces. So, if we drive somewhere as a family, we now have no spare seats for friends or family. As a Mondeo isn’t exactly a narrow car, we will just have to hope we can still properly fit Anna’s & Tim’s car seats into our slightly narrower car in Kazakhstan (Ford Mondeo vs Suzuki SX4).

Lizard Relaxing On A Sofa

If we have a couple of friends over, then trying to seat all everyone as well as the family, sofas run out of space now, as well! That said, I find lying on the floor actually helps if my back is aching. It would appear that my gym sessions earlier in the year didn’t do very much at all to strengthen the back muscles that invariably seem to get pulled when holding a baby for a few hours in a row. The furniture itself here in Clydach has largely escaped milky stains (and smells) so far, as Tim seems to dribble excess liquid onto his clothes, rather than with any great velocity. Famous last words!
The health visitor and midwife both seem to be perfectly happy with his progress, and Tim has already demonstrated baby boys’ ability to sprinkle surrounding furniture with wee. Karen (a great lady who we were also lucky enough to have around when Anna was born). Thankfully I’ve managed to avoid a shower so far.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,