ChrisMerriman.com

Dec 18 2009

Dressed For Winter Walks

Category: Anna's Photos — ChrisM @ 11:07 pm

23rd of October and we have (I think) the first pictures of Anna in her winter outdoors outfit. Whilst it would be overkill for most situations in Britain, with temperatures here in Astana regularly dropping down to -25 Celsius, and occasionally colder, you can see why a body, jumper, dungarees /salopettes and a thick snow suit are needed. I took some photos of Anna on her sleigh recently, I will try to find them and post them up soon.

No Michelin Man Jokes Allowed

Anna And Ira Ready For A Walk In The Cold

Posing In The Shade

Tags: Anna, Astana, Britain, Irina

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Dec 14 2009

Eating To Help Others

Category: Friends,Kazakhstan — ChrisM @ 5:08 pm

A little over a week ago (6th December), a charity event was held at the Radisson Hotel here in Astana. The Annual Winter Charity Bazaar was setup by the international community to raise money for local charities, including an orphanage I think. Stalls were in place for each country that had people willing to attend and sell their home made cakes, souvenirs and in some cases, drinks. We weren’t around for the bazaar this time last year (when it was first put in place), as we’d already returned to Britain, so it was interesting to see which countries were attending, what lovely dishes had been prepared, and just how much could be raised.
Irina baked the Death By Chocolate cakes I seem to be mentioning a lot, and they seemed to sell well. The event eventually raised just over 5.3 million Tenge, of which the UK stall sold 176,000 Tenge worth of goods. The hot dogs from a stall that was set up by a local company went down well, as did the most authentic lasagne I’ve tasted in this country. Although Irina and I just attended to buy and eat (well deliver the cakes as well), some of our friends (both Embassy staff & their families and “normal” ex-pats) were actually manning the stall, and DanD even managed to ~~virtually chop half his arm off~~ cut his hand a little.

Tags: Astana, Britain, Dan, Irina, United Kingdom

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Dec 14 2009

No Travel, A Lot Of Food And Drink

Category: Friends,Personal — ChrisM @ 4:45 pm

So Christmas is drawing near, and this will be the first year we won’t be back in Britain for the celebrations. Although I have mixed feelings on the subject, our finances meant that a trip home to Anna’s Nana, Dad (Welsh word) Kav, Grandad, Nick and Roz etc. will have to wait for a few more months. On the plus side, we’re hoping to meet up with some friends over here, both at the crossover point of Christmas Eve into Christmas Day, and also for Christmas Day itself, where Anna can play with (or at least alongside 🙂 ) some other children.
Irina is planning to bake a couple more Death By Chocolate cakes, so we have no need to try importing some Mr Kipling treats. There are apparently some vodka bottles in the freezer that need finishing off, I’ve recently managed to convince myself that beer isn’t so bad after all, and Inessa seems to have a lovely meal planned. Despite the fact that three families with children will be combining forces for Christmas Day dinner, I think we’re all relaxed enough to fit in with each other’s plans and/or traditions, and as one of the men already put it, “relax, get drunk and eat too much” seems to be the order of the day anyway 🙂

Tags: Britain, Christmas, Dad, food, Irina, Nick

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Dec 14 2009

Alma TV Initial Report

Category: Kazakhstan,Personal — ChrisM @ 5:23 am

As promised, here are my first impressions of Alma TV’s cable service here in Astana.

I’ll lay out the details first – we asked for and got the digital service (apparently not available in all areas just yet), didn’t get their internet service (not available in our location), and already had all the cabling in place for them. Our flat has already had a normal TV aerial wired in from the roof, as well as a large sat dish pointed at the Hotbird satellite. Not wanting to lose the satellite channels, we opted to use the standard aerial leads to feed the cable signal into the flat. As this lead is already split to feed a socket by the TV and also by the PC, this means we can watch two different cables channels at the same time. As long as one is Russian language – more on that later.

So, we went for the Prestige package, which basically means all of the channels except for three or four extra sports ones are included.

The channels that are mainly in English are as follows

The following channels are either in Russian or another language, but might still be of interest…

English audio doesn’t actually mean that all programs will have English speech. If you have a program that involves interviewing people from other countries, their speech is left intact – the English dubbing you’d get from watching the same channel in Britain is lost. Also adverts are mostly in Russian – no great loss there 🙂

Some channels have their EPG (Electronic Program Guide) two hours off – that is to say if you want to find out what is on now or next, you’ll need to check what the cable box thought was on two hours ago. Not all channels are like this, and I’m fairly certain it would be simple for Alma TV to correct this mistake.

The program names are mostly in Russian, but if you can at least read the Cyrillic alphabet, then you can just say the words out loud, and normally guess what it might be about. Channels that are specifically themed (SciFi, Discovery channels and sports for example) are normally easy to guess.

The interface menu for the cable STB (set top box) was originally in Russian, but can be changed to English. Our installers knew Russian wasn’t my first language, so they swapped the language for us (Menu, 1, Left until you see English, OK and then a few Exits), and also altered the relevant channels from Russian to English audio. Though not all of them, which is why I’ve listed all the ones I could find above, in case you ever find yourself using a digital set top box post-install time.

The box has both composite video and S-Video outputs, but obviously no component, HDMI or VGA. The audio is covered with both analogue RCA stereo output, and digital.

If your area isn’t yet covered by the digital service, you can still get most (all?) of those channels, but only with Russian audio (BBC/CNN excepted).

The ANNUAL rental for the box is around 750 Tenge (that is around 3 UK pounds, or $5!), and the monthly charge depends on which channel package you go for. I’ll have to double check with Irina, but I think the Prestige package (as DanD rightly pointed out, Kazakhstan HAD to have a channel package called that!) costs around 4000 Tenge per month.

I’ll try to post more information as it arises.

Tags: Astana, Britain, Dan, Internet Explorer, Irina, Kazakhstan, Nick, Russia, United Kingdom

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Dec 14 2009

Limp Or Frozen?

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 4:42 am

Having discussed the smoking in public places ban that Kazakhstan has recently put in place with one of my students last week, I think I am smoking a little less (when not at home) compared to when you could just light up in a restaurant or cafe. With the temperatures regularly in the mid-twenties (minus that is, and celsius), the urge to light up is dampened a little. Speaking of which, unlike in Britain, the humidity here is a lot lower, so no damp cigars if you forget to store them properly. That said, if you’re smoking a cigarette outdoors over here, and don’t take puffs very often, or rest the cigarette on a wall etc. whilst putting on your gloves, you can find it extinguishes itself.

Tags: Britain, Kazakhstan

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Dec 10 2009

Orange Mobile Phone Customer Service

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 4:19 am

I am currently trying to pay my Orange mobile phone bill. This should be a simple process – they want some money. I have the money in my bank account, and a card to pay it with. I’ve changed from a pay monthly to pay as you go contract, as I very rarely use the UK SIM card here in Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, this switch over means I can’t pay my bill online. As part of their security system, Orange send a code to your phone before you can log onto a ‘new’ account at their site. This code won’t be receivable until I’m back in Britain, as Orange PAYG accounts don’t have any roaming agreements here in Kazakhstan. So I’ve had to call them (internationally, to a UK mobile number) to try and pay it. The automated system wasn’t working either, so I’m on hold waiting to speak to a real person.
Finally got through, and to their credit, Orange had a very helpful lady, who warned me at the beginning that a card payment for another customer had just failed. She was polite, helpful, the payment went through, and she reassured me that they would send an e-mail or letter confirming that the account was now settled. Compared to some of the other mobile networks in Britain, I’ve very rarely been let down by their customer services. Thank you kind lady, I forgot to write your name down, but it is nice to think I won’t be returning to Britain and finding nasty bill reminders 🙂

Tags: Britain, Kazakhstan, United Kingdom

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Dec 03 2009

Digital, HD And Aliens

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 12:22 am

So, apparently people in the Swansea area of Wales no longer have an analogue terrestrial TV signal! All channels must be viewed via either Freeview boxes (or integrated units in newer sets), satellite boxes (obviously mostly Sky STBs in Britain) or a cable box. Mum and John have a Sky box, a Freeview box, a Freeview recording device and Freeview built into one of their tellies, and of course a modern high gain aerial, however some sort of technical hitch means most of the televisions in the house aren’t currently showing what they should be capable of. If it isn’t sorted by next February/March, I’ll hopefully figure out what has gone wrong for them.
The picture below? Taken from a strip at AbstruseGoose, it shows what any aliens would be watching right now, if they happened to be monitoring our transmissions. Obviously the further away from our planet they are, the ‘older’ the signal would be that they could pick up right now.

TV Watched Across The Universe

Tags: Britain, Mum, Swansea, Wales

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Dec 01 2009

Hitting The Beach With Anna

Category: Anna's Videos,Friends,Personal — ChrisM @ 5:30 pm

Skipping forward a little, this camcorder video was shot on the 22nd of March, meaning Anna was now one month and a day old. Seb had come over ( 🙂 ), and we decided to have a walk along Port Talbot beach, so he, I, Irina, Anna and Gwen all piled into the car, and drove down a few junctions on the motorway. It was a pretty good day weather wise, considering it was a) Britain, b) Wales specifically and c) Only March!
Seb found some driftwood to take home (the Mondeo obviously wasn’t full enough yet!) for Mum and John, and we all managed to get some fresh air and I think we even squeezed in a quick fish’n’chips shop visit.

Oh the ‘depends if there are any dogs around’ was a reference to letting Gwen off her lead. She is only a little dog, and wants to make friends with everyone/any dogs. Some dogs get a bit aggressive and she doesn’t defend herself very well.
Also, please excuse the wind on the microphone, didn’t have a sponge to stick on it sadly.

Tags: Anna, Britain, Irina, Mum, Wales, YouTube

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Nov 29 2009

If You Are Waiting For A Reply, Sorry

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 12:04 am

I have let my inbox pile up once more, so to friends waiting for a reply, people who have left comments on this blog and are awaiting approval/replies, or to the couple of web directories that have asked for my participation/permission to use my Kazakhstan posts, apologies. I’ll try and get most of them sorted by the end of this coming week. It was quite a surprise to receive the request to use my information on this country, as I normally find that (less reputable) sites simply scrape my content. Even though they usually include a link back to the original post on this site, it is still a lot nicer to be noticed by a real human being, and in this case they want to summarize posts, to avoid any duplicate content penalty from the search engines.
I also hope to get around to posting some of the older videos shot here in Astana and a few from Dubai and Britain soon, as I re-uploaded them to my newer YouTube account (AstanaClydach), and some of this site’s newer visitors won’t have seen them before they were unceremoniously removed by the powers that be over at YouTube. I’ve learnt my lesson, and there’ll be no short clips of BBC shows I like with this new account.

Tags: Astana, Britain, Clydach, Kazakhstan, search engine, YouTube

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Nov 21 2009