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.
Dec 14 2009
Eating To Help Others
Dec 14 2009
No Travel, A Lot Of Food And Drink
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 🙂
Dec 14 2009
Why Are We Waiting?
So, Astikzhan’s shopping home delivery service still isn’t available. Irina has most of an order ready to go on their system, which was originally supposed to go live mid-November, but eventually found an entry on their site explaining that they were still working on a few problems. With Gros now (finally) restocking their stores (the rumour I attempted to start re. shutting down was indeed premature – a new boss decided that new lines of stock should be tried, so they were just using up old stock), and Metro (a cash’n’carry/hypermarket type shop recently opened in Astana that have a lot of bulk packets of items. Like Milky Ways and other goodies in boxes with built-in cardboard displays ready for smaller shops to sell from), I’m hoping Astikzhan get going soon for their own sake. If anyone in Astana reading this tries out Astikzhan’s service before we notice it is online, could they leave a comment please?
Comments Off on Why Are We Waiting?
Dec 14 2009
Alma TV Initial Report
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
-
Discovery Channel
Discovery Science
Discovery World
Discovery Travel & Living
AXN Sci Fi Ru
Sci Fi Channel
Fox Life
Fox Crime
Universal Channel Russia
SET Russia
TV-1000
TV-1000 Action
National Geographic
National Geographic Wild
Animal Planet
Zone Reality
Viasat Explorer
Viasat History
MGM
Hallmark
ESPN
BBC World
CNN
Euronews
Bloomberg
Cartoon Network / Turner Classic Movies
Nickelodeon
Jetix
VH-1 Europe
World Fashion
Fashion TV
Luxe TV
The following channels are either in Russian or another language, but might still be of interest…
-
Sport 1
Sport 2
Eurosport
Russian Extreme – different extreme or unusual sports
Drive – Motor related programs
Box – Fight channel, different disciplines covered
Play TV (seems to be KZ KZSport1)
MCM – French music channel
MTV Russia – You can probably guess from the name 🙂
A-One – Another Russian music channel
Mus TV – Another Russian music channel
Hit TV – Not sure yet about which country this channels originates from
Music Pervogo – Another Russian music channel
Mezzo – Classical/Jazz/Non-pop music channel
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.
Comments Off on Alma TV Initial Report
Dec 14 2009
Bum And Bogey Tweet Explained
OK, so I’m a little late with an explanation for the Frozen Bogey Or Dirty Bum? post, but yesterday was Sunday, and I don’t always seem to write a lot on Sundays. Anyway, something happened on Saturday night that hasn’t happened (at most more than once) since Anna was born – we realised we only had one nappy left! (We were at Ira’s parents’ house, so didn’t have a large supply to hand).
Now Anna was about to have a bath, and then head to bed, so she should have been OK until the morning, but we didn’t want to just hope she wouldn’t need a change in the night. So a dirty bum was not on the cards any more, but walking out to the shops at that time of night is a little cold. Cold enough to make sure that not only does your beard freeze up, but also nasal hairs and anything else hiding up there freezes virtually instantly (see previous posts regarding the use of the sliding scale of facial and nasal hair freezing as a thermometer).
So, Frozen Bogies or Dirty Bum was an easy choice to make as a parent, I’m just glad the first shop I got to had some nappies in the right size. (I’ve never come across a shop where they sell individual nappies before!).
Note for non UK-English speakers – nappies = dipers and bogies = boogers.
Comments Off on Bum And Bogey Tweet Explained
Dec 10 2009
Christmas Couch Potato Mode ON!
I had a welcome surprise when I woke up this morning – Irina has arranged for AlmaTV’s cable TV service to be installed on Friday! As the digital version is available in our area, we should be able to watch some of the channels with the original English audio, instead of Russian. Obviously Russian and Kazakh channels will just be in Russian or Kazakh, and I’m not sure about Eurosport/ESPN etc., but things like the Discovery Channels, National Geographic, CNN etc. should be great to catch up on.
I’ll post more details tomorrow when I know them.
Thank you Irina 🙂
Dec 10 2009
Cutting Out The Midnight Lullabies
Last night saw a huge improvement with Anna and her sleeping habits. We have heard from some friends how their little ones virtually sleep right through the night, but Anna has nearly always been one for 3 hour sleeps, interspersed with a good feed. Our friends don’t seem to have dark circles under their eyes, and we have been hoping that Anna would gradually sleep for longer periods under her own steam.
Hopefully last night is an indicator of things to come, as she went from 9.30pm until 5am-ish, with NO FEEDS! 🙂 She was still waking up, but we had decided that another bout of training for her was required. I went in (Mummy=milk at that time of night) if she was crying, reassured her all was OK, told her to sleep and quickly and quietly left the room. I left it 5 minutes, and if Anna was still crying, repeated the procedure. After 10 minutes, if she was still crying, repeated the visit, reassurance and hug if she was standing up in her cot. U then left it 15 mins (I’m sure you get the idea). By the end of the night she was doing really well. There is hope yet for Irina and me to eventually both get a solid night’s sleep 🙂
Comments Off on Cutting Out The Midnight Lullabies
Dec 09 2009
Wet Sound
OK, so having checked through SEO SearchTerms 2’s output so far,
sonic focus drivers must be loaded for this application to work
sonic focus drivers must be installed for this application to work
tewksbury flood 2007
intel audio studio sonic focus drivers must be loaded for this application to work
funny double barrelled names
happy birthday
tewksbury floods 2007
sonic focus drivers must be loaded
sonic drivers must be loaded for this application to work
linkedin problems
alreader2 english
twitpic badge
pocketwitter
alreader english
poi amsterdam
intel audio studio controller sonic focus drivers
spitoons
green tea asthma
Free Bed Plans
skype scams
funny links
Funny Double Barrelled Surnames
intel audio studio sonic focus drivers must loaded application work
intel audio studio controller sonic focus drivers must be loaded
green tea and asthma
intel audio studio controller sonic focus drivers must be loaded for this application to work
BBC Prime keys
Executable PHP widget
free log bed plans
karabatan
free waterbed plans
barcorama
intel sonic focus drivers must be loaded for this application to work
intel audio studio controller sonic focus
happy birthday cat
tewksbury flood 2007
have all brought people to this site.
I’ve stopped at the point where search terms only bought me less than 10 visitors since I installed the plugin. You can see from the list that the sonic focus drivers error message that I encountered a long time ago are by far and away the biggest crowd pulled, closely followed by the floods in Gloucestershire (specifically Tewksbury) back in 2007. That second one is all down to Irina spotting some photos online that other people seem to find interesting, I guess.
Comments Off on Wet Sound
Dec 07 2009
Re. frostbite.My lower left ea…
Re. frostbite.My lower left earlobe apparently went bright white.Felt weird.Ira thinks earrings may’ve contributed.Will wear scarf next time
Comments Off on Re. frostbite.My lower left ea…
Dec 06 2009
At the hotel Radisson for the …
At the hotel Radisson for the International Xmas bazaar. Hot dogs, waffles and Ira’s Death by Chocolate. And all for charity.
« Previous Page — Next Page »