In a little over four months, Mum will be coming to see us here in Kazakhstan again 🙂 Although we had all been hoping this would be possible, since she bought the idea up, with my younger brother and Roz having had a child recently, another bargain holiday for Mum and John found on eBay and the prices for plane tickets to Astana, nothing was guaranteed. We have told Anna that her Nana is coming over, and she points at the photo of her and John, so she might even understand what we’re talking about 🙂 We are all really looking forward to seeing Mum again, and I’m pretty sure Mum will be looking forward to seeing her granddaughter.
Now all I need to do is control my online purchasing, and try not to take Mum over her baggage allowance. If you visit relatives via road, gifts can be reasonably bulky, however as the flight isn’t direct, and you only get 20 kilos, I might need to limit myself to some Shreddies, Orange squash and a couple of powered USB hubs 🙂
Mum did find an airline called Baltic Air (a sort of Ryanair/EasyJet equivalent based in the Baltics) and although their prices were almost half of the next cheapest fare (Turkish Airlines), the reviews indicated that this wouldn’t necessarily be a wise choice to make.
Anyway, John (and Gwen obviously) will be staying in Britian, so we’ll have to wait until out next trip to the UK for a reunion with them, but we’re over the moon that Mum/Carol/Nana is coming to Kazakhstan again 🙂
May 24 2010
Mum Coming To Kazakhstan Again!
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May 15 2010
Beer, Brilliant Buddy Bears And Babies
DanC is back in town for a few days, so we are hoping to meet up on Saturday and see how his family is doing. The other Dan (DanD) will be joining us after his daughters finish their afternoon nap, by which time I hope to have had a few relaxing beers (one advantage of not driving over here), some barbecued beef, and then we’ll all move on to Bayterek to have a look at some brilliant buddy bears. Hopefully the walk will be healthy, as beer and shashlik aren’t known for their fat/calorie free content 🙂 Why all the letter B’s in this post? No idea TBH, but the buddy bears started this whole alliteration theme…
In case I forget to blog on them, or we end up not going there for some reason, here is a quick summary –
The Buddy bears have arrived in Astana! There are 125 brightly painted bears standing in between Baiterek and Keyruen shopping centre. They stand at over 2 meters high painted by famous artists from all over the world, each one representing a country. They are an event of the ‘Germany in Kazakhstan’ programme and will be displayed until July.
(suggested meeting date and time information cut from original e-mail, my thanks to the Astana International Women’s Club for sending Irina this information)
Take a look at the website http://www.buddy-baer.com/united-buddy-bears/world-tour/astana-2010.html for more info and some great pictures.
May 14 2010
Pizza At KFC?
If you search for the words Pizza and Astana in Google, this site has been number one for a while now. Fair enough, there aren’t that many other English language sources that discuss eating out in Kazakhstan’s capital city, I’m just not sure why the post that Google thought best matched this search term was one on the KFC Rostik outlet in Mega? I have written a few specific posts on pizzas in Astana, both in restaurants and home delivery, but apparently fried chicken was a better match.
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May 07 2010
Compilation Of Videos From B-Day Party
As all the videos were taking up the whole front page on this blog, and contained a few dud, four second long accidental recordings, I decided to compile them into a couple of posts instead.
It was a family friend’s birthday party at the Attila restaurant in Astana, and there was food, drink, dancers, music and an MC, as usual.
Oh, the titling of Qik videos (on the site) is totally screwed up again, most of the videos have the title from the previous clip, and virtually all of them lost these (wrong) titles when tweeted. Combine that with the jerky 320×240 video, and you can see why I’m still looking for an alternative Windows Mobile based live video streaming app…
Shots from outside the Attila (as in Attila The Hun) restaurant, here in Astana…
Irina’s Dad toasting the Yuri Constantinovich – the birthday boy 🙂
People dancing
Golka! (People chant this at weddings to encourage the bride and groom to kiss, a little bit like when the priest/vicar says “the groom may now kiss the bride” during a wedding ceremony). This was a reference to when Yuri and his wife got married many years ago.
Here we had an example of Korean dancing from some local enthusiasts (Yuri has Korean heritage, Kazakhstan has a wide mix of nationalities making up it’s population)
His Mum toasts Yuri
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May 06 2010
I Couldn’t Spell Kalmykia Either
Just caught an interesting BBC article regarding claims from Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (the president of Kalmykia (or Kalymkia as the BBC have it currently spelt in the article?!)) that he was abducted by aliens, and spoke with them!
If, like me, you hadn’t heard about this region of Russia before, check out the Wiki page on it here, or a similar BBC page on it here.
Now the question is whether this is connected to recent UFO sightings in Kazakhstan? Tongue in cheek level is around 99.7% here, on my part, but a really small part of my brain wants to hope this is some sort of alien contact involving two way communication. If I have a couple of beers, that stat might alter to 98% 🙂
Hoping KZBlog doesn’t totally hate this post 😉
Apr 27 2010
Anna’s Birthday Cake
Not much to say with this video, as you may have guessed from the title, it features Anna on her birthday, about to taste her first ever birthday cake. The rest of the year, we’re pretty careful about sugar (and salt) levels in the food she eats (a little more difficult here in Kazakhstan, as the selection is narrower), but for that one day, pretty much anything was allowed 🙂
Anyway, here she is, sat in her highchair (this one is a little seat that you can attach to most normal “adult’s” chairs, and worked out pretty well), having already blown out her candles…
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Apr 27 2010
Another Kazakh Blog
I was just catching up with some of the Astana and Kazakhstan based pages over at Expat-Blog, when I realised I hadn’t yet checked out the Kazakh Nomad blog. Obviously this site, KZ Blog and also the Oyster one have been read, and in deed linked to from here in the past, but for some reason I’d not looked into the last entry on the Kazakhstan blogs page. The lady now lives in Astana, and teaches English, so I suspect she has/will cross paths with a few of our ex-pat English Language teachers. I’ll have to check around and see if anyone has met her in real life yet…
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Apr 27 2010
Suggestions For Kazakhstan – Part IX
This one is pretty much a personal gripe, and not even totally aimed at the authorities/companies in Kazakhstan this time. As you may know, all of the flats in our area have simultaneously had their hot water and heating turned off before. Before Spring has even arrived! The reason was that other residents weren’t paying their bills on time, and so the company involved had apparently run out of money to pay for the diesel that powers boilers.
Other flats in Astana can apparently have the hot water and/or heating turned off individually, however in this area, the company simply shuts it off for everyone. There are different sides to this situation, as the company will point out that without the money, no one will sell them the diesel (surely non-paying of bills isn’t some sort of new situation for them though, were there no plans in place before?), some flat owners don’t live in the flat and so don’t see why they should pay money to heat a flat not used (again, paying bills for a property you own but don’t live in can’t really be a new concept?), but it boils down to plain injustice.
Why should a family with a small baby have no heating to warm the flat, or hot water to wash their child in, because some property speculator thinks buying a new car is more important than paying their debts? When we moved back to Kazakhstan, we had to get a boiler installed, as they had again cut off everyone, so this year we are at least ready prepared. We just need to remember to test it out properly before…
May the 15th will see the heating turned off (not a problem really, as the flat is already getting a little too warm since Spring arrived) and only cold water available from the pipes. (If it goes orange again, that’ll be a double whammy 🙂 ). If we didn’t have the boiler, that would mean putting kettles on just to ensure Anna didn’t have to go to bed without a wash. OK, I have finished venting for now; if any of this series seems like I’m moaning about trivial things, you may be right (on other posts at least), but I guess I just need to let off steam occasionally. Insert your own bad pun here…
Apr 27 2010
Family Friendly Taxis Of Interest?
Recently this blog has started to get a lot more traffic from people interested in life in Kazakhstan again, though I have not really been writing a lot more about Astana. One thought I had is to create a list of taxi companies that might be of interest to families living in the capital. One of the problems you find is that many cars either have the seat belts in the back hidden away, with the drivers not always wanting to pull up the seats to retrieve the anchor mechanisms. Worse than that, some cars have actually had the seat belts cut out off them, as people complain they “get in the way”. So, since Anna has been in Astana, we have tried to keep a list of drivers that own cars with working seatbelts – there isn’t a lot of point in using car seats otherwise. Would such a compilation interest anyone?
It is of course a generalization, but I’ve also found that the drivers that care enough to ensure their rear seatbelts are in good working order, also seem to drive a little more safely. One of the people we use the most definitely amends his driving style when there are children in the car.
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Apr 27 2010
Suggestions For Kazakhstan – Part VIII
Hmm, why isn’t the number eight represented as IIX in Roman numerals? It takes less characters…
Anyway, this will probably be the penultimate Suggestions for Kazakhstan post for a while, and it is on children in cars. As the law dictates that only those sitting in the front should have to wear belts (and even that is only fairly recently legislated (or perhaps enforced?)), you hardly ever see anyone wearing seatbelts in the back of a car. If the idea of trying to force adult Astanites to also wear belts when not sat in the front seems laughable to the authorities, could we at least have something passed, or enforced if such legislation already exists in writing, that children sat in the back should be seat belted and in a car seat if necessary?
Some sort of government information scheme is definitely required, at the very least to prevent motorists whining about being unaware/ignorant of the dangers of free roaming, jumping and distracting kids in a moving car, and also that air bags will cause damage or even death if inflated with a child sitting on the relevant part of the dashboard. Yes, in case you didn’t read my tweet regarding this last(?) year, I saw a mother sat in the front of a modern car, holding her baby over the dashboard, right where the airbag would shoot out from should a shunt occur. It is bad enough thinking that you can seriously hold safely onto a child in a 30mph or more crash, but to actually put them into so much extra danger makes me want to scream.
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