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
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
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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…
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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.
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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.
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Dec 10 2009
Orange Mobile Phone Customer Service
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 🙂
Dec 10 2009
spEak You’re bRanes
Some language NSFW. Nothing shocking, just a few swear words here and there. Anyway, another link waiting to be published was this one – spEak You’re bRanes.
The guy basically picks the most notable comments left at the BBC’s “Have Your Say” discussions pages online, posts them up, and leaves a few comments. Some of his views are a little simplistic, but this could quite easily be to garner a response in his comments section. Anyway, not sure if the twat-o-tron generator script is the same one as often mentioned over at The Register, but it can be useful if you’re looking to troll some liberals 🙂
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Dec 05 2009
Happy Birthday Mum
Today is Mum’s xxth Birthday. Where xx=whatever number Mum wants it to be.
We all hope you have a brilliant day, and that John makes sure you don’t have to work too hard.
Hopefully Anna will get a chance to see her Nanna on the webcam again, and we’re all already looking forward to seeing you, John, Gwen and everyone else in just a few months time.
Nov 22 2009
Muska has now taken to making …
Muska has now taken to making her occasional pukes into performance art by sitting on top of the PC first, then launching it across the desk
Nov 21 2009
#YouKnowYouAreInKazakhstanWhen…
#YouKnowYouAreInKazakhstanWhen … you have shots with your (large) breakfast to celebrate family arriving after long journey.
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Nov 20 2009
Mobile Phone Company In Good Customer Service Shocker!
I finally got around to calling Orange (a UK mobile phone network provider) today and asking them why my final bill was double what was expected. In the end, I didn’t end up wishing I’d recorded my previous call to them.
The first call I placed through Skype (international calls to a British mobile number are expensive on Kazakh landlines), and 12 minutes into the call, all seemed well – they found out where the problem was, seemed amicable to discussing removing the extra month’s charge from the bill, and had just transferred me to the next department I needed to clear things with, when either Skype or my internet connection went very dodgy. The audio had large gaps with silence, but no skipping, so there were huge delays. Deciding to cut my losses, I called back from a normal phone, and spoke to a couple of very helpful and friendly lads. We’ll have to wait and see whether the final paper bill (due in just over a week) confirms what was offered on the phone, but it looks like the superfluous month will be knocked off, and even a bit extra deducted to cover the cost of me calling them internationally!
I’m the first to shout from the rooftops if I am at the receiving end of bad customer service, so I wanted to take a minute to say Thank You to Orange for their customer service attitude and ability to see beyond “losing” 18 pounds and realising that keeping a customer happy (and loyal) makes more sense in the long term. (I’m switching to PAYG whilst in Kazakhstan, as I rarely use that phone and SIM card unless in Britain).
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Nov 19 2009
Sorry Isn’t The Hardest Word
Something like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or antidisestablishmentarianism might be. Anyway, why sorry? It has been a while since I posted anything on the blog (truth be told, the Anna pictures and video posts were written and post dated a while back). Assuming you don’t count the tweets from last week (in case you are new to this site, any post without a title, or date shown, on the front page originated from my twitter account, normally from my phone), nothing has been written. With Anna’s swimming classes, the guide to Astana I wrote for MoveOneRelo, a pretty bad head cold and transferring Anna’s UK camcorder videos to our PC and then YouTube, I haven’t had a lot of spare time. So, hopefully this trend will stop, and I already have nine new videos of Anna to post soon. I also seem to have about thirty sites/pages bookmarked to write about in the future, though some are already a year old, and may need culling.
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