19 September

Infrastructure

Today we have no water, as promised. I think we also have no heat. The building heating is provided by radiators.

At the baby house there's no heat and no electricity. We can't even take baby Aigerim to the play room, let alone outside, without bundling her up in three layers of clothing and a bonnet.

Bobi's a Mom!

She still has a cold. She's very docile when we come to see her, but she smiles big time and makes cooing noises at both of us. When I reach out to touch her hand she wraps it around one of my fingers, pulls it into her mouth and starts gnawing. Teething time.

At the end of the morning we see Olga standing out in the cold, waiting for the last of the drivers to appear. Everybody is here except Vladimir, our driver. "If he doesn't show up in two minutes, he's fired," she says. She's smiling but I think she's serious.

I can't resist asking how things went for Bobi. "Oh yes, she passed," says Olga. And, later, to Bobi, "By the way did anybody tell you, your court date has been moved to Friday morning at 9 am?" This sounds like good news, and when Bobi asks who managed this feat, Olga takes a little bow. But Bobi isn't entirely happy -- she's afraid an earlier court date would cut short the 21-day bonding period, and that the court might deny the adoption on that ground. Olga seems unconcerned.

[2006/10/08] Olga knew what she was doing. The judge was heading out of town on vacation, so it was good to move up the court date. What's more, as we learned from Kristin and Nancy, the bonding period is actually 15 days, not 21 days.

Weather

The temperature has taken a nose-dive this week. When we got here it was too hot for long-sleeve shirts. Now it's too cold for the fleece I brought. Yesterday afternoon we had sleet. At lunch time we go back to Tsum, and I pick up a Puma (name brands everywhere) skull cap.

The Absahl mall has no heat today. Tsum has heat, and running water. Their toilets are working. I'm surprised they don't have more business.

Getting Fed

We've said that the locals are very tolerant of our poor Russian. The one exception is the lady behind the counter at the Express Bar in Tsum. She's actually pretty tolerant, but as I order she's always looking at me with a bemused expression and asking me to repeat everything. And then she gets the order half wrong. Today it takes three tries to get two cups of tea, one with milk and one without. And, although I'm able to order two pukreehm (meat and potatoes in a sort of pizza-bread wedge) without having to point to them, she does repeat my order to demonstrate the correct pronunciation. It's as if to say, "Oh, you mean puh-kreyEM, it's lucky for you I was here because nobody else would have been able to make sense of your gibberish." A big part of spoken communications is conveyed by rolling the eyes :)

In the afternoon Olga suggests that we may want to see if we can change our tickets, to get an earlier return to the states. The 15-day waiting period starts as soon as the court appearance is complete, so everything could be accelerated from this point. It might be good to leave for the states a few days early, to finish preparations.

Celebrating

Tonight Bobi suggested we go to Line Brew for dinner. The name of the restaurant is in English, so they probably have comfort food on a menu we can read.

[2006/10/08] If you're ever in Karaganda, Line Brew's address is Boulevard Mira 24 (Бульвар Мира 24 - I think it means "Peace Boulevard", "Mira" as in Mir). And if you're in Almaty you can find a Line Brew at 187 Furmanov Street. Tel. 007 3272 507985.

Good call, Bobi! There's an air vent cranking down masses of hot air on our heads, and the menus are indeed in English (and Russian). The separate beer menu lists maybe a dozen Belgian brews, complete with summaries of their flavors (hoppy, fruity, etc.) and alcohol levels. The food menu, unlike the one at Johnny Walker Pub, doesn't include any re-interpretations of standard American fare (e.g. "juicy fat burger"); so, with apologies to Douglas Adams, there's little chance of getting something almost, but not quite, completely unlike what you ordered.

Of course there is still an opportunity for misinterpretation. I order beef with mixed vegetables and get just that, grilled bell peppers and onion greens over nicely grilled, slightly spicy beef. But Bobi orders the meat fondue with some uncertainty of what she's getting: it turns out to be a thick black pot with hot oil, into which our server sets skewered cuts of beef.

Neither of us is willing to try the Alabama vegetable salad. I can't even remember all of the ingredients, but I think it involved home fries and mayonnaise.

Bobi's not a big fan of sweet desserts, but my pancreas and I love them. We order a pie of sorts, a wedge of chocolate ice cream over alternating layers of sweet waffle and frozen meringue. Had to have something to go along with two snifters of Hennessey brandy.

It was a great meal, and a good way to celebrate today's news.

Blogging Tools

I've been with Bobi in Kazakhstan since the first of the month. She's adopting a baby, and I'm here to help :) You can find the full story at The Den Hartog Stork.

Up to now I've been keeping my notes on paper, and it looks like a hopeless task to get them all posted. There's just too much stuff! Besides, Bobi has things well covered in her blog.

Instead I'll just start keeping notes online from today. Or rather, from tonight. It's about 4:30 am just now, and I'm awake because this receding cold has given me a dry cough.

We're both using Blogger. It's free and easy, and it lets you include images in your posts with some control over the layout. But, watching Bobi compose a post, it seems a lot of time can be lost trying to control the flow of text around inline images. The only reliable technique seems to be to insert a bunch of blank lines and to hope that your content pane remains at a fixed width.

The point is that page layout can be pretty distracting when you're using Blogger. This is one reason I'd rather be using something like iWeb. If I could have brought the Powerbook on this trip (or if I'd sprung for a MacBook with Parallels) this would be a non-issue; we'd be producing pages with the layout we wanted -- and with whole swaths of text rendered as copy-unfriendly PNG images :)

In general it's a pain for me to be Mac-less. Never mind controlling how images are arranged in a post, how do I crop my poorly composed images for display in a blog post? With the Mac it's Command-Control-Shift-4 (or something like that -- it's burned into muscle memory) and a sweep of the mouse. With Windows it's probably something similar, but my ignorance makes for a lot of frustration. (Or maybe I should start downloading little utilities for Windows, e.g. MWSnap? Anyone have any recommendations? Anyone?)

There's still a big opportunity for somebody to produce a cross-platform blogging tool which makes it easy to control page layout and which renders content as plain old HTML.

The Stamp Seller

Today we had to ask Olga where to buy envelopes for mailing letters. We thought we could buy at the post office but couldn't remember what we'd seen there. She looked surprised and said simply "Kazpost," confirming our guess.

So at lunchtime, when Vladimir asked where to ("to home?" "doe dohm?") we asked for Kazpost. His reply was a question which we didn't understand, but which seemed to mean "which one?" Uh...

No matter. After a few seconds of confusion he reached for his cell phone and called Olga. Then he dropped us off at the only post office we knew about, the one on the main street (Bukar Chirau) near our apartment.

I went to the Valyuta at the back of the post office and exchanged some dollars for tenge. Then we headed for the stamp stall. Along with stamps it had a variety of envelopes.

Bobi asked "Amerike?" The man behind the counter had the chubby but well-groomed appearance of a Bavarian clock maker, and a quiet, gentle demeanor to match. He pointed to the Avion envelopes and began explaining that "A" on the stamps meant "150 Tenge". Like so many others here he didn't mind that our Russian skills were almost non-existent.

Bobi moved over to the stamp display case, said "Poshawlsta (Please)," and began pointing. For the next ten or fifteen minutes the old clockmaker showed us his wares with great patience and not a little pride. He would use one- or two-word phrases to convey something about the images on the stamps and, somehow, we were able to figure out what he was saying. During most of the exhibition another customer stood patiently behind us, waiting for her turn.

This way of doing business -- turning out all of the drawers to find everything that might match the customer's request -- seems pretty common here. We've seen it in the baby store ("Mickey House"), where a woman unwrapped a huge assortment of little shirts for Bobi. And we've seen it in a school supply stall where we tried to find stationery without any lines. First Bobi pointed to a notebook of graph paper, and we tried the phrase "nye lin-ya". The lady reached under the desk and brought out horizontally-lined notebook paper. Again we tried the phrase, with different emphasis: "NYE lin-ya." She brought out some blank paper. "Da! Spasiba." We'd found what we wanted and thought we were done. But she began rummaging through the display cases and shelves, bringing out four or five different kinds of blank-paper pads.

As we neared the end of the stamp exhibition, our helper inquired shyly what we were doing in Karaganda. "Rabotaiyou?" I know that word: he wants to know if we're working here! "Turist," answered Bobi.

Eventually we finished, and the clockmaker pulled out a set of stamp-handling tweezers. Absorbed in his task, he delicately gathered up Bobi's selection, pausing occasionally to count out the amounts and add them on a desk calculator.

Once everything was totalled Bobi paid and said thank you. Then the clockmaker looked up toward me, one of the few times he had made eye contact with either of us during the entire exchange, and shook my hand with a big smile.

This seemed odd; almost the entire business exchange had been between Bobi and the old man. I'd stood to the side making occasional comments to her and calling out words in English when I thought I understood something he had said.

There must be an etiquette in male/female interaction here which I don't yet understand. The old man wasn't being chauvinist; he was just happy to have helped us. (He was quite unlike the guy at City Market for whom Bobi had held the door a day or two earlier. That man had smiled, made an "O-ho" noise, bowed a little, and walked through the door saying something that included the words "man", "woman", "Russia" and "Amerike".)

This exchange with the stamp-seller left us feeling especially warm and fuzzy. The feeling lasted until we got to the front door, where we realized we'd forgotten to buy stamps for the postcards.