Bai-Baikonur

Russia confirms shiny new cosmodrome - The Register:

"Putin stressed the non-military nature of the project, and indicated that Russia is keen to cut its reliance on Kazakhstan's Baikonur spaceport."

www.neweurasia.net - Blogging Central Asia » Kiran over Mongolia: Interview with Joseph Spaid

www.neweurasia.net - Blogging Central Asia » Kiran over Mongolia: Interview with Joseph Spaid:

Q: What motivated you to shoot the documentary?

I was moved by the rugged and natural beauty of the eagle hunters and their lifestyle. Berkutchis [...] are just so damn strong and tough. They typically don’t even wear gloves, although it regularly gets below -25ْ F where they hunt. They are true ‘badasses’ by my definition.

Wah, crawling is hard

Wired Science - Wired Blogs:

"The researchers say that fake crying, used to get attention though nothing is wrong, is a first step on the slippery slope to deception. The dishonesty, said lead investigator Vasudevi Reddy, can be detected when babies pause to see if they've been heard -- showing that they're 'clearly able to distinguish that what they are doing will have an effect.'"

Aiga taught us about this during our first week in Karaganda. As she crawled laboriously across the floor she made the most pitiful little cries. Yet, when we told one of the other adoptive parents that Aiga was the one, her response was, "Oh, you mean the busy little one who crawls so fast?"

Saving the Saiga antelope

News from the Caravan: Wild Kazakhstan:
The Rise and Fall of the Saiga:

One of the main species to be protected is the saiga, an ungulate (hooved mammal) that’s somewhere between a sheep and an antelope. It looks like a critter Dr. Seuss would think up, and the story of the saiga is like that of the truffula tree. From millions to rare, back to millions, and now endangered again, in little more than a century.

"Dr. Seuss" indeed! But it still reminds me of Zoidberg.

One smart baby

When Bobi brought Aigerim home from Kazakhstan she was not quite nine months old -- way too young to talk.

Aigerim has a stuffed pig of whom she's very fond. Almost from the moment she saw it she's been calling it "n'Goita" or "Nyáh-do" or "Nyáh-da". (We live in New Mexico, so of course we've been repeating this as "Nacho" or "Puerco Nacho".)

But she also uses this word for other things. Typically, she'll repeat it insistently, arms outstretched, while leaning way out from whomever's holding her, as she tries to reach some object.

Lately Bobi has begun to think this might be a word from the Baby House. So this morning we pulled out the Langenscheidt Russian to check. A search in the English section for "want", "give", etc. turned up nothing. But then I flipped over to the Russian section, and there it was:

Надо - need, want

What an awesome little girl.

American's imprisonment in Kazakhstan sends chilling message - International Herald Tribune

American's imprisonment in Kazakhstan sends chilling message - International Herald Tribune:

"Despite all the Western donor money and American-financed projects aimed at reforming the judiciaries here," said Michael Hall, an analyst in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, with the International Crisis Group ... "this is all part of a bigger Central Asian trend to make their judicial systems subordinate to their presidents."

"The result is a significant retreat in America's ability to project its public and business interests in the region," he said.

"Plus, the U.S. has suffered a massive loss of credibility when it comes to talking about the rule of law and independent judiciaries in the wake of the abuses we've been hearing about in places like Guantánamo." (emphasis added)

The last paragraph is a sideline to the main story. But it shows again that it's in the best interests of the United States to treat its prisoners humanely. Any abuse we lay on our prisoners (call them what you will) can be used as a justification for the mistreatment of U.S. citizens.

Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Kazakhstan: where are we going to be in 15 years?

Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Kazakhstan: where are we going to be in 15 years?.>

Interesting synopsis of the recent past of Kazakhstan, with several guesses as to the future.

Leila Tanayeva:

15 years ago we were different: we had huge lines to the shops that had nothing to sell, we experienced electricity black-outs, lack of heating, state monopoly on everything and huge inflation.

15 years have changed us: we now have polite salespeople in Gucci stores, we go to corporate parties with our colleagues from multinationals, and we travel around the world (that is when we are asked about Borat’s film!).

When Bobi and I were in Karaganda, our translator Olga explained to us that many of the signs of commerce we saw -- a business in practically every building, cell phones everywhere, fresh bananas from Ecuador in every shop, supermarkets reminiscent of the Åhlens in Linköping -- had not existed even seven years ago.

She remembered her first cell phone and its volatile signal strength. "Sitting in the back of my classroom I could get a signal, moving away from a window I could not." (Sounds like every cell phone I've ever had...)

She laughingly remembered the sudden appearance of oranges. They didn't have much else, she said, but they all carried oranges because they could.

For a few days in September (and, I hear, again in the spring), parts of Karaganda still have electricity black-outs. And the whole city has no water during that same period, while the city engineers switch the hot water on. But these are planned outages, probably not what Leila referred to.

Adam Kesher:

...those in the middle were waiting for democracy and money, poor were waiting for money and democracy, and [those having] oil-riches - for money, without democracy...

That's a noteworthy detail for those engaged in rebuilding countries: when you lack food, shelter, clothing and democracy, you may be least interested in the last of these. Let's eat, then let's talk about voting rights.

I guess we could stand to remember that democracy is a luxury here, too, one easily lost through neglect.

The Mummies of Xinjiang and the Amazons

Too busy to yammer at length -- getting ready for Christmas.

From Discover Magazine, 1994: The Mummies of Xinjiang, comes another reference to the Golden Warrior:

...also, in 1970 in Kazakhstan, just over China's western border, the grave of a man from around the same period yielded a two-foot-tall conical hat studded with magnificent gold-leaf decorations. The Subashi woman's formidable headgear, then, might be an ethnic badge or a symbol of prestige and influence.

This week the local PBS HD station aired "Secrets of the Dead: Amazon Warrior Women", about archaeological investigations related to the legend of the Amazons. It focused on the work of Drs. Jeannine Davis-Kimball and Leonid Yablonsky, and showed that there could be something to Herodotus's claims that the Amazons married into tribes on the steppes.

At the conclusion of the story Davis-Kimball and her colleagues analyzed the mtDNA of Meiramgul Khoja, a nine-year-old Kazakh nomad living in western Mongolia. They found a direct link to a 2500-year-old warrior priestess whose body was buried beside the Ilek River near the Russia-Kazakhstan border.

The show left a few questions. For example, how did the German forensics experts determine that their reconstruction of the warrior princess should have dark hair? The decision must have had some rational basis, because it was enough to make Davis-Kimball question her efforts to find a light-haired woman among the Kazakh nomads.

Questions aside it was an interesting episode. Makes me want to go a-Googling in several directions at once -- nomads, steppes, the Circassians, less-relevant topics like Bukar Zhirau...

Lonely Planet finally discovers Kazakhstan

When we were preparing for Bobi's first adoption trip to Karaganda, we were surprised at the dearth of travel information for Kazakhstan. Even Lonely Planet seemed to know nothing of the world's ninth largest country.

Thanks in part to Sacha Cohen they're finally catching up.
Lonely Planet | On the Road.

Welcome to Mountain Standard Time

For her first 11 days in New Mexico little Aigerim had a really hard time getting to sleep. If somebody was awake and in the room with her she would squirm and play through the middle of the night, just as if it were mid-day. (Which, of course, it was, in Kazakhstan.) And if she were put in her crib? She would howl like a wounded beast. Didn't matter whether the lights were on or not. Of course she'd sleep soundly during the day.

This week we tried something different. I'd come over every morning at 8 to bring hot coffee to Mom and warm formula to Aigerim. Bobi would sneak in a quick shower while Aigerim topped off her belly. Throughout the day Bobi's mantra was, "Keep the baby awake," (except for one short nap).

It worked. Aigerim has slept through the night for four nights in a row. And she has been getting sleepy earlier and earlier. Last night she was lights-out by 8:30, which puts her almost on her Malutka schedule.

It helps enormously that she's bonding so well with Bobi. Before, unless she was totally exhausted, she would start crying the instant she touched the crib. Now she knows everything is okay. Mom is there for her, to sing lullabies and rock her to sleep, and again to greet her with hugs and kisses (and a bottle) in the morning.

The baby loves hanging out with us in the living room in the evenings, playing and grunting and making little babbling sounds. She gets so happy at our noises that she has to stand up, big tongue-lolling smile, and bounce vigorously for a few seconds. We know she's getting sleepy when her head suddenly plops down on the back of the couch, or on Mom or me. A few rounds of bouncing and plopping and she's ready to snooze.

It's pretty wonderful to see her happy again, just like the baby we met in Kazakhstan.

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.