Greetings from Kazakhstan!!!
Below the pictures I've summed up what life has been like so far, so scroll down to read. These shots are near my apartment.
The apartment on the left (upstairs) is mine. Nice view out my window huh?
Where I live- upper left.
Street view near the school where we have training.
The School
So I made it ok. The flight over was long but ok. I was only able to sleep a couple of hours, so it took me several days to catch up and get to a point where I could think straight. But beyond that, the trip over was good. We arrived early in Almaty early in the morning (1:30am), gathered up our luggage and departed for the hotel on the outskirts of Almaty. After two days we departed for our training sites (I wasn’t able to see Almaty). I was put in Ecik (or Issik).
I’m living with Victor and Valla Publichenko. They are very nice people. Valla is a teacher and it shows, as every day I’m quizzed on items around the house. Victor is a welder. They are busy with their own jobs so they don’t do much in the evenings, which I’m fine with. I’m usually pretty tired after school and studying. They are enthic Russians which is good, as it helps me with my Russian studies to hear it, though I understand little right now. We live through the dictionary right now.
So far, "school" is good. My vocabulary is still small but Cyrillic is getting easier and I’m able to at least pronounce most words I see (albeit slowly), though I may not know what they mean. They don’t do training here like they did in RO, so there is a different feel, but it’s also exactly the same. Ha. The main difference is that in RO all the volunteers stayed together the entire training. Here in KZ, we are split up. My sector and a few English teachers are in Ecik. The others are in surrounding villages. Ecik is a town of 20,000 or so and most volunteers have running water and showers. The others outside of Ecik aren’t so lucky.
I’m on the north side of Ecik and if my view from the apartment wasn’t blocked, the view to the north disappears into steppe- you can see forever. The view south (and out my bedroom window) is of the Zailysky Alatau Mountain range. I don’t know how tall they are, but it is an impressive walk to school each morning. They obviously appear taller in person and I suspect they are very tall, as they keep their snow year round. I’ve asked their elevation and haven’t been able to get a clear answer, as my Russian is bad. My book says "the peaks rise over 4,000 meters" (this would be 12,000ft).
I have to say that the rest of my experience here in Ecik has been nearly 100% the same as Romania. The street scenes, housing, cows on the street, smells, the way people interact, cars, lack of driving rules, etc…..is really making me feel at home. Haha. Many of the other volunteers are having stress about the reality of Kazakhstan, but so far for me it is no different than the life I led in Romania. Apart from the language of course. I’m sure there will be new things tossed in as I go along though.
Along those lines, I tried Kumis last night- fermented mare's milk. My host family doesn't like it and thought it was weird that I wanted to try it. But I did...and they laughed as I made faces when I swallowed it. It is pretty awful stuff. Haha.
Internet is sparse in Ecik. This is the only internet cafй I know about and it is pretty expensive – 300 tenge/hour ($2/hour). This may not seem like much, but on the allowance we have, it is, and I will have to accumulate pictures and write at home to save some time and money. So the posts may be few and far between for the next 10 weeks. This means I’m out of email range for the most part too.
I haven’t eaten horse yet, but the food has been good (lots of borsch). So things are good. This post is heavy on the writing and little on the photos- next time I’ll be better. I haven’t had time to explore and take many photos yet.
That’s that. I hope everyone is well and I’ll post when I can.
