This past week was a productive week. Last tuesday I went out to the Nature Museum. It is a beautiful building about 7km outside of town. Inside are 6 rooms. They are full of lots of stuff: 3D map of the park, as seen in the pictures below, minerals, stuffed animals that are in the park, plants, insects, and photos.
The park is currently in the process of writing a tourism plan for next year. One of the things they told me they wanted help with was reorganizing the Nature Museum. They want to renovate it and make it more interactive for the tourists. This sounds really fun to me and I already have a few ideas to spruce it up some. Along these lines, if any of you are ever in a museum (of any kind) and see an exhibit that is really neat and interactive, send me a picture of it!
Next to the museum is a large wildlife pin that houses bison, elk, wild boar, and some big horn sheep. They told me the point of the pin was to raise them up to a certain number and release them into the wild. I saw everything from a distance but the boar. There were 16 wild boar in a pin near an overlook. They want to expand the overlook and make an elevated walkway throughout the 200 acre pin, so that tourist can walk through and see the animals up close but without danger.
I also had a conversation about a topo map this past week. The park is amazingly rocky and I was surprised when they told me there isn’t a topographical map of the park. Along these lines, there isn’t a trails map either and on most of the “tourism” maps, they don’t have the major destinations or how to get to them. So even though I’ve only been here 2 weeks, I think this may be my first real project. There is a local guy that makes topo maps apparently but the price is high, so I think I’ll look for a grant that will help us out, get a map made, and then we can actually promote the tourism spots on the park with a decent map! We’ll see. This is all contingent on me being able to find a grant for this.
I think having a good map will help promote recreation areas a lot. And I have to say that the park guys so far have been good about listening to ideas and are the first to say that they need things like a map. I can tell they really want to grow, so it makes it easy to want to put forth the time to help them.
There was also a small breakthrough in another area. There was some interest by the park staff in me teaching English to them. I’m not a teacher and don’t have a strong desire in teaching, but I think I may have found something to keep their (and my) motivation. There is a US park exchange that allows foreign parks to visit US parks for a period of time. I mentioned this to the director and he ate it up. So I have 1.5 years to teach 5 members of the staff conversational English in the hopes of doing this exchange. We’ll see if it really pans out. They want me to start right away, but I’m going to stall for a bit to make sure I’m prepared. I’m thinking of starting after the New Year, when all the holidays are over for a while.
Now for the pictures! Here is a 3D map of park of the park. You can see how much contour there is.
This pig was huge. ha. Maybe the biggest I've seen!
Alishair is on the left. Amir is on the right. These are the two boys that I live with.
The Ali-shair show. He is a fireball for sure. He came in the other day with his toy pistols, I snapped a picture and he loved it, started posing, and the pictures below are the results. haha. He is what the Kazakhs call a "hooliganski", or hooligan!
I have some of a hike that I took on Sunday that I will post soon. But had to get these on here first.