May 01

We spent the better half of the day lounging in Frankfurt, and realizing that the way cool iPod charger I bought does not work with all of the adaptors, converters, and funky German outlets. Good thing there was a plan B or I’d be left without any music for a couple months.

The flight to Astana was comfortable, although they kept asking me questions in German; I guess the haircut I got before I left was a bit short so I looked very Germanish. Or maybe it wasn’t the haircut, maybe it was my Novak German roots….nahhhh it was just the short haircut and tired look. The plane had little video screens on all of the seats and there was a channel where you could track miles/km to go, airspeed, estimated time of arrival—very good for anal retentive people who like to watch water boil (or for Kim the Project Manager, it allowed for Monitor And Controlling of the project once we were in the Execution Phase) The airport in Astana was not as big as we thought, there were about 4 glass booths to pass through, and since no forms were available in English we guessed our way through the first set of forms and onto the 2nd set. The only minor problem I had was at the end of customs where they had to screen all of my luggage. We had a lot of room left in one large duffle bag my Dad gave us, so we threw in a 24 pack of toilet paper (Quilted Northern, of course). The scanner guy, who spoke no English, kept running it forwards and backwards trying to figure out what it was (apparently all of the electronics devices were not worrisome). After a bunch of gesturing I was guessing he wanted me to open the bag. As I started to open the bag he looked a little panicked, and I was not sure if that was a good ting or not. I unzipped the bag, then I think he asked me if I was a plumber, about 6 times to which I had nothing but a stunned response, obviously he knew nothing about my attempts at plumbing attempts which end in 5 trips to Home Depot and assorted abrasions to the knuckles. I pulled out the toilet paper, he giggled, or at least I think it was a Kazak giggle, and waved me on. It was late, after midnight, and I think he was tired and my Quilted Northern was not worth confiscating.

To give you an idea on the size of the airport, we spent about 3 minutes bickering over filling out forms and leaving luggage unattended, so most everyone passed through customs before us. As we wandered aimlessly for those 20 feet to the final screening, about 6 people said ‘Taylors?’.…ya think we stood out? I’d like to think that the entire country had been anticipating our arrival, but I think it was just our agency people getting a little worried that they had lost us already, so they enlisted the help of the customs people to locate us.

The agency people were very nice….especially for it being midnight. We were asking them all kinds of obscure questions on the ride to the hotel (where we’ll stay for a couple days until we get an apartment). They walked us up to our room and we stuffed about 6 people in there to make plans for the following day—it took about 20 minutes to decide to meet at 11am….which I’m sure I made it take that long because I was sleep deprived and asking stupid questions….yet I never thought to ask what time it was.

Before we went to bed we raided the mini-bar because we were thirsty…not hungry since Lufthansa feeds you something every hour or 2. Rob made quick work of making a Heineken disappear, I realized that mineral water tastes bad no matter how thirsty you are, and also drank a Russian Sprite. Our mini-bar bill topped out at about $4……you couldn’t even get a can of Coke from an American mini-bar for that.