May 03

May 03
I am still waking up at 2:30am, so I guess I have not quite adjusted to the 10 or 11 hour time difference. It works out well because people at home are getting home from work then. We gave up trying to get the internet connection working from our hotel room (and our coordinator warned us it would be VERY expensive- $6/hour J ). Before I left home I set up my cell phone with the Kaz plan so we can call and text message from here. We called Rob’s parents to let them know we arrived ok (after about 5 failed attempts where we woke up a crank Russian guy). At $5 a minute for a call, no one will be getting too many calls from us as we blew our monthly phone budget in 3 minutes. So instead we tried to text message, which is only 50 cents to send and 10 cents to receive. Don’t laugh, but today was the first day I had ever text messaged. The hardest part was finding the + on the phone so I could send it to a phone in America. And then I realized I only had a couple people’s cell phone numbers, so the messages were limited (I did have the cell # for my old boss Norm but I did not think he would want to hear about life in Kaz, he’d just ask if I had started reading my PMI book yet. To which I would answer a firm Nyet). I managed to send off a text message to Kim—it took about 5 minutes to type about 100 characters. My spelling is bad enough in e-mail and IM that you can imagine how long it took to write a text message. After I hit send, we sat and wondered if it would work. In about a minute we had a response back from Kim and I’m not sure if we were more excited to hear from someone, or that our first text message attempt worked. Either way, we were high fiving each other.

This morning’s breakfast was much easier then yesterday, it was a buffet so we could see everything. We started off with pink yogurt, some crepes, which I dip in the yogurt because they don’t give you a spoon, just forks and knives, cheese and some other pastry looking things I could not identify but we ate anyway. They also had these little rolled up things with some kind of white crumbly stuff inside that reminded me of the cheese they put on top of flautitas at Cactus Blue the Mexican restaurant. I have no idea what they were, but they are very tasty and I hope we have them again.

After breakfast we took our morning 1-hour power nap (I am still waking up at 2:30 am) and then it was off for the morning ritual of paperwork followed by a visit to the orphanage. Can you guess which one we like more?

The drive to the orphanage is always entertaining. We are not sure if there are lines on the road or not because it’s so dusty here. But the drivers swerve in and out of cars, missing monster potholes, construction patches that seem to sink too much, man hole covers and the common car that makes a left turn from 2 lanes over to the right. Our driver Dmitri is a world-class driver being able to handle all that while taking driving directions from 2 Kazak woman in the 3rd row of the mini-van speaking energetically in Russian. I’m sure there’s a Saturday Night Live skit in there somewhere. But Dmitri is a focused driver and gets us there in one piece right on time. Most cars here are very dusty and we complimented him on his clean white VW Vanagon—I think it was the first smile we saw from the very serious man.

The roads here don’t allow for a lot of left turns, so the drivers compensate by making lots of u-turns in 4 or 6 lane roads (ok, it’s really a 4 lane road, but with no lines they make it 6 and sometimes 7). Yet more entertainment.

We made more progress with our visit at the orphanage. Yesterday was all tears and farts, which are both very good things. Today we brought 2 toys, we did not want to overload him. He liked the dinosaur with the teething rings and crinkly feet. It took him a minute or 2 of confusion to understand the toy—I guess smiling dinosaurs that come with every appendage a different color of the rainbow are not common place in his world. But I will add that it is not the dreaded Purple Dinosaur—we could never push that on the little guy or his fine country. But after a couple minutes of Rob jiggling he toy, he figured it out and held onto it with a death grip and stuck the teething rings in his mouth. He did figure out the game where if he shakes the dinosaur and drops it, the Daddy man will pick it up….over and over.

We tried putting him down on the blanket a couple times to play on the floor, but then the crocodile tears started again. It was only later that we figured out he likes being held while we are here because he does not often get such dedicated attention from 2 adults--- which is a good sign that he likes us J ….or that he just likes being up higher to see more stuff. He really likes looking out the window because in his regular room he’s never high enough to see the trees out the window. It’s a good thing he like being an outdoors kid. Towards the end of the visit he fell asleep on my shoulder, which may not sounds like a big thing, but we were very excited to see him content. Our visit was cut a little short because he has a cold and needed to some medicine and a massage. If only we could get a massage every time we got a cold!

We packed up our dinosaur and blanket and headed out to lunch. Rob had the biggest and roundest glass of beer I had ever seen. I think it was a ½ liter, but it was a very short glass and almost needed 2 hands for it.

We spent the afternoon and better part of the evening looking for an apartment. Since we are the first family for our agency in Astana it was an adventure for everyone. They lined up 3 or 4 apartments to see. The first was downright scary, and I dare say did not have a bed—more like a really bad futon from Ikea for skinny people under 4 feet 5 inches tall. The second was much nicer with a real bed and a little balcony. We never got into the 3rd apartment because the owner was busy and could not make it over that night; but it was right along the river and there’s a beautiful paved trail along the bank of the river for what I am guessing is a couple miles. Unfortunately we will have to wait for tomorrow to see it if it has not been rented yet. The 4th apartment matched the first in scariness. It was supposed to be vacant but a family was in there doing laundry, watching TV and cooking some less than pleasant smelling food. We are hoping to get in to see the 3rd apartment tomorrow and move in after the visit to see the baby.

While we were waiting for the apartment owner to call back this evening we spent some time driving around seeing the sites. There’s a UFO building where a year-round circus is, which we will visit in the next week. Then we pulled into a tree lined small circular parking lot. We looked over and saw lots of brightly colored flags, large expanses of flat green artificial turf and tiny houses including a windmill. Rob says “Goofy Golf!” and I was right there with him in his excitement level. I guess Goofy Golf does not translate well into Russian. We paid about $1.50 to get in, then realized it was not miniature golf, but a scaled down replica of the entire country, complete with seas, rivers, mosques, camels, horses, mountains and trains. It was a couple hundred square feet and it had each of the regions of the country what you could walk along a winding stone path and read about them (if you read Russian). It was really neat.

It feels like we have been here for a long time so far, but it’s only been 2 days. We have seen so much and our lives have changed so much. We are still on the quest for the right name for baby Taylor, today’s offering: Blini Taylor.