Heart ache at school

My eldest daughter came home from school today in a foul mood. She was playing horrid games with her sisters, until I told her that if she couldn't play nicely, that she could go upstairs and leave the garden for a while. She stomped off in a fury, but later, when the two little ones were happily engaged on the swings together, I coaxed her into the kitchen and asked her what on earth was the matter. 

To start with, true to form, she admitted nothing. But then it all came out. Her favourite 'girl' friend in class has moved house to Astana. You may think it is strange that we did not already know this, but bear in mind that at the beginning of last year, she started in her school which was brand new, and went into a class of 22 children of whom only three other boys spoke fluent English, the rest of the class all spoke Russian and many of them were already friends from before. She was the only girl who did not speak Russian. Over the course of the year, she became firm friends with the English-speaking boys, and good friends with some of the girls but not to the extent of more than going to each others birthday parties along with everyone else, even though break times they played together a lot. Even though I tried to encourage it, she did not feel confident enough to ask them over for a play at her house and I didn't force it. 

However, all summer she has been talking about this one friend, who she really liked, and who she was really looking forward to seeing again after the school holiday. And when she came back to school, the girl's name was up on the cupboard but she was absent and so my daughter just assumed she was coming back to school late. But the name has since been taken down and her teacher told them today that she was not coming back. 

And eldest daughter is gutted. I am gutted for her. She is so good and has made such a good effort in fitting in to her school, getting on with everything without complaining and in very good humour. Having her sobbing on my lap (she is quite big now and doesn't do that very often) made my heart ache for her. Any suggestions what to do? I asked if she wanted to invite some of the remaining girls around for tea and a play, and she may like to do that, so perhaps I will organise for next week. 

Monday hiking resumes/ Joy to the world tra la la

This morning, the hiking club reconvened after a long summer break. We drove up to Chimbalak ski resort in the mist and rain, which then became sleet, and then turned into a full-on snow storm and all piled out next to the smelly farm at the top of the track. The smelly farm's little yurt tent outside was all covered in snow and looked very 'Lonely Planet does Central Asia'. 

We walked down towards the absolute torrent that is the stream there at the moment, crossed on the metal footbridge and then walked back down the valley, not a single uphill burn of the legs required. This was a brilliant walk for all the unfit summer thighs, wobbling away under our plastic trousers - sorry, not a nice image! 

The snow was falling thick and fast, and we scrambled along the valley over bracken, under fallen trees, ducking beneath branches and slipping all over the place until we reached another metal bridge with a drop of about 100 feet below it, that we needed to cross to get back to the cars. It was a good no-messing group of girls (unfortunately none of the guys came today), and even though some people were crapping themselves with vertigo and the quite real fear of crossing an untested metal bridge over a raging stream in the snow in Kazakhstan (we could not see the condition of the bridge for the snow cover), everyone managed to pull themselves together and make their way across. I think it was a classic case of (very genteel) mob rule, for I am quite sure that some of the gathered would never have made it, were it not for the general consensus that it would probably be alright. 

We made our way back home, soaking wet and freezing cold (my aged fake North Face jacket is officially no longer waterproof) to thaw out in hot showers. And now, two hours later, the sky is glorious blue and the mountains are magnificently white and clearly towering over the city in all their majesty. What a brilliant day. 

It sounds rather over the top, but the hiking in Kazakhstan has been one of the most uplifting things I have ever done. Quite honestly, the scenery year round is breathtakingly beautiful and changes weekly.  I love the fact that I am able to walk through it in good health, in the company of interesting pleasant people, feeling so alive and lucky to be doing what I am doing. I love seeing eagles soaring overhead. I adore walking past silent mountain streams in the winter because they are frozen solid and milky white, or skipping across them in summer as they race over the rocks beneath making happy, rushing, babbling brook noises. And I love doing this on my own, without my family, just me. I take my husband and kids to the places I find with the hiking club at weekends, but Mondays is my time and I truly savour every second of it. 

Moloko Coco

Today I am going to admit to a rather shabby bit of assumption on my part, and I record it so that I can shame myself into not behaving like this again! Only too often, I hear people complaining about things here, when quite often I am certain that if they spoke the language they would find that 70% of their worries would just melt away. And so I was quite cross with myself when I found that I had been doing the same thing. 

I was in my favourite supermarket Ramstore picking up a few things for a camping trip. I have mentioned this store before. Usually my complaints are about things like staff watching as I simultaneously try to control three children next to the sweetie stand (there are no child seats in the trolley so one older kid has to look after baby in her stroller), then letting me unload my entire trolley onto the belt before they tell me that the payment machine is not working, and I need to move to another check out. 

I needed to buy coconut milk, but it had disappeared and been replaced with glace cherries. 

"Right," I thought, "I am going to ask a member of staff where it has gone,"

"Excuse me, there used to be coconut milk here, where has it gone?" I enquired of a Ramstore employee. 

"In the chilled aisle, near the eggs," she muttered in surly fashion. 

"No, not milk," I said, "Coconut milk, it is in a tin, used to be here, you know," I pressed on, certain that she had misunderstood. 

"Try the next aisle then," she said, and sent me off to the tea and coffee aisle.

"I will not stand for this," I thought to myself, and bustled back to confront her again.

"That is the tea and coffee aisle, there is no coconut milk in that aisle," I wittered on. 

She was obviously thinking 'Oh go away you annoying woman,' but said, "Well, maybe we don't have it any more. I don't know where it is."

"So who can you ask to find out?" I persisted

"Try the information desk," she said disappearing off, and I went home without coconut milk. 

Later I was chatting to a friend at home who is a keen asian cook, so I told her that coconut milk seemed to have disappeared. The she spotted my tins of Heinz Baked Beans which they have started to stock ("Oooh, where did you get those?") but I was explaining to her that I would rather have coconut milk than baked beans any day. 

"Oh, they still have coconut milk, but it is in the fridges. Near the eggs!" She told me. 

Serves me right for not listening, eh?

I don't Monday

Continuing my rant about policemen all over the city of Almaty who stop, hassle and then extort cash from drivers for no reason whatsoever I would like to share with you some advice I was given by Wise Old Owl, a long-time expatriate who has coped in regimes worse than this one before now and is utterly inured to coruption. 

"When you're stopped," she said, taking a break in her sentence to inhale deeply from a menthol cigarette, "Just say 'Ya-Nee-Pon-Ee-Je-Nick'. It's easy."

She is as cool as a cucumber, I suspect, in most situations and facing the local constabulary would be a walk in the park. I was new to town and did not know any Russian at this point, so she explained:

"You see, the police will think you are trying very hard to speak Russian but you are completely crap at it. 'Pon-Ee-Je-Nick' means Monday. But 'Pon-Ee-My-Oh' means I understand. So you say 'I don't Monday' and it sounds like you are trying to say 'I don't understand' but you can't even get that right," she chortled. 

"Works every time!"

"Brilliant!" I thought, "I will give it a try."

Husband was away in Europe one weekend and so I took to the roads for the first time by myself. I had not driven for weeks and weeks anywhere, and had not tried out the new car at all. The whole unpleasant afternoon (forced upon me by a total lack of anything to eat in our temporary apartment) was one of heightened-experience for me, never having been behind the wheel of a 4.2 litre automatic V8 engine before (they go very fast very quickly, by the way) and not having clocked up many miles in Almaty at all. 

Making my way slowly around a corner (yes, I was on the correct side of the road), a policeman started waving his little red traffic wand at me, and trying to catch my eye. 

"Bugger that," I thought, and put my foot down avoiding catching his eye. 

"Mummy, that policeman wanted you to stop," came First Child's observation from the back of the car.

"Yes, darling, I know," I said through semi-gritted teeth, "But I haven't done anything wrong and so I just pretended I didn't see him. He probably just wants me to give him some money."

"But Mummy," she continued. "It's easy, you just have to tell him that you don't Monday!"

Police harassment

I am officially getting a bee in my bonnet about Kazakh police and their traffic control measures. Husband was stopped three times in under an hour last Sunday. Admittedly, we had lost our front bumper in an unfortunate traffic incident - more of that on another rant. But we still had our license plate attached  (yellow for foreigners, instead of white for locals, making us all the more easy to pick out of the flow). Considering that I have seen Ladas here literally tied together with string and still on the road, the fact that our Landcruiser was looking a little less pretty than normal does not seem due cause to be stopping him every 100 metres down the road. 

They don't have to have an excuse to pull you over, they just wave the red wand while eye-balling you, and you must stop.  

There are numerous, onerous bits of notarised paperwork that you must carry around in your car here to be legal on the road. We have a folder with each piece of paper in a plastic wallet in the glove compartment. These documents are meticulously checked every month by our driver to make sure they are valid, in date, fully notarised. Baktiyar (driver) studies the new issues of the highway code intensely for weeks after it comes out. He stops sleeping in the car while waiting around, and can be found poring over the booklet until he knows every fine, offense and new legislation that has come in since the last pamphlet was published. These usually include a lot of  rules that are so silly that sometimes you don't believe them at first. Like the new rule that when you are driving out of the city limits (from inside of the city) even if it is midday and the sun is cracking the sky, you must switch on your headlights. If you do not, the fine is 6000 tenge (40 US dollars). Probably it is 6278 tenge - all the fines are bizarre numbers as if a bored policeman has allowed his 2 year-old-son to type the numbers in randomly while sitting on his lap in his smoke-filled, peeling-paint-walled office. Why do you have to put your lights on? Has the Union of Car Head Lamp Manufacturers been having dinner with the chief of police again? 

Some people believe that by feigning a lack of Russian-language skills they will escape the fine. This does not work all the time, and some policemen speak English, so you can't really get away with that. A friend of mine babbles away in Spanish (definitely less common and they don't know what to do with her, so she has been safe so far). I once just pretended that I hadn't noticed a policeman waving me over and drove off, but someone later told me that they can fire their guns after you if you do that, so I don't do that anymore. 

With 100 lessons under his belt, husband has now decided that he will speak as much Russian as he can and see if he can argue his way out of a fine. So first time he was stopped last weekend, he argued that he wasn't due to pay a fine, the car was road worthy: it had been checked and certified road worthy, and his head of HR had checked for him with the police so there was no need for a fine. He called said HR head but she did not pick up, policeman took pity and let him go. At the second policeman, my husband told him he had just paid a fine to the first policeman who had stopped him five minutes previously, and didn't he just think that would be too unfair (even for a corrupt official) to do it again? He was let off. The third little piggy was not so kind and fined him for not carrying the original of his driving license (a new regulation which we did not know) and "fined" him 2000 tenge (only 15 dollars, but annoying for not really doing anything wrong - we had a notarised colour copy of the scabby little bit of paper that is our UK driving license in the car). So frustrating. 

We were stopped AGAIN the following morning on the way to school - Baktiyar was driving at about 65km/h in a 60 limit. No fine that time, but honestly, all the other cars on the road were going at the same speed. Yellow plates. Agh! 

We had a friend here who used to drive an Audi 4WD OffRoad - a snazzy, fast car. He paid so many fines for speeding that eventually he drove everywhere on cruise control. Then he bought a Lada Niva as a second car/run around (this is a kind of 4WD soviet mini-jeep, much beloved of locals and actually pretty cool I think) and still got stopped, but found that the standard fine went down from 5000 tenge to 2000! 

Expatriata! Ruminations on coffee morning etiquette

Blimey! What a day. After a whole summer of absence, ladies from all over the world are back in Almaty. Today was the Almaty International Women's Club coffee morning at the Intercontinental Hotel (great hotel but = can of diet coke, only 9 dollars! ha ha). The coffees provide a chance for people to catch up and for new girls to meet a few people then mill about alone for a while wishing that they did not have to go through this version of personal hell, but hopefully knowing that this feeling doesn't last forever. Coffee mornings leave me baffled. I don't understand why women do them. Does anyone? What about the men who have to go to these events? The amazing bunch of male trailing spouses who find themselves in a form of Girls World, but not in the way that they may have fantasized about when younger!  Why do we women do it to ourselves and how do you put up with it? 

Ever since I moved abroad 11 years ago, and attended my first coffee morning at the Swedish Church in Santo Amaro in Sao Paulo, I have not especially enjoyed these events. In Brazil, the new girls had to wear a sticker and then stand in front of all existing members (sitting facing them in a semi-circle of chairs) and introduce themselves. I am a reasonably confident person, and I found this slightly nervewracking aged 25 in my first foreign country, so gabbled my way through a personal description in under 100 words, went bright red and sat down. For those less sure of themselves, and specially if English was their second or third language, it was nothing short of torture! 

But this kind of gathering seems to be the way that women abroad feel that they should network en masse. Of course it is useful to get everyone together once in a while, and it is a useful forum to spreading information among the community. And I cannot really think of a better way to do it (apart from the obvious option of At Night and in a Pub), but somehow, I always leave these things feeling that there must be a less painful way.

We all arrive and walk in, looking around for a familiar face. Of course, when you are new you know no one so you just have to balls it out. There is a membership table where you can fill in a form with the name of your spouse and his company and any other details of your new life that you have managed to cobble together since getting off a plane at 2.30am with three kids two days before hand, and going to stay in a hotel (if you can remember your own email address you are doing quite well). You just need to hope that the person on membership duty is a human kind of person and at least chats to you for a bit or shows you a friendly face. Fortunately, here in Almaty, the committee are pretty friendly, but it is not always so. And then it is introduce-yourself-to-anyone time, or go-home-without-meeting-anyone time, up to you! Sink or swim and off you go. 

So I think part of the reason that the first coffee of the post-summer year is so grim is because it always reminds you of your first coffee in that particular place. 

And the second reason is because some people are constantly dissatisfied in this kind of expat life, never settle or really make good mates and find it all very difficult. And at a coffee morning, if you get stuck with one of these you can be in real trouble. They will constantly start a new sentence, or seemingly fail to take breath, so that you can feel your face cracking as your smile begins to waver, you are unable to escape or change the subject, and you are listening to an endless list of complaints about how difficult such-and-such is (this will usually be from a range of subjects including, but not limited to,: a) finding a maid, driver, nanny, school or house b) medical issues, very personal details from someone you hardly know or c) some kind of comment negatively bashing the country in which they are living, like complaining about a lack of spoken english in rural China).

On the occasion that you find someone who you are quite excited to meet, who seems to be on your wavelength and with whom you think you may have things in common, then the chances of being able to have a conversation without being interrupted are practically zero. So you have to get in quick, swap a few titbits and phone numbers and move on in about two minutes. It is like a bizarre form of speed dating. 

And now PIzza Hut

I don't really think of Almaty as a difficult place to live on the whole, but then from time to time we all get very excited about a new service, or shop that has come to town and it makes me recognise the paucity of things here, that in the west we take utterly for granted. 

My recent Marrone Rosso post gave you an insight into the dearth of decent coffee shops. And it is the same for pizza and any kind of food by delivery.  When you order an Indian from the Indian they often don't have a driver to deliver, or he forgets to bring half your food. Most places you have to pick up yourself, I guess because the roads are so treacherous in the winter that there is no tradition of motorbike delivery boys like you get in loads of other places. 

Maybe I am missing a wealth of knowledge about take away and home delivery food? If this is the case, I would truly welcome some advice and comments on places in Almaty that do home delivery from people who are living here? Anyone? Anyone? Feel free to comment! My domestic talents do not always stretch to the creation of utterly wholesome offerings for my family (let's just say we eat a lot of eggs and/or breakfast cereal these days!). And sometimes it is really nice to order in... 

A friend recently bemoaned the lack of consistency even in fast food recently when she said,

"Well, you think when you first come here that it is all hunky dory, because everything looks alright, and really developed. In fact, we just laughed that this place was considered a hardship post by my husband's company. But then after a while you realize it is not quite what it seems. I mean, take McBurger for example. It is a burger shop. It only sells burgers and chips. But you can only buy what you want about one in four times that you visit - what is the story there?" she wailed, after a summer in Almaty on her own with her kids. 

She is not the only one to complain, and when Pizza Hut opened on the corner of Furmanova and Abai streets in June, there was a collective whoop of delight from many expats. And after the ceremonial opening yesterday of the new astroturf football pitch at the kids school, a few of us took our offspring for a slap up pizza lunch in "the Hut". 

Exciting. The waiter got our long and complicated order completely right first time! Wow, very unusual. He then served us our food in the order that we had requested (even rarer, the starters came before the main courses) and everything arrived that we had asked for. This is practically unheard of here. I was very impressed. The picture is of our smiling waiter. They don't yet deliver, or have a take away menu, but this will apparently happen in the future.