Cross Cultural Understanding

Tonight, the 13th February, the kids' brand new school is hosting its first parent/staff event: a valentines evening of jazz music, drinks and snacks in the atrium next to the library. To date, parents have been kept at arms length by the school (partly I think to try to avoid having to deal with the over-the-top parents of which my father, who was a headmaster for many years, grew to be so fond (not!), and partly just because it has been hard enough to get things going with a paid up staff, let alone any other random influences being added to the mix). Anyway, having harped on about letting parents be involved in the school in some way, when the headmaster said that he would like to do a small event at this time, I and a few others agreed to help. 

We discussed at the outset that the school would provide drinks and music, and that the mothers would organize a range of finger food for the evening. I am the foreigner parent, and there are two Kazakh ladies also organizing. 

The idea was to keep it a simple affair and this has led to some hilarious conversations, because parties or events here are not so simple. In the Kazakh mind, I think, simple party = rubbish event. Full stop. For example, two hours of drinks and snacks accompanied by live jazz is enough of a small event for most people. For Kazakhs this is anathema, they like parties to be over the top. I heard about a Kazakh millionaire who spent $4 million on his 40th birthday, including flying Elton John in to perform for the night. I was talking to one of the managers at the Intercontinental about this, and he told me that not only had they flown in Elton John, but also his own full size grand piano. He also told me that this party had not been for business man celebrating his birthday but a government official - must be well paid, eh?!

So the original ideas for a few helium balloons, some chicken drumsticks and a few plates of crisps has now turned into two catering companies, seven wait staff, a balloon sculpture costing $400 and some jugglers (shame we couldn't get a troupe of dwarves for added entertainment! ha ha). The mothers and I have all had nights waking up and worrying that it is going to be a complete flop. 

As a PR exercise I think it is important to do a reasonable job, and even though it is only going to run from 7pm to 9pm, some care, thought and detail are required. The Kazakh ladies have been great, pulling in favours from friends to get a lot of things for free, but basically we have had to beg people for money and help. 

What was supposed to be finger food is now going to be a mini-banquet of blinis, cakes and other assorted goodies, eaten off plates with napkins and forks. And on several occasions my friends and I have had to explain to each other how a British event might be run, compared to a Kazakh event and vice versa and try to find a middle ground. For example, when I explained to one girl that the understanding of finger food is generally that you eat it with your fingers, she was genuinely shocked. And later, as we discussed getting plates, napkins and forks from the kitchen (we had always planned to have napkins) I explained to her that foreigners are quite used to picking up things to eat with their fingers, and just wandering over to a table and grabbing a couple of crisps... like animals, I said, knowing that this is what she was thinking about our behaviour! 

We had a good laugh about this, and I asked her why Kazakh people don't like to use their fingers. And she told me that they think hands are dirty. So I explained that we tend to assume that people wash their hands from time to time and have clean fingers, and so we don't worry about this too much, especially when the food is small and you pick it up, eat it and finish - there is no pawing allowed! 

Fingers (clean ones, of course) crossed that tonight goes well. 

Another fab hike and eagle spotting

Last week our nanny was sick and so there was no skiing, no hiking and my pilates class was accompanied by the baby playing to the sound track of The Wiggles (an Australian children's entertainment act for those who don't know the lovely tunes of such classic tracks as "Fruit Salad, Yummy Yummy"). But on Monday Allia the nanny returned to work (looking extremely well I thought) and so I shot out the door wearing my new gaitors and special clip on boot spikes for the Monday morning hiking rendez vous. 

I think I will have to stop being quite so enthusiastic about these hikes, or people will genuinely think I am completely mad, but I find it hard not to enthuse about it practically non-stop while out, and for a couple of days afterwards. 

I simply cannot believe my luck at being so close to such accessible and stunning trails. It really blows me away. This week there were many people in the group so we split up into two. The French lady who always includes a good steep bit in her hikes took those wishing a more demanding hike, and someone else took a slightly easier route. I went with the French lady. 

We started with a slippery muddy climb up a steep hill for about 25 mins, then walked along the ridge at the top for quite a long way, to stunning views along the edge of the Tien Shan and into the hills. 

At about the half way point, we stopped to allow the group to catch up, and suddenly a massive eagle came whooshing up out of the valley on a thermal right next to us, and started circling over our heads, calling out with its strange squawk, but making no sound with its wings. We watched it for about 10 minutes. None of us had the faintest idea what kind of eagle it was, but nonetheless, it was magical. I loved it. 

Another country, another devaluation

Our first ever stint abroad was a move to Sao Paulo in Brazil and five days after we arrived there was a maxi-devaluation of the currency, the Real, which was a crash course in economics (and Portuguese) for me. I remember sitting in our serviced apartment with a dictionary and a copy of the newspaper Folha De Sao Paulo, trying to work out what the paper was saying and also, just in basic terms, what “devaluation” meant, since I had never heard of that (in those days I guess I thought that pound sterling was also invincible, but I was young and naïve then). It was disappointing when it slowly dawned on me that what had been worth X yesterday, was today worth half of X. Even for someone with my patchy grasp of maths, that didn’t sound like a very good thing at all. And I was right, it was a very bad thing indeed. We were fine as long as we stayed inside Brazil  but many of  our travel plans in S America suffered for three years as all flights were based on petrol prices which were set in dollars and against which the Real had more or less halved. And it took us years to get over the pain of buying rounds in British pubs when we went home, which during the devaluation years, could cost us as much as a months socializing in Sao Paulo. 

So it is a slightly older and wiser me which greets the news of a 26% devaluation of the Kazakh Tenge today. Usually these things are good and bad. Any money we bring in from abroad will now go further than it has been. Any money we earn here will of course go less far than we had hoped. Such is life. Just have to weather it.

I might have known that something like this would happen today. The hot water still not working, and as I opened the curtains of the baby’s room I noticed that one of our gates to the road was slightly open. Husband had pressed a button on the controller and not realized that he had half opened it before driving off. Because it had snowed in the night, it hadn’t been able to fully open but it was open enough to let a small and roving pack of wild dogs into the garden. The dogs had a great time, they peeed all over the un-finished igloo (now known as Mowat’s Folly) and finally Baktiyar came back and chased them away – I was not for going out and chasing them in my pyjamas in the snow!

I wonder whether drivers realize the variety they will encounter when working for a family. I also wonder whether their job description includes the line  “Must be able to drive away packs of wild dogs as and when required”!

But just as I suppose I feel disappointed to realize that what we thought we would earn while here is unlikely to fully materialize in the current credit crunch crisis and with this devaluation, so Baktiyar (who we recently found out worked as a sniper in the army before he became a driver) probably never thought he would be battling wild canines at 8.30am before driving a spoilt housewife to her Pilates class. 

Rage in Almaty

If I ever get this text onto my blog, and google has not shut me down thru inactivity, there will be a period of nearly three months of not only sporadic posting, but increasingly desperate whinges about the Internet here.

Oh my god. Honestly, I don’t think that the government of any country should let people run internet services as they do in this place. You have to basically pay by the Megabite of usage. Like you listen to the radio and get charged according to how many songs you enjoy. Or watch TV and are charged by the programme for the pleasure (although if you subscribe to BBC Entertainment I actually think that they should pay you to watch it since their idea of prime time “entertainment” consists of re-runs of the “Weakest Link” - pathetic). It is not just down to bandwidth speed. You are given a connection speed, which ranges from dial up speed to 2048 bpm. But then you have to pay more based on your usage. The fastest connection with unlimited usage from one of the suppliers we were quoted from is more than US$4000 per month!!!!!

 People are regularly telling us that they spend more than $800 a month on the internet.

Hello.

This is daylight ROBBERY.

It makes me so mad. I think I am suffering culture shock. I had a rage attack last weekend when I went to the Mega Centre which is Almaty’s shopping mall, pretending to be like a real shopping centre with some particularly irritating quirks.

I had to go there to get the kids new school shoes (and to pay at least 25% more than we would pay for the same shoes at home, and with the choice of one shoe each since the shops carry no stock and they never have what you want, you have to just pretty much take what you can get). After getting them (“why are you moaning?”, I hear my local friends ask, “You got shoes, right? In one place? You didn’t have to go to four or five different places and eventually buy them in Louis Vuitton? Hey, chill out”) we had to go to the supermarket, Ramstore, also one of the world’s most annoying supermarkets since their stock is so variable and unreliable (in the Cyrillic script it looks like “PamCToP” so if you are ever faced with the choice between, say, PamCToP and a luxury Waitrose, you will know which one to choose (clue: NOT PamCToP!)). One time we went and they didn’t have ANY chicken for sale. This time, they were only missing small things like maple syrup and baby milk for 12 months plus, so as usual I had to spend the same money to buy the wrong type of baby milk for Connie, but never mind. You can never be organized and plan to go to Ramstore once in a week with a list and expect to get everything you want because they will NEVER have it.

Going from the shoe shop to the Ramstore involves descending one floor of the mall, but with a pushchair. There are three escalators but only one lift which is located at the opposite end of the mall from the shop we were in. And since, for seven years, I have moved my kids up and down escalators all over the world in their pushchair without incident, I opted to go down the escalator with Connie in her pushchair rather than walk the extra 5 minutes along the mall to the lift.

I hadn’t seen the sign not allowing this, and it turns out it is prohibited to descend au stroller (I know now this) but we started to go down it. Then a really irate security guard came running over as we started to descend and grabbed hold of the pushchair and started trying to pull it back up the moving escalator, saying, I presume, something along the lines of “Oi, you’re not allowed to take that on there,”. I was stunned at this outrageously stupid and dangerous thing to do, so I started yelling at him, something along the lines of “F*** off, what on earth do you think you are doing you total moron, get off my pushchair or there is going to be serious accident here,” This interchange was in Russian so the words used were approximations but the sentiments were very clear!

He saw and understood the look in my eyes, a dangerous blend of angry mother bear and woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because he backed off. But he was so incensed at my breaking of the rule, that he went scuttling back up the escalator and pressed the button to stop it working entirely, leaving us stuck half way down. While he was glaring at me with a  mixture of hatred and contempt, I was actually checking to make sure I still had a child in the pushchair and she hadn’t accidentally fallen over the edge of the escalator!  But once he had pressed the button I was pretty much completely stumped. What did he think was going to happen now? We were going to base jump over the edge of the escalator with the stroller, just for thrills? Far too exciting. Wearily, I asked the older kids to carry the shopping bags and picked up the pushchair myself and carried it down the escalator. Much safer than just riding down and strolling off… NOT.

Which brings me back to why I was talking about Mega Centre, which was partly  because the actions of the security guard were so inept. But then we still had to go to Ramstore. Before we went in we had to check our bags into the lockers they have for this purpose (they assume all their customers are thieves and so practically strip search you before you enter the store), then we had to take the pushchair with us because they don’t have any trolleys with baby seats which is also inconvenient.

We did our shopping, paid up, took our shopping down a travelator (lucky not another escalator to negotiate!) and out to the car which was parked in one of the furthest points from the door to the stores.

Loaded up the car, got the kids in their seats, then decided to take the trolley back to the other trolleys, not particularly out of a sense that I wanted to be community minded and help out, but more that I had had such a rubbish afternoon that I would be buggered if I was going to give the holding company another dollar of my money for making me suffer their shit mall. In most places that force you to put a deposit in a trolley for the privilege of giving them your money in the shops, there are many easily accessible trolley drop off places dotted about the car park so that you don’t have to walk miles to drop off your trolley. But not Mega Centre. They are so focused on getting that extra dollar out of every one who parks their cars there, that they force you to walk all the way back to the door to park your trolley, but which time you think that you are not going to be able to get out of the car park because too much time will have elapsed between paying your parking and leaving through the lever thing. (I do know that this was stupid on my part, and I should have just abandoned the trolley with my dollar in it, and left it for the poor trolley boy to collect and get a small tip for doing so, but I just couldn’t at that point. I was marching around like an idiot “on a point of principle”… yawn at myself for being such a numpty.)

But what really annoys me about the trip to Mega was not so much the blatant lack of service, and total profiteering (it is a shopping mall after all and was only set up to make money for the owners, so I can accept that) but the really depressing thing is that the Mega centre is the only shopping centre in Almaty. And all the middle class Kazakh families go there, go bowling, eat in the restaurants, watch movies and do that “hanging out at the mall” thing, and seem to think they are getting a good experience. When the reality is totally different. They have hardly any choice, the customer service is terrible, most of the shops sell grossly over priced, out of date stock and hold no reserves so you nearly always have to compromise on what you wanted to buy. It is also daylight robbery, not only from your purse, but of your spirit. It saps one’s strength to carry on. And they just accept it. And in fact, probably think it is quite good. I find that depressing.

And so now, after another week or so of suffering the lack of internet connectivity (which may also be down to my lap top, I am not sure) we are now having to consider taking out an internet service which will cost us nearly $500 to install, and nearly $700 per month to use. And this also sticks in my throat. I am not happy to accept this. The internet is not a luxury and should not be priced as a luxury. My husband has a well-paid job and we should not be noticing the cost of the internet as a major expense in our household bills, but it is going to cost us as much as hiring a full time nanny to get it in the house. And what is more… there is ZERO choice of suppliers for us, until KazTelecom upgrade our telephone line.

This is all really annoying to me, especially in a credit crunch, when our income is not guaranteed and we will all likely make less than we hoped this year.  And I don’t understand why people here accept this, and why the newspapers are not full of stories of this crookery going on in our midst every single day of the year. It is outrageous.

I don’t want to go giving thousands of dollars away to some opportunistic company, which, as my husband described, are using a “rape” strategy – since presumably, with competition, these outrageous rates are unsustainable. How I long for them to go out of business, but not until I have transferred my account to a cheaper server available once I have the new telephone line!

OK rant over. Maybe next time I write on my blog I will be able to upload it straight away on my new internet line.

Off to bed now, but unfortunately without a shower, since our hot water has stopped working. 

Burns Supper

It has been nearly two weeks now since we held the Burns Supper at the Intercontinental Hotel in Almaty. What started as a quick suggestion by husband, “I’m going to organize the Burns Supper here. Will you help me?” turned into a marathon effort of organization which stretched us both to the limit, but which was a good evening, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and we raised a good amount of money for charity. It is not that we consider ourselves duty bound or self-appointed Scotlandizers of the world. In fact, I am not sure how husband came to the decision to take on the mantel of organizer of the Burns Supper, but take it on he did with gusto and I helped.

Last year, there was no Supper, since the person who had planned to organize it was busy with his wife having a baby overseas and when he reaslised he wouldn’t be able to do it, he couldn’t find anyone else to take on the task. A shame, but just goes to show that if you don’t do things yourself, sometimes they just don’t happen at all. When you live in a place like Almaty, it is nice to have things organized so that you have some nice evenings, the expat community gets a chance to mingle a bit, groups mix up and you can have a bit of hassle-free fun. But it relies on there being a number of people willing to help put these things together. Arranging a black tie evening for 225 people at a five star hotel, with a five-piece band and a piper flying in from Scotland, sit down dinner, speeches and haggis being smuggled into the country by the suitcase takes more than an afternoon to organize.

Actually, the event took off steam and especially once our initially-reluctant dance instructor got enthused, and paying punters started coming to the dance practices we had organized then we all got quite excited about everything and things really got going.  Once the band arrived (they are called The Infamous Grouse (great name, great band I think their website is www.infamousgrouse.com or maybe face book, not sure and cant check on the internet at the moment)) we all had a blast of music-filled evenings, nights at the pub and the evening itself, which ran until nearly 3am, and was brilliant.

Highlights for me were the pre-party to welcome the band, thank the people who had helped us to organize everything, and have a good knees up at our house the night before the Burns Night, when Hugh Donald gave us a virtuoso accordion performance sitting in our living room. Our kids, and our friends kids who were staying the night, were all sitting listening on the stairs in their pyjamas and I loved that.

And taking the band hiking two days after the Burns, watching as my gutsy friend L showed her mettle once again, helped me to carry the baby in the back pack and then literally crawled up such a steep slope of ice and snow with Connie on her back. And good for the band for sticking with us, even when we had obviously taken the wrong route and ended up hacking our way through huge pampas grasses, climbing through barbed wire fences (disappointing on that walk as they were the first bits of barbed wire we have ever seen in Kazakhstan!) but finally getting a fabulous view of the Tien Shan mountain range. 

I also enjoyed the very cool sound technician guy on the night, complete with permanent sun glasses, skinny jeans, studded belt and afghan head wrap. Despite having zero verbal communication, through a series of thumbs up, thumbs down and other gesticulating, he did exactly what I wanted with the music all the way through the evening. And if I looked at him after a long break and gave him a “turn it up slowly” kind of sign, he immediately spotted that I was looking at him, and did exactly what I asked. Brilliant.

Continued Internet Issues put Big Beluga in danger of extinction

Big problems getting the Internet in the house. BIG problems. The telephone line has to be upgraded before the Telephone company, Kaz Telecom, will install any new Internet systems. The upgrade would be done in the first two weeks, then the last two weeks of December, we were told.

On January 3^rd with no Internet and no landline, I called our agent to ask about progress and she told me that there were two landlines in the house and so I could use dial up Internet in the meantime while waiting for broadband to be installed. Dial up internet is so obsolete that macs don’t even come with a built-in modem. And since I have a mac, quite apart from the fact that it probably takes about 500 hours to download one email on dial up, I can’t even try since I don’t have a blinking modem. However, I did in desperation plug the telephone line into the computer in the vague hope that something might happen. All that happened was that I discovered that neither telephone line was working at all. A man came at 8.30 on Sunday morning to make them work (which was fantastic because we had got in from a late night at 2am and had banging heads, and installing the phone lines involved copious amounts of hammering - nice).

And today, even worse news. They are not going to upgrade our lines until February and they absolutely will not install any broadband on the old system, so I will just have to lump it. Or find another supplier (I do not yet know of another one for this area).

So I have to go to wretched Café Delia every day to download my mails, where the band width and speed is pathetic, and where I cannot open or update my blog. And I cannot skype my friends or family, or Internet shop (quite useful when you live in a place where you cant get anything, and anything you can get is three times the price it should be and old stock). AGH ALMATY!!!! 

Sasha gets stitches… again

One of my friends here is Korean and she is very friendly and nice and in this blog I will call her Mrs Kim. But her language skills are, by her own admission, absolutely hopeless. We met at the beginning of the year. I was finding that my new Russian lessons were opening up the language section of my brain, and my non-existent Korean (see bigseoulsister.blogspot.com for some clues about that) was absolutely flowing. I was positively lucid! So she took hope from the fact that she had met a westerner who could occasionally translate some of the words into Korean. A shame that she believed this, because the Korean is now firmly gone again and seems, since our recent visit to Thailand, to have been completely overwritten by my very patchy Thai. But that is her disappointment, not mine, since I am more likely to return to Thailand and it is very useful to have some Thai in Thailand. But I digress. This friend’s “Engrish” is terrible, her Russian is, I believe, even worse (although this is hard to imagine!), and after a long trip back to Korea she admitted defeat and hired a full time interpreter to go around with her. This is weird but works well as she can now communicate with everyone she needs to.

But my friend is a plucky and courageous woman who is not going to allow a total lack of communicative ability to prevent her from living in a normal life. When her son single handedly built a 10 metre long ice tunnel in their back garden (not an unimpressive feat given that he is only 7 years old, and my husband spent the best part of his Christmas holidays trying and failing to build an igloo in our garden), she decided to invite some friends over to see it and play in it.

This involved getting the interpreter to write a long and detailed invitation for the kids to come on a certain date and enjoy “fellowship”, snacks, playing in the yard with the igloo tunnel and a request to bring warm clothes etc. Then followed lengthy discussions about how the kids would arrive (we were dropping ours off), she offered the use of two drivers to pick up and collect the kids. It was really quite an intense amount of time and effort required to coordinate what would have taken between two native English speakers from the same country, approximately 1 minute.

But both husband and I were impressed at her guts and effort and really keen for our kids to go and enjoy themselves. The children were excited at the thought of being offered good Korean rice and Kim (dried seaweed) which they so loved eating while living in Seoul, and so they tottered off quite happily to play.

We are both knackered after a tough month of the baby being sick, mother in law staying for four weeks, moving house, organizing the Burns Night and I have also been diagnosed with bronchitis, so basically feeling a bit run down. And with both  he big kids away playing in the Korean house on a Saturday morning, we decided to put the baby down for her nap and watch a DVD (in the day – exciting!).

But half an hour into our film (the outrageously certified 12 Batman film, the Dark Knight – someone must have taken a bung to make that a 12, we were both terrified) the phone rang, and it was Mr Kim.

“Who has had an accident?” asked husband on the phone. I could only hear one side of the conversation but it went something like this:

“Ah, Sasha has had an accident. Is she OK?”

“Oh, you are taking her to hospital? Is she OK?”

“What? What? Which hospital are you going to? Is she OK? Where is the hospital?” and he hung up.

We were not sure how serious her accident was, but we knew she was going to a local hospital up the road, so no time could be lost. husband jumped in the car, mobile phone in hand, trying to find out where they were. We had to wait for him to get there before we would know if she was about to lose an eye or something horrific.

Well, fortunately, it was not too serious. She had merely slipped and needed 7 stitches under her chin.

Husband said that he arrived in the local hospital and burst into the room where Sasha was being attended to, and into which he was not supposed to go according to hospital rules, calling out “Stop!” to the white gowned doctor who stood, poised with needle in hand above our bloody-faced five-year-old daughter who was lying out flat on an operating table.

The doctor took offence that husband preferred to remove our daughter and take her to a place where we could understand the diagnosis and treatment from a doctor who spoke our language (husband understood that much and tried to explain in Russian,

“Look mate, I’m sorry but I can’t speak Russian and neither can this bloke here, and I would just rather go and get this sorted out somewhere where I can understand what’s going on.”) but husband persisted and soon they were heading down the road, daughter sniveling in the passenger seat, on their way to the clinic.

The South African doctor greeted husband warmly – we are practically on first name terms these days, and also informed us that at a recent management meeting of the clinic, we had been mentioned by name as the month’s most profitable family!

Seven stitches later and Sasha was happy as Larry to have a genuine injury with antibiotic pills to take to school, we were greatly relieved not to have anything worse to deal with, and instead of Batman we all three watched Barbie and the Diamond Castle, which is a completely ridiculous film but Sasha loves it.

I am gutted for Mrs Kim. She put so much effort into a lovely day and her worst nightmare happened within half an hour of the start. I am going to ask one of my friends in Korea to translate a message into Korea for her to tell her to please not worry about Sasha’s accident which could have happened anywhere, that we in no way blame her for the accident happening, and that we are terribly sorry that the lovely day she had spent so much time and energy organizing had involved a trip to the local A&E.