Keep Calm and Carry On

So, not being able to buy the camping equipment you so desperately need instantly is hardly going to shorten ones life. Admittedly it is frustrating from time to time, but there are so many other compensatory factors to living the life I do, that I shouldn't complain at the unsurprising difficulty in acquiring basic items like cocoa powder, contact lenses, fresh coffee or decent bread (go get a breadmaker because apart from Marrone Rosso cafe there isn't any in town). 

And when I have mornings like these, I simply go home, and get out my EESK (English Expat Survival Kit), pictured below. Nothing as restorative as a freshly brewed pot of builders tea, drunk out of my newly acquired summer present-to-myself mug: 

Stock issues

The curse of Tsum, the department store which has reduced me to tears before now, seems to affect the whole block in which it is located. 

Planning a one night camping trip to the wilds with friends this weekend, I set off at 10am today to buy a gas canister for our lantern, a tarpauline and poles to give shade and some camping chairs. Possibly, even, I dared to imagine, I might buy a plug into the car cool box for the beers. 

Walking into the town's largest camp store Robinson, 50 metres down the road from Tsum, which oddly enough has two large suits of armour standing at the front door, I make my way inside. 

By means of my poor russian, a pen and paper and much talking, the shop assistants and I manage to ascertain that they: 

1. Sell lanterns but there no gas canisters for sale in the whole of Almaty until September

2. It will be almost impossible to find fuel for our trangia cookers (Swedish made, used all over the world) here. They do not even understand the concept of liquid non-gas fuel, but suggest I use petrol instead. 

3. Do not sell tarpaulins to give shade. They do have a ground sheet which we could perhaps string up. They sell poles, but not the little pointy bits that allow you to use them through a metal eyelet - totally useless poles. 

4. Do not have chairs in stock. 

5. They do sell rope - well done!!

I can feel the familiar rage rising but keep my cool, although I cannot help myself from asking what is the point of having about 20 different lanterns for sale if you do not sell the fuel to make them give light? What is the point? Agh! This is still very  post-soviet, and people are so used to products not always being available that they can hardly understand the question. They do not expect to have all the necessary components for anything easily available to them. 

I head to Limpopo, the classiest of Almaty's outdoor stores but with limited stock also, and find a really nice guy who agrees that the Trangia looks like an excellent piece of kit, but that of course, in Kazakhstan nothing like that is available. He agrees that it is frustrating not to be able to get the right kit. As a keen climber he has to make do with what he can find. But he is able to tell me what is probably the russian term for methylated spirits, the fuel required by Trangia cookers. I will set Baktiyar the driver to the test of finding and buying a litre of purple fuel and see what he can find this afternoon. 

My friend calls and our camping trip is cancelled as her husband has to work all weekend. 

So picnic at Big Almaty Lake instead. Fine. 

A mother's lot

Feeling quite the Nigella Lawson yesterday, I knocked up a couple of banana and chocolate chip loaves after lunch, and the house was full of the wafting aroma of delicious baking. Warm, moist banana loaf was ready for the children and I had a totally clear conscience as I left in the evening for a supper meeting leaving the children with our new nanny to have their tea and be put to bed. 

Arriving home later, I walked into my bedroom to see a little note on my pillow. The girls are wont to leave loving messages from time to time, "Ah, sweet," I thought, as I walked towards the note. There was something resting on the paper, some egg shell, maybe they found a nest or something interesting in the garden I thought. Then I read it. 

"I FOUND EGG SHELL IN MY CAKE" 

Never mind "I found some egg shell in the lovingly-prepared, fabulously delicious, freshly baked loaf that you kindly prepared for me this afternoon". Looks like my eldest daughter will be an "outraged from Tunbridge Wells" kind of letter writer in later life! 

Big Beluga on the Radio!

Big Beluga Baby is all of a twitter today because she was interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live this morning. You can hear this here if you click on listen again for Monday 24th August. Kids were thrilled to hear Mummy on the radio as we always listen to some radio at breakfast time. If you do go to this link, then scroll along to about 2.45 hours thru the programme to find the section I am in. It is questions to expats all over the world.

Considering that the show I was on (BBC Five Live's Up all Night) was being played at 3.35am in the UK I think I am safe from instant fame in my homeland. It is also unlikely that the Kazakh secret service were tuning into Five Live (unless they had been listening to victorious England in the last Ashes Test Match, fallen asleep and woken four hours later to hear some over-excited expat  housewife describing their country as "like the wild west on cocaine"), so I am probably safe from expulsion on the grounds of criticizing the regime, which, for the avoidance of doubt, I was not!

So how did the Beluga get invited to speak? Persuaded by my friend Emily Expat (not her real name!) whose friend works for the beeb and had asked her to do it. Emily Expat was too aware of her own propensity to say outrageous things and so she had passed it on - or perhaps she had been worried that the show might air after a Sunday night session in Line Brew pub and she might have really shocked everyone then. 

Fermented Bread Soup

To mark my husband's 100th Russian lesson, and as a small reward her for her immense patience in the face of incredible repetition rates, we decided to treat our Russian teacher to dinner. 

Her favourite Russian restaurant in Almaty is called Namedin (I will try to add the Russian script later) and it is at 44 Furmanova Street, on the corner with Makataeva Street (tel: 8 727 273 8494 - no website). 

Despite the huge investment in lessons, neither husband nor I are exactly fantastic at Russian, but we had all agreed in advance that we would do the meal without using English. This could have been a recipe for one of the dullest evenings on record, but in fact, we were all able to entertain each other with lots of stories and had a really good time. 

The food was Russki, and the most notable dish was a course of chilled summer soup.  The base of the soup is a liquid of water in which bread has fermented, which gives the soup a tangy flavour and makes it distinctly fizzy. Within the whiteish, watery stock, there float hundreds of minutely chopped sticks of cucumber and a good smattering of dill, small pieces of cooked beef into which you add a couple of dollops of sour cream. 

We tried it, husband almost gagged but was able to cover this up! I didn't mind the strange fizziness, and the tangy chilliness was quite refreshing, but it definitely goes against the grain as someone from food-sell-by-date-obsessed England to eat anything apart from blue cheese that has a hint of change-through-time about it.

We ordered a huge meal: 

potato breads with beetroot and aubergine salads

a plate of assorted cold meats (tongue, roast beef, chicken, pork sausage)

the cold soup (say no more)

main course: Pork cutlets with a rich sauce of sour cream and smoked sausage, noodles and pancakes stuffed with potatoes and onions

fruit platter, chilled melon and an apple stuffed pancake baked in custard. 

This is what we ate based on our original conversation that it would be a good idea to order some nice, light, summery dishes!  Going back for some winter food may take a certain amount of building up to... like a 10 day fast.

Slumdog Toilets

I have finally watched the film Slumdog Millionaire. What a fantastic story - so optimistic and romantic, beautifully filmed and with an amazing sound track. Top film. 

My comment today is that other people who have seen the film scoffed at my earlier description of the horrors of the toilets at the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (19 October 08, The World's Worst Toilet blog). They told me, "Wait until you see Slumdog Millionaire, that is definitely the worst toilet in the world," but I have to argue that they were wrong. 

The toilet on the Kyrgyz side of the Kazakh/Kyrgyz border is a place that noone should ever go. I have seen some very bad loos (notably the Hong Kong Driving License office toilet, very bad, poo everywhere,  and I remember a really bad toilet between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo where it was so rank my friend could not bring herself to use the bowl and admitted later that she had peed in the hand basin). And also some very good ones (all in Japan - amazing place to do your business). 

As my husband pointed out, the fact that the number one tip for tourists entering Kyrgyzstan at this particular border crossing (a country keen to exploit its fabulous natural wonders as an eco-tourist hub) is to avoid at all costs entering the first lavatory you see, shows that they still have a long way to go!

Below are two pictures of quite a good toilet near the Ille River in Kazakhstan. The amazing thing about the picture on the right was that after taking this snap I dropped the camera and watched in despair as it plummeted towards the dark hole of doom. Then miraculously, it bounced just on the right-hand foot plate and onto the safety of the wooden surround. A not-too-deep breath of relief later and I picked up my precious Olympus - I would never have been as desperate as Jamal to get it back (to understand this, you must watch the film...).

   

Samarkand, the Uzbekistan trip rolls on...

We were met at the station by a new driver (there are definitely some huge advantages to booking a tour in this country - not having to faff about arguing with taxi drivers about ridiculous fares every time you want to go anywhere is definitely one of them) and he drove us to our hotel, the Hotel Malika (not the hotel that pops up when you click on Samarkand, but a new one in the same group, very close to the Registan which is the main tourist attraction). It was a perfectly pleasant 3 star hotel, really clean with a good breakfast, and had obviously already attracted a loyal following from local tour operators because of its consistency of service and the good, functioning, pleasantly decorated rooms. 

One of the biggest headaches in running any business in this part of the world is achieving consistency of standards, and also in getting buildings to actually function. It sounds so basic, but then you see how places are built here and you start to realise why every building is riven with huge faults and that it is only a matter of time before they go wrong. 

Basically, all buildings are put together using a collection of impoverished labourers from the cheapest, nearest pool of labour, so in Kazakhstan there are a lot of Turkish and Uzbek workers, in Russia it is a standing joke that the Tajiks do this stuff (and that they are hopeless at it - see Nasha Russia - the Russian version of the BBC comedy programme Little Britain which has an hilarious skit about two Tajik decorators and their horrible Russian boss who just despairs of their incompetence and lack of language skills. I could not find any clips of these characters, but you can get the gist of the programme if you see some of the video clips on this site, they really show the gross side of Russia). I guess in Uzbekistan it is also a real mixture of where people come from. 

Anyway, these labourers appear at a site, a huge hole is dug for foundations, they all set up camp either on the plot itself, or if there is no space, on a nearby bit of waste ground like a bunch of gypsies, and there they live and work using hand tools and sweat until they get the job done. 

You never see any power tools, or accurate-looking instruments being used. I think they judge a lot of straight lines by eye, rather than using spirit levels. Work tends to be done very quickly, land is not given time to settle before construction begins even if it has been recently leveled,  so almost as soon as a building is finished, bits start falling down, or off the side/roof etc. And this is absolutely normal. 

But anyway, I totally digress. In Samarkand the main thing to visit is the Registan. A huge development of mosque buildings, minarets and domes which rather dominates the city. It is not a working mosque - the population, although something like 90% muslim, is only approximately 15% practising, and so there are a few mosques in and around town which are still genuine places of worship, but the Registan is purely there these days for its architectural and decorative merit. 

And a very good photo opportunity it makes too!  The stunning blue domes, wonderful and intricate patterned tile work that covers the monuments are all really attractive and impressive to view.