Head of state on the slopes

I happened to be up at Chimbalak, our local ski resort, yesterday on quite the most glorious morning. There had been about 7 inches of snow over night, and because President Nazarbayev was evidently planning a visit (we worked this out from the solid presence of policemen and people scraping ice off the road all the way up there), the slopes had been pisted even before 10am when the lift opens.

Chimbalak, and Almaty in general, will host the 2011 Asian Winter Games if a certain development company gets its act together and manages to upgrade the infrastructure in time. The credit crisis has taken a serious toll on this much-leveraged firm, and while their vision and ideas for the city were obviously ground-breaking and impressive originally, their cash flow management leaves much to be desired. Having had an entire summer to work on putting in new lifts and upgrading the frankly rotten facilities at the top of the hill, there has been no change at Chimbalak except for the removal of the car park closest to the piste, and the installation of tons of plant which is now sitting in the snow mainly unused. The result is that skiers have to park on an unpaved area of mud half way up the side of the slope, pick their way through cables and past diggers and then slide down the slope to the ticket office (conveniently placed so you have to take off your skis to get to it!). At the end of a hard days skiing, you then have to clamber back up this slope, duck under the cables again to get back to your car. It is pretty basic, but at only 25 minutes from our front door, we don't actually care that much as long as some of the lifts are working.

From time to time the president likes to have a few runs, and Tuesday was one of these days. He will be 70 in a couple of weeks time, but President Nazarbayev is pretty spry for his age. He brought with him around 30 honchos and heavies, camera men and assorted hangers on. They then stopped the normal flow of skiers making their way down to the chair lift, and off he went.

The person on the chair lift with the red jacket is the President of Kazakhstan. 

It left me wondering how many current heads of state go for a quick ski during their working weeks!

When shouting works!

A couple of incidents lately have left me wondering about the local psyche.

First of all, I had a long conversation with my Russian teacher about the way English people behave. Apparently, in general, we are considered "tricky" to deal with on account of our lack of propensity to say exactly what we mean, because we are always trying to be polite. Turns out that many other nationalities find our pleasant interactions frustrating and baffling and they cannot understand why we don't just spit out what we mean, instead of couching things in gentler terms.

"But if someone is nice to me all the time," she asked, "How can I tell if they are my friend or not? Maybe they are just pretending they like me."

"Well, yes, maybe," I thought, "But surely you would prefer that to someone treating you as if they don't like you?"
I explained to her that one of the things foreigners living here most often complain about is the surly first-contact experiences they have with locals. Having lived in many different countries, I have finally learnt not to take first impressions too much to heart (it took a while). You simply cannot understand where a person is coming from by their first reaction to you, if they do not share the same cultural background as you.  I would much prefer that the norm here was to be smily, happy and helpful, but that is just not the way it works. It may be the case in other countries, notably the US where service with a smile is an oft-repeated mantra, but in the UK that whole idea is a relatively recent concept.

"We don't like to give out our smiles at the start, but then the next time you meet someone, if they like you, you will be able to tell," she enlightened me. And she is right. My general approach everywhere, is to be smiling and courteous, and to persevere even in the face of the grumpiest, most sour-faced bureaucrat as I tempt them to crack their dour expression at least into a twinkle in the eye. But, my goodness, you have to persistent to get results sometimes. If I fail, I generally find it quite funny. Being that grumpy takes a huge amount of concentration! Most of the time, with enough smiling and general pleasantry-making, you can eek out some kind of signal that you are making progress. And the next time you come across that person, you will practically be asked to go and drink vodka with them for a couple of days.

Contrast this with the over-zealous smiling of the Thai nation, for example, where foreigners complain that everyone is so nice all the time, but then they will stab you in the back as soon as look at you - the famous crocodile-smile complaint - you just can't win.

But I digress. I am going to share a still-being-developed theory for social interaction in Central Asia with you. On two occasions recently, I have had cause to get annoyed with people and, forgetting my usual "be nice to all" mantra, I have let rip with a torrent of abuse then stopped speaking, slightly horrified at myself, only to find that the torrent has worked, and the recipient is now a meek and pliable bit of putty in my hands.

The first victim was an officious security guard at the ski resort, who was trying to force my 6-year-old to queue to go through the ticket machine even though she is too young to have a ticket. By queueing with me, she usually loses a ski or two as we struggle to get through the turnstile together, and then we hold up the whole queue and other people shout at us to get a move on, and it is all quite stressful. However, there is a plastic fence located down the side of the line, and she can easily ski up the outside, wait at the end until I get through the ticket barrier and then nip in at the front. Considering there are legions of VIPs who regularly do this anyway, it is not as if she is the only person doing it.

The security guard kept telling her she had to go with me, and could not go through at the top, until I yelled at him in patchy Russian not to be such an idiot, that she did not have a ticket, and it was very difficult for her to come through the machine with me, and honestly, what was the problem with one small young child waiting for her mother on the other side of the turntable, get a life! And immediately, it was no problem. They practically gave her a seat and a cup of tea to enjoy while waiting the next time we came around. Extraordinary.

Second time, was in a shop, where my toddler had put some items on the floor while we were trying on some trousers, and an assistant came round tutting and complaining, "What's all this then," as if we had single-handedly de-stocked all their shelves and were planning to leave everything in disarray.

"Oh get over yourself, I will put them back on a minute," I snarled. Moments later, she re-appeared, smiling ingratiatingly, and offering to search the stock room for anything I required. Amazing.

I have told a few people about these rather weird experiences. And especially among the friends of mine who are working here, my observations are met with sniggers and nods, as if I am the last person on earth to have worked this strange thing out.

It seems that to come across as too friendly at the beginning of an interaction is taken as a sign of weakness, and one should not reveal one's hand too early. Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen is modus operandi for this town. And so the brusque approach which most people reserve for dealing with people round here, is the one to take. They are not, as it turns out, being incredibly rude. Just normal.

How to tell your mum you are up the duff

I am now a full five months pregnant, but I have not told my mother about this. We have a fairly close relationship, but by dint of my being abroad, she has not seen my expanding waistline so has been utterly oblivious and also completely engrossed in the arrival of her fourth grand daughter who was born three weeks ago to my sister.

I was really nervous about telling her. She has made it clear that she thinks that one more kid will be too much to handle. She feels that I might have been pressurized by my husband into having four (admittedly he has been keener than me on the idea, but at the end of the day, I am happy to go along with his idea of the perfect family and I am sure that in the long term, having a bigger family will be terrifically rewarding and fun).

I am old enough that I think I should be able to organise my life without being answerable to my parents, but there are some things in life that never change. Perhaps it is because I am Piscean, but I seem to still crave her approval in most things. Not that I really pay that much attention to what she says (our views  on many things are not aligned), but if she has made it clear that she thinks something is not a good idea and I am then basically going against her advice and doing something anyway, it does make me anxious. Perhaps I am doing something totally crazy? Readers of this blog will be aware that I have questioned my own sanity on the subject of this pregnancy. Maybe I will not be able to cope? My own self-doubt has been reinforced with her worry! Maybe, in an awful way, she will be proved right. What if I find myself drowning in an emotional whirlpool of screaming baby, crying toddler, sullen and neglected primary schoolers, the older children weeping in misery as a domestic implosion occurs, sucking us all down, and which is all my own fault for having too many babies.

Well, finally yesterday I managed to break the news to my parents. I had been talking to my sister who has just had her first baby. Despite having been offered a brand new, lightweight, compact stroller from us (admittedly it would fall into the category of hand-me-down which this baby is not going to experience if she can have anything to do with it!), they decided to buy a Phil and Ted's deluxe gigantic pushchair. Surprise, surprise, three weeks into parenthood, they are finding that their designer chair is so big that they can hardly get it in the car, and it weighs so much that they are both in danger of slipping disks in their backs from heaving it around the place. I was telling my mother this, and we both agreed that you just can't tell people things sometimes, and it is probably better to just let them spend their money and they will buy a smaller stroller in the end anyway.

I then told her that, well actually, in fact, umm, our own lightweight stroller  is going to be drafted back into action next March in our house.

Silence on the end of the phone.

"Oh" came the response. Not as bad as I expected, I was half expecting for her to say something like, "Oh god, you are joking aren't you? You're not serious? Oh, for god's sake."

There was a reasonably long pause before my father piped up to rescue the situation from his armchair (they use the speaker phone on our phone calls so they can both chip in) with the classic "That's great news, darling".

There is a lot to work out, especially if I end up not having the baby in Kazakhstan, when we will actually be in rather desperate need of some support and help from our parents. On both sides they have plenty of grandchildren these days, so no one is jumping out of said armchair and offering to rush over and help out. The novelty has completely worn off. Although we live away and so they hardly ever take the kids, that works very well for them. They come for visits and when we go and stay with them, I am always around.

If Mummy did come and help out, it would not be her preferred new born experience - lots of cuddles and walking around holding a pleasantly-snuffling little tiny one, making the odd cup of tea and going for proud granny walks with the pushchair. It would be straight into bedlam that is our house, with the three other kids careering around, bouncing off the walls (it will be the end of the winter and we will have relatively been inside rather a lot), probably eating nothing but eggs and breakfast cereal.

It was understandably a bit of a news thunderbolt for them, and sweetly, the next day my father called to offer all the help they could give. "Just make your plans to use us as much as you can," he said. My mother also, had sent a hasty email to apologise for the lengthy radio silence that had greeted the news, "It was just such a surprise, I didn't know what to say," she admitted.

And now that the news if officially out and about in family-land, I feel incredibly lucky to have such a supportive bunch to help us through what will be a challenging but perfectly-manageable time.

Lurgy central

Wow. Last week was a house of sickness in Almaty. First our eldest daughter crashed, vomitting and feverish, to the floor for a two-day bout of television watching and recovery. Then, while preparing a large lunch to celebrate our smallest's 2nd birthday, second daughter went bright red in the face and was overwhelmed with a high temperature for two days. By the end of the lunch party, I was feeling rank, coughing and also feverish and took to my bed for what turned out to be a three-day spell of feeling so hellish that doing anything apart from lying in bed in a gloomy room was enough to make me weep. Half way through the week, husband also succumbed and "worked from home" which actually meant wandering the house hacking and coughing and complaining of feeling rank, in between heavy doses of Lemsip and sleep.

I have never had flu before. Nasty, nasty bug. Even the smallest domestic task felt like an insurmountable effort. At our lowest point, when both of us were feeling dreadful, the children ate cheerios breakfast cereal for their supper!

But seven whole days (and a large packet of antibiotics) later I am delighted to report to feeling more or less back to normal!

Where's Mummy? Bed

Since going to see the doctor's in London, and being advised to rest for at least one hour a day for the duration of this pregnancy, I have felt much, much better. Turns out that having three children and being pregnant for the 6th time can take its toll on your body. Unless I rest every day, come one o'clock in the morning, I am woken with horrible crampy pains across my abdomen which only subside as the sun rises and it is time to get up again. Doctors think this is due to general wear and tear, and bed rest has been the key to stopping this rather degenerative sleep deprivation.

You may think it is simple to just go to bed. But basically, if I go to sleep for two hours a day, then that means that two hours a day of not pottering around and getting things done. I don't get an extra two hours awake at night, because I am still as knackered by the end of the day as normal, but I do get to sleep at night, rather than wander around drinking peppermint tea and reading blogs by candle light!

And especially on the weekend, when we have no one around to help out with the kids, it is husband who has to take up this extra child minding, dishwasher loading etc etc. I feel so sorry for him (although of course, he is half responsible for my predicament to start with). He is so knackered and really needs to lie in or nap, but if he does then we tend to run out of time to do anything at all with our free time and he hates that, so it is his sleep which is being sacrificed while I snore away.

On the bright side, the resting is really working. I have gone from an average of three or four night's lost sleep per week to none since beginning to put my feet up.

This last week I have been well and truly knocked out with the flu. The sleep tally has risen. I have never spent so much time in bed. It is not, surely, natural for a human to sleep so much without actually lapsing into full-on hibernation? Days and days, hours and hours of being unconscious during the day and then sleeping again at night. Having just awoken from another long nap (I went to bed thinking I would not be able to sleep since I had only been up for five hours and the sum total of my efforts today has been playing lego and putting the marzipan layer on the Christmas Cake, but was out of it within minutes and pushed out another couple of hours of good quality zzzs), it is probably only another few nano-seconds until it is time for bed again.

A couple of days ago, he went to get our toddler out of her cot before heading off to Tajikistan for the week.
"Where's Mummy?" he asked her, and although I was actually downstairs plaiting the hair of our other two for school.
"Bed!" she confidently replied.

St Thomas here we come

For those who check in every so often to Big Beluga, you will know that I have just spent a week in London on a "shopping trip". For those who know me well at all, the idea of me going on a shopping trip is one that I would like the idea of, but not something that I would normally fork out 800 dollars to go and spoil myself with. And in fact, it was not just a shopping trip. I went back to have an amniocentesis test done at a private clinic where I could be sure that the practitioner's cock-up rate was low.

I cloaked my trip in lies about having a shopping trip and visiting my sister who was having her baby.
I didn't want the news of this pregnancy to come out three days before the arrival of my sister's first, much waited for child. But I had to go this week in order to be within the time limits for this test (which is up to 20 weeks of your pregnancy), because the week afterwards, my husband was on a business trip to Moscow for five days. Super nanny is very nice, but we cannot leave all our children in her care while we are both out of the country.

I did the test (which was pretty unpleasant, but I survived and so did baby), and also visited a couple of places where I could possibly have the baby next year when it arrives.

I can hardly describe the sense of security I felt being seen by a proper consultant at the St Thomas Landsell Suite maternity unit near Waterloo station. He seemed so nice, has so many letters after his name, has many many years of experience, works in several of the cleanest, best practice hospitals in London. The staff in the unit are lovely (I have been there to visit a friend when she had had a baby before, and then also, they were utterly fantastic). They are classic no nonsense nurses and midwives: sensible but friendly and pleasant and extremely professional. And english-speaking too, working in an environment that I can understand, with a system that is vaguely familiar. The relief I felt, sitting in the waiting room of a place that smells like a hospital, where there is obviously a good system in operation, and where everyone seems to know what they are talking about was extraordinary.

And it made me think that for the six or seven weeks disruption that it will cause our family next year if I do go away, I would much, much, much rather have the baby somewhere like that, than try to stay at home and be absolutely bricking myself with worry about everything.

It may not be London which is only convenient for one of my sisters and we may need more help than that (she has a full time job which interferes terribly with being on hand 24 hours a day to be my helper! ha ha). But somewhere in the UK. There is still lots to work out, but I am sure we will get there.

A wish for a simpler life...

Well, I have finally come to terms with my pregnant state. It only took four months to accept it and become even happy about it and so I am really glad (not to mention relieved) about that.

But now, we have a few logistical things to consider.

Our clinic does not particularly recommend having your baby in Kazakhstan. They couch everything in very diplomatic terms, but when the opening sentence from your doctor is:

"Now, the thing you should remember is that you won't find the sort of facilities here that you are probably used to for having your baby," you start to wonder what it is going to be like. I have had babies in Brazil, Hong Kong and Seoul and so I am not exactly "used" to anything. But last year's miscarriage was not great (even though it was the best you can get here) and I have serious heebie jeebies about doing it all here. Even if it might be easier for others around me (kids and husband).

Another girl I know who had her first baby here described it as "a nightmare, the worst thing that I have ever done." And someone else I know, who had her first baby in Almaty last year (so she had no idea what it could be like), thought it was OK. When I probed a little further I realised that it had been pretty tough for her as well, but she just hadn't known because she had never done it before!

And after my miscarriage last year (see my Gynacologia! Gynacologia! post of last October) I have to admit that I would not be going to hospital to have this one feeling relaxed and I have recently heard enough medical scare stories to put you off even visiting a doctor's in Almaty, or in fact, anywhere in the former CIS. Admittedly, I do not yet know the full intricacies of Kazakh birthing options, but I can't believe that practitioners here use the latest best practice, and in the awful event that a new born needs serious medical support, well, that is simply not available. Fabulous neo-natal care is not available here.

And all this considered, husband and I are thinking that perhaps it might be better for me to go to the UK to have this one. Which leaves a few other things to sort out:

1. What to do with the other three children we already have?

2. Where to stay if I do go back to the UK - we sold our flat recently so we are homeless. Stay in a hotel? Rent a flat near the hospital? It will most likely be central London (where our health insurance works with various hospitals) so not cheap.

3. When would I have to go back? We have to work on the assumption that everything will be straightforward, in which case I can fly at 36 weeks. But if anything gets complicated, then life will take a stressful turn.

4. When will husband come back to make sure he is there for the birth - I don't fancy doing it entirely myself, nor do I like the idea of asking even a close friend in to see me grunting away in labour! I may have to schedule a caesarian.

5. Will we ask my parents to come out to Kazakhstan and help with the older kids? For how long? Could they leave my aged grandmother for weeks on end? No. My father may be having treatment for an illness in which case, they will of course, be engrossed in that.
6. Will we bring all the kids back to the UK when the baby arrives (neither husband nor I like the thought of leaving the oldest kids on their own in Kazakhstan without either parent). To stay where?

7. What about MIL? Sister in law will have just had her 2nd baby and so is probably relying on her own mother to be around to help out. I would feel bad to interfere with that.

8. How will the kids be without me for weeks on end? Maybe six or seven weeks by the time I have the baby and get its passport and visa for Kazakhstan.

All in all, trauma.

You can add into this heady mix of questions the fact that my husband will be in his "busy" season at work which usually means working 18 hour days for him, and the fact that the kids have a 10-day half term a week before my due date. Oh yes, and our eldest daughter will have her 9th birthday on the 12th March (my due date is the 4th or 5th - my birthday is the 4th as well!). It is all complicated.

I could stay here. But I just don't fancy it. Should anything go wrong, we are not sure that the medical care will be adequate to save me or the baby. So no matter how much it costs, how complicated it all gets, I think we will go to England.