Apartment pix

Hello again,

I'm feeling very prolific of late as well as computer savvy so I thought I'd post pictures of my apartment and Almaty. Here goes!

My apartment is a three-room sixth-floor very sunny place with a great 180 view of the city. It's much cheerier than other places I've seen, although as you will see, the exterior does not bode well. Most apartments that live up to western standards have been renovated, and mine is no exception. The hallways have lights, which is not true of all buildings.

This is a picture of my living room that faces north.

My office has only a couch and desk, lots off room for books and things that I don't need to buy but probably will.

My kitchen faces east toward the moutains and is a delight in the morning - very sunny and breezy. Unfortunately, there is a very strange digging project going on outside my window whose mission I cannot identify. I hear banging and shouting at all hours of the day and night, even on weekends, with lights making it seem almost like day time. My landlord just said, "They're digging." But it keeps my imagination active as to its purpose. We writers need such stimuli.
Here are some pictures of my apartment building. The first is the front, the second is the back where I enter.Notice the black kitty who lets me pet her when I come home. I left out some tuna juice for her today.

Going Chop Chop with the Natives

No trip to Kazakhstan would be complete without talking about the language, which in this case must be plural because they speak both Russian and Kazakh. I was drawn to this position for many reasons, but among them was the fact that I know Russian. Or so I thought. It’s an ideal language-learning situation because most people here don’t know any English, so if you want to buy, say, a watermelon as I did today (for only $1.50!), you’d better figure out some speech to do it with. That’s why living abroad is so good – it expedites learning by a factor of 10 or more. I’ve had to watch the Olympics with Russian-speaking commentators. So, I picked up a few words without trying very hard. I do put effort into trying to read and understand signs and messages. Someone told me last night that he thought I spoke Russian very well. Of course I blushed at such a preposterous comment – I think he was astounded that a westerner could say anything in Russian. Everyone asks me where I’m from and what I’m doing here. They are pleased I am a professor, and I am accorded a lot of respect. We’ll see how that holds with my students when I start teaching next week.

The other language spoken here is Kazakh. It’s based on Turkish and uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It used to have its own script, but was then transliterated into our Latin alphabet then again into Cyrillic when the Rooskies barged in in 1917. It is a language that is not spoken natively even by many Kazakhs. The Soviets routed out a lot of the indigenous languages (e.g., Kyrghiz, Turkemni, Uighur, etc.) and replaced them with Russian, so many generations have grown up with Russian being the main language, or in most cases the only one. It has made it hard for people to remain literate since many did not have access to additional education that would help them learn the new alphabet. Limiting access to their written word is a classic, time-honored way that governments have controlled the masses. That said, Kazakh is the only language spoken by those in the very small towns. So I guess I’d learn how to say ‘yurt’ in Kazakh if I venture out into the boonies. I'm I'm lucky, it's a Kazakh word and I just have say it with a Russian accent.

I’m told that Kazakh has nine additional letters that represent sounds that do not exist in Russian. But when Kazakh names are transliterated into English, they look very strange indeed, almost as if they’ve taken all the leftover letters from a Scrabble game and dumped them all on the table to make words such as the town Kyzylorda and street names like Qonaev and Rozybakiev. Put one of them babies on a triple score square and you’ve won handily.

The country is trying to go back to using its language. President Nazerbaev, himself a Kazakh, is promoting bilingualism with bilingual signs and Kazakh courses in schools, with the eventual goal of phasing out Russian. We teach Kazakh in our Language Center and I can take courses in it for free, but I feel that my brain is already red and swollen with attempts at reviving my college Russian. I have placed into the intermediate level (they set the bar low here) and will start classes next month. Russian will get me a lot farther in both Kazakhstan and Russia, which I plan to visit soon despite the outrageous prices and uproar over Georgia.

Na zdarovia! (To your health)
Nancy

New apartment and grocery shopping

Dear friends,

This missive finds me newly installed in my apartment on a busy intersection in Almaty that hosts many fast-moving and noisy cars. It will take some getting used to the intermittent beeping and whoosh. But offsetting that inconvenience is the wonderful view of the city that my sixth-floor apartment affords. The elevator seems more reliable than others I’ve been in. But just in case, and of course for reasons concerning health, I’m committed to walking up and down, except when laden with groceries (concerning which, please see below).

The apartment is an absolute delight. I watched the sun set last night from my living room and rise this morning from my kitchen. The balcony stretches around the building so I can see to the south the Zailiysky Alatau mountains, a spur of the Tian Shan mountains, which boast peaks of almost 25,000 ft. They appear close enough to touch. The owner of my apartment is a young man, perhaps 28 or so, who has kept it in excellent condition. Wood herringbone floors, new throw rugs, and even some Krups appliances will make my stay very pleasant. I’m told that when the Soviet system broke up, all the apartments, which had been state owned, were simply given to the occupants. They now rent them out at outrageous prices and move farther out of town, where rent is more reasonable.

There is the matter of shopping now that I am out of the hotel. I feel safe in saying that in any other country one visits, except for perhaps in Canada, there are choices for goods and foodstuffs that cannot possibly be made on logic but rather faith that it will cook up into something edible and not land one in the hospital. Such was my situation last night when I visited the neighborhood grocery store that is bigger than a mini-mart but half of which is devoted to selling and even serving liquor. A man stood at the ready behind a special counter for eager, thirsty beer drinkers who may want to imbibe while choosing from the array of cookies, meats, cheeses, and yogurts.

Back to the making blind choices part. It brought back memories of my visit to a friend in Paris when I was about 30 years old. I didn’t want to buy lunch at an expensive restaurant, so I went to a market, secure in the knowledge that my years of French would win me a full tummy. While in the market, I spied a counter with ready-made vegetables, much as we have delis in our markets, and thought the beets looked inviting. The saleswoman asked me brusquely how much I wanted. It turned out that French was not my problem but knowing the metric system was. The price was per kilo, but, hey, I’m an American. What do I know from kilos? I felt rushed and embarrassed to be one of those stupid Americans who only solidify the European stereotype of us. Although I didn’t know how much to order, I thought a half kilo sounded like a reasonable amount. So, under pressure not to hold up the line, I squeaked out “un demi kilo, s’il vous plait,” and in a flash she’d dished up quite lot of beets, which I now know was over a pound. I took my purchase back to the apartment, where my friend asked me if I’d intended to buy enough beets for all the French Foreign Legion. As we teachers like to say, this was a teachable moment. I have never looked at beets, nor the metric system, the same way again.

At the store last night, however, my knowledge of the metric system did not help me make decisions about goods that were labeled only in Russian (and some in Kazakh). This would account for my purchase of 100 grams of salt, which I took to be sugar. (That’s about the same amount as a plastic bag of confectioner’s sugar.) I now have enough salt to soak all the cucumbers in Almaty and surrounding environs in brine for the entire year, perhaps longer. I can only hope the salt doesn’t cake into a brick before I get around to my canning.

I managed to buy eggs, bread, and butter (although there were several kinds and I couldn’t decipher the differences among them). From these goods, I was to make my very first dinner in Kz land, which I did accomplish. The bread is not bad at all but the packaging suffers a bit. It comes wrapped in the thinnest plastic known to man and is tied in a knot. It looks as if my Aunt Minnie made it in her kitchen that morning, and perhaps she did. It was cheap, though. A loaf cost about 40 cents, while butter (about as big as a cake of soap or 200 grams) cost a little over a dollar, and the cheese (it was yellow and free of mold, so I bought it, again taking a leap of faith) was about $4.00. So the staples seem to be somewhat tolerable in cost, although digestibility still undetermined. Four little cartons of Dannon’s Activia cost about $2.50. Then came the Big Kahuna – washing machine detergent. It seemed wise to choose from among the products based on cost, since I couldn’t detect whether I would be paying for advertising and slick packaging of one over the other. So, my purchase, which purportedly does 30 loads, cost a bit over $6. Ten eggs (they come in packs of 10, obviously a slam at our American notion of dozen), cost about a $1.25. Not bad. Being unable to verify the quality and provenance of any these goods? Priceless.

I have not used the washing machine yet. It is modeled on the German marks that allow you to use a cycle called “cook wash,” which gives you the opportunity to set the water temp at an astonishing 90 C (something over 200 degrees!) But in case the water temperature doesn’t dispatch the germs and grime, the sheer battering the clothes take in the hour and a half cycle surely will. Clean clothes? You bet. Colorless and threadbare? De rigueur. I think I may stick to soaking stuff overnight if I want to be able to recognize (and wear) it again in its clean state.

My job starts next week (Aug. 18) and we have orientation starting today. I’ll give you a front-row seat as the vagaries and nuances of Kazakh culture and KIMEP unfurl. Thanks for listening.

Arrival in Almaty and first impressions

Dear friends and family,

I have arrived without incident in this far-off and exotic place. I’m still absorbing the environs and culture of Almaty, a process I am sure will take as long as I stay here. But so far, it is hospitable enough and offered me, if not a lot of vegetables, then surely meat and bread – steppe staples, I call them.

My first couple of days were frenzied trips about town by the folks in the housing department helping me look for an apartment. The department is paying for my stay in the Hotel Kazakhstan for the first 10 days and understandably has a vested interest in getting me out of there and into my own place. I have just been told that I cannot rent the apartment I had wanted and now must spend the rest of the day looking at yet more. It seems flexibility is the best tool against mired in culture shock here. But I know it’s on its way.

Almaty is rather run down. Building facades are crumbling and in some the windows remain broken. Entryways to apartment buildings are enough to scare even the most traveled individual to developing countries: most are without lighting and when there is an elevator, it is frightfully small (able to carry four thin people at a time) and old enough to look as though they carried many a Soviet party member in their heyday.

My university has many new buildings, and others are being renovated, including the one housing my office. It has the clumsy name of the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, and Strategic Research and goes by the initialism KIMEP (it doesn’t match the name because it reflects the Russian translation of the school’s name). KIMEP is one of about 15 institutes in Almaty, but is the only one modeled after the American system. According to the assistant director of the Language Center, where I work, it pays about five times better than the state-run institute she worked in and the conditions are a lot better. It was begun in 1992, just after the Soviet Union broke up, and has set about training Kazakhis to take over the businesses in the country, which is awash in oil and wants to husband its resources well. It’s still pretty palsy-walsy with Russia, which has a strong oil company presence here, as do many western companies. If you go to the site www.kimep.kz, you will see the school’s logo, which smacks of its Soviet roots, as well it should since this school used to be where Communist party leaders were trained. Its slogan is “Education to change society.” Hows’s that for a throw-back to Khrushchevian times? They could use a little help from Western marketing experts on that one.

Speaking of Westerners, they have stocked the school with many of them, including lots of Americans, so I am not alone in my red, white, and blue blood. There is to be a retreat with new faculty next week, which I hope will make me feel a lot more a part of the school by then. As it stands, the campus is pretty deserted and I am taking the hiatus in activity to get together courses and THIS BLOG!
The Language Center is a vital part of the campus, even though we are not our own college. Our director is hoping to make it so, since he feels we are viewed as the handmaiden of the business people. I wish him luck, since language, as central as it is to human existence, is taken for granted and (usually) only shows up on the radar when there is money to be made. I am teaching linguistics and training Kazakh master’s students who want to teach English. The census for the program is small, as it is in its second year – about 26 at present. I will also probably take part in a distance learning course they have set up with students in Kyzylorda (weird language, huh?), which in central Kz. (FYI, Almaty is in the extreme southeast corner of the country, almost on the Kyrgyzstan border.) The course is split into part online work and part onsite intensive weekend courses taught by my boss, David Landis. My part is unclear yet. I think they are still assessing who the heck they hired. I was told they got applications from all over the world, but I had the right mix of teaching experience and educational background, and at last word, they are “happy to have me.” Ditto on my end. It’s going to be challenging and quite fluid as far as my responsibilities are concerned. There is talk of my conducting seminars for the faculty at the Language Center who teach other languages to help them divest themselves of their rigid, Soviet-style teaching methods, which means slavishly following the textbook, and drill-and-kill practices. It will take some delicate diplomacy to bring new ideas without being too heavy-handed about it. But then, maybe they’re used to that approach…

Architecture is an interesting mixture of Soviet blocky, cementy boxes and some more graceful buildings that have softened that style a bit. I’m thinking here of the opera house, which I will photograph for you and upload when I figure out how to do it.

Weather is hot for now, with promises of a cooling trend as the month goes on. Winter can be very harsh, with temps reaching as low as -25F. Yes, I brought a down coat! And we have to wear these things called Yaktraks that fit over boots and keep one from slipping on ice that is never cleared from streets or sidewalks. Anyway, that’s another entry in my blog.

I have a lot to keep me busy, but I have to admit to some pangs of loneliness. Today is my son’s 18th birthday and I will not be able to taunt him with tales of how long I was in labor with him. He is a super, wonderful kid and independent as all get out. Handsome too. I’ll always be his mom and I’m thankful for that.

Any message about your activities and thoughts about Kz, politics, or the weather, no matter how trivial they may seem to you, will be welcome in my drought of friends and information. Please respond on the blog for all to read or email me at BurkhalterN@earthlink.net if you would like to speak privately.

Talk to you again soon.

Best,
Nancy