BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

Friday was to be the day of my birthday celebrations.  We hoped that with three night to recover from the 13 hour time difference I might be able to stay awake long enough to at least say hello to the guests.  As I had been away for a few weeks it was to be a chance to catch up, and to make the most of it and not be over occupied with the cooking we decided to go out.

I like this rather local restaurant which has private dining rooms for hire as well as a main dining room.  So for a party of about 25 people we hired a room there and pre-ordered a menu of shashlik (beef, pork, lamb, chicken and veal), roasted vegetables and some fries.  Typically Kazakh!

On Friday morning I walked over to Ram store to do some shopping.  Unfortunately I had forgotten my transport home (that is my cell phone, key to arranging a taxi) so had to walk back.  It was fine as it is only a 30 minute walk or so.  

However by the time I got home I was feeling really tired, jet lag catching up perhaps, and decided in order to be in good form for the evenings activities I would take a brief siesta.

I woke up about four hours later with a fever, headache and sore throat.  The long and the short of it was that was the end of my birthday celebration.  Sandra went and hosted the party and I went back to sleep.

She tells me a good time was had by all and most of the guests have kindly corroborated this.  The photographs seem to indicate people having fun.

Thank you everyone who attended, and I fully understand those of you who were also ill!

The pictures below are courtesy of Jon Hockenberry, thanks Jon.

BACK HOME!

Well in one sense I am back in Atyrau earlier than expected.  I had planned to return in March and Sandra was going to visit California in January, but by reversing the order I get to enjoy the heart of the Kazakhstan winter, oh joy!


On the other hand I booked my flight back on through Istanbul travelling from Wednesday to Friday.  Unfortunately my visa did not show up from the Kazakhstan Embassy in DC in time and I had to delay a few days and fly into Atyrau on the next Istanbul flight on the Tuesday.  I took the delay to spend an extra day in Istanbul, so it wasn't too painful.

Atyrau is snow covered and a little chilly, about -10C, but fluctuating.  Fortunately there is not much wind.  So on Wednesday I decided to walk to Asia and meet Sandra for lunch at the Riverside Office.  It was harder to get out on foot than it was in summer and fall, before the snow and ice. 

Zheti Kazyna was deep in slow though they have now obtained a small bulldozer and have started piling it up then loading it into a truck to be taken away.  The groaning of the dozer has been going on all day for three days now.

 Out on the roads and side walks the snow has been compacted to ice and the ice sheet is an average of 3 inches deep. 

I walked out on the canal side route, unsure of how easy it would be to climb the bank of the canal.

                                                         It wasn't a problem.  But what was a problem was a three foot ditch that has been dug all the way along the top of the canal with the dirt from it piled up beside it.  I realised this only when I had scaled the bank, I decided not to try and jump/step over it with all the snow and ice so went back down the bank getting into 12 inch deep snow that tripped me up and almost caused me to fall flat on my face!                                                                      


                                                           So enraged was I with my own foolishness that I took a picture of the offending foothole in the snow.  Don't try to figure that out!




I took a more conservative route out  staying on the level ground.




At Tamosha the Christmas tree frame is still up and Santa Claus is sitting there fully inflated, welcoming in the New Year.

Along Satpayeva the summer sweeping crews have morphed into the winter snow moving crews.  The main task is to chip away at the ice coating which breaks off in blocks and is piled beside the side walk. 





For some strange reason piling this ice and snow round the little sapling trees is very popular.

 In the picture on the right you can see where ice has been chipped away.

Below is a detailed picture of the technology used to undertake this chipping task.

On the subject of technology I happened upon a road scraper.  In the summer I encountered a mechanical road sweeper, and now there is a mechanical snow mover.  I need hardly say that this does not bode well for the legions of road workers that sweep in summer and chip in winter.

No prizes for guessing where this piece of equipment came from!

The next day I decided to walk out using the other route, going round the back and taking the footbridge across the canal.  This time I came upon the pipeline layers in action joining the sections of pipe together.  What puzzles me is that the pipes are being joined on the ground at the bottom of the dyke.  The channel that has been cut for the pipe is along the top of the dyke, and the dirt that has been excavated is piled up next to the trench but between the pipe and the trench, making it necessary to haul the connected pipe not only up the bank but over the pile of dirt.  I need and engineer to explain the logic.  If the pipe was laid and joined on the top of the dyke it could simply be rolled into the trench, or so it would seem.

As you can see above the pipe connecting equipment is not very large or bulky.  

The picture on the left is the improvised bridge that has been put in place to cross the trench at the top of the dyke.


The picture below shows the current end of the trench over by Satpayeva, far right is the Zheti Kazyna compound.

On my walks to Asia I had the opportunity to have my first walk of the year on the Ural.  Unfortunately the steps down to the river, straight opposite the Riverside Office of NCPOC, had already become icebound.  The conundrum is that they are clearest in the middle, but by risking the middle route one is unable to hold the hand rails.  On the other hand using the sides and holding the rails puts one on the edge of the steps which are simply a long icy slide with no footholds at all.  I negotiated them using an abseiling technique, whereby one goes down backwards, holding the rail with both hands and leaning back to try and get some traction with ones feet.  It sort of works, I just hope that there are not people watching this Mr Bean type performance from the Riverside Office!

This year with the snow the river surface is very bumpy and rough.

 After lunch I walked home to Zheti Kasyna.  The strange thing is that once the ice has been removed from the side walks the brick surfaces become very slippery and much more difficult to walk on than the ice.  So on my route home I tried to avoid the newly cleared pavement.  

Of course in this weather there are lots of car accidents.  The drivers do not actually go particularly fast, I think because many of the cars can't go particularly fast.  But their ability to go fast is matched by an ability to stop fast, especially on icy roads, and therein, I suspect, lies the problem. Having said that the number of accidents where cars have simply run into the car in front seem to be matched by an equal number where one wonders what they were doing to get into that position in the first place.  This was the accident I saw on my walk home. 

 The highlight of my day!  That says it all, I think.

.  

CHAMPIONS, FAR FROM CHAMPION

One pays the price for being lazy!  Last night we decided to go out for a quick bite to eat rather than stay in and cook.  I had not been to Champions Bar in the the Renaissance Hotel yet this trip so we decided to go there.

Sandra ordered a bowl of soup and I chose chicken wings.  When the food arrived Sandra's first spoonful of soup contained a piece of plastic in it.  My wings, on the other hand were cool, not cool as in good, but cool as in cool.  Cool or even cold wings can actually be quite good, but these were sloppy skinned and very very greasy.  I a managed to peel and eat only three before I gave up.

We asked for the bill, and then we explained that we didn't want to pay for the plastic soup...in fact in the US we wouldn't have paid for any of it, but leaving a plate of cold greasy wings here is just an expat. affectation.  So three wings and a beer for about $20 (with tip!).

So we went home and improvised a quick supper with what was in the fridge.  At this point any Italian readers should look away as they would surely prefer to have the wings!

I had a piece of smoked ham in the fridge which I cut into cubes and gently fried.  Then I put a pan of salted water on the induction cooker and added a good handful of dried spaghetti to the boiling water.  This meant I had about ten minutes.  I put some left over stuffed zucchini in the microwave for Sandra (recipe was blogged earlier).  She is happy to eat them two days in a row, I am not!

I broke an egg into a bowl and added some President Brand Salakis FETA cheese.  This is not quite like feta cheese, but rather a feta cheesish/cream cheese cross breed.  I mixed it in well and added some milk powder.  (Of course there is no fresh cream or milk in Atyrau and the UHT variation is, to my taste, quite horrid).  

I put a splash of water in the mix to turn the powder officially into milk.  I then added a good grind of black pepper and  mixed it up well.

When the pasta was cooked I emptied it into the collander and tipped my egg mix into the hot empty pan and gave it a few stirs for the cheese to melt.  Then I added back the pasta and threw in the ham and mixed it well before turning it out into a bowl for dinner.

If you are looking at the above picture an seeing the grated cheese on top and wondering why I didn't use parmesan in the recipe...it isnt!  It is a little piece of aged gouda that I found in the cheese box!!

And just in case you thought I was making it up about Sandra getting the Zucchini, here they are...

BALLET NIGHTS IN ATYRAU

This is a quote from the on-line newspaper, West Kazakhstan Today, which is a wonderful new resource for the expats in Atyrau:"

“Ballet Evenings”of Bolat AYUKHANOV’S ballet theatre will be on tour on November 5- 7 in  the Drama Theater named after Makhambet. The citizens of Atyrau will have the pleasure to see the scenes from such world famous ballets, as “Swan Lake”, “Carmen”, “The Master and Margarita”, “Eugene Onegin”, “Anna Pavlova”, “The young lady and the hooligan”, “Giselle” and other. The tour is dedicated to the 45th anniversary of the state academic ballet dance theater under the directorship of Bolat AYUKHANOV, the People’s Artist of the Republic of Kazakhstan." 

Last weekends we bought tickets.  When I say "we" I mean Sandra, I stood well out of the interference zone and took photos.  They were purchased at the box office using the AMOS.

(For those of you unfamiliar with AMOS, it is the Atyrau Menu Ordering System. This system, widely used in restaurants, involves being offered a wide range of choices (in restaurants often accompanied with pictures, in the theatre- a diagram of the auditorium).  After carefully making a selection one is told, Nyetto- not available.  So one reconsiders and makes a second choice, to be told again, Nyetto.  This continues for as many cycles as ones patience or innocence can handle.  Finally, one has to ask what one can have, and then is offered a choice of a few items from the extended list.  In our theatre case, a diagram showing 90% of the seats available ended up with us being directed to two seats near the front, which of course we then "chose".)

The Aukhan Kazakh National Ballet Theatre is, according to its website:

"Kazakhstan's most internationally renowned dance company. The companies founder and director, Professor Bulat Aukhanov is world famous in Ballet circles as one of the greatest living choreographers"   

We were looking forward to going to performances on both Monday and Tuesday, Swan Lake and Anna Pavlova, not the entire ballets, but selections from them.

On Monday night we left Sandra's office at 6.16 pm and walked the 20 or 30 minute walk to the Drama Theatre in time for the 7 o'clock start.  The theatre has a prominent position at the top of Abay street.

We popped into the Ak Zhaik Hotel to buy pastries to snack on as we walked, Sandra was not very approving!

The picture of the Theatre below is actually one that I took earlier.  I forgot to take one on this occasion, or perhaps it was more a case of being too preoccupied with my cheese stuffed pastry thing.

At the top of the theatre steps we entered through a fairly modest door. Our ticket stubs were taken at this door, so it was not possible to even enter the foyer without a ticket.  The lobby was very simple.  No ticket sales, just a long counter behind which the ladies were checking in coats  and hanging them on rows and rows of pegs.  There were no catering facilities and one just waited in the tiled foyer until the theatre doors opened and we could enter.  The picture show the foyer outside the auditorium doors.  down the steps to the left was the theatre entrance and the coat racks.  Behind to the left is the main door.

Inside the auditorium we took our seats.  Rather confusingly the seat numbers in front of our seats were not our seat numbers, they were on the back of the seats.  So we, like a number of expats who subsequently came in and sat near us, started off sitting in the wrong seats.  As you see number 14 is behind number 13, and I am sitting in number 15.  I am still wondering why they didn't put the numbers on the other side of the seat backs so they were easier to see.

We were in early and the theatre was fairly empty, Sandra's colleague Edwin, was there with his wife Ester, and he kindly took our pictures!  The seats were a little hard but there was more leg room than most London theatres, which were probably built when people were on average 15cm shorter!  The room was not exactly elaborate, but nor was it stark.  The thing I noticed immediately was how few lights (spots, fllods etc) there were in the wings and hanging from the roof.  It turned out that the performance did not rely on a lot of special effects lighting. 

 The were sitting in the third row from the front, just out of the above picture on the left.  Those large speakers at either side of the stage turned out to be the orchestra for the evening.  It worked perfectly well, though it was rather loud where we were sitting.  I think they were the sound for the whole theatre.

The front seats were the most expensive.  just behind the front six or seven rows was the row of VIP seats.  These were eventually occupied by rather smart looking local people.  They were seats that we tried to book (Nyet!) so we know they were not available to riff-raff like us.

The performance started on Monday with a disembodied announcement of a couple of minutes.  We don't know what it was about.  On Tuesday, the great Mr Ayukhanov (I think) came out and made a short speech. We don't know what it was about either.  

The Monday night performance was a series of dances from Swan Lake. After about an hour the curtain fell, we did all the appropriate applause, but then it opened again and we got about fifteen minutes of Carmen, with a ballerina who seemed very good if a little older.  We supposed we were supposed to know who she was.  Possibly a famous Kazakh dancer.  The performance was over in about 80 minutes.  We thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was fast moving, intricate and energetic.  On Tuesday we had parts of Anna Pavlova, which lasted a little longer but with a 15 minute intermission.  Again, it was very good.

The pictures below were taken in poor light without a flash...some people were using flash, and there seemed to be no prohibition on taking photographs.  I have mixed pictures from both performances.

The costumes were fairly elaborate and colourful, and there were a lot of changes.  Not being a ballet buff, I cannot actually critique the performances, but there was a lot of spinning and jumping, high kicking and balancing in odd positions (these are not technical terms...) and nobody fell over, dropped anyone, got lost in a major dance routine, which I think is all good.  But above all they managed to make it look fairly easy and effortless, which I think is pretty important.  One doesn't like to watch ballet feeling like it is the final mile of a marathon.

One other thing that was rather different was the number of small children in the audience.  The first night there were two or three little girls abot 5 years old who seemed to mbe playing musical chairs, moving round the seats during the performance.  This was rather a distraction from listening to the people chatting to each other behind us during the quieter and less action apcked dances.  Some of the audience were very young.

Or if you want a little more detail...

We had a very nice couple of evenings.