A Day of Shopping

Today Derek and I went shopping at a bazaar to buy stuff for our house. We went there with the kids last week but we took the bus so we were not able to bring much home. (Three kids, a stroller and packages on a overly packed bus is not a good idea.) Today one of my grade 12 students babysat while we went out. We also arranged to have a friend pick us up in his car when we were done so we were able to bring our stuff home easily.

We were able to find nice pots and pans, hair clippers for Derek and the boys, plants, duvets for the kids beds, and a grocery store for microwave popcorn. I wanted to try on a shirt at one little store but I almost walked away when the seller took the shirt away from me, spread her hands wide apart and said "nyet, vee bullshoy" which means "no, you big". She went into the back and brought out a large shirt for me. Derek (with his ever-present phrase book) tried to tell her that no, I was small or medium. But sure enough the large fit. So I guess I am "bullshoy". (With all the walking that we do here I actually think I've lost weight so I guess I was extra large before.) It is really hard to find a shirt without sequins, buckles, and loads of bling so I bought the shirt in spite of the customer service.

Our new phrase is "nada padoomat" which literally means "I'll think it over". We soon learned that loosely translated it means "give me a discount" because the sellers would drop the price a few hundred tenge whenever we said it. Apparently it is a great phrase to know; all told that little phrase saved us about $45 today.

Well I'm off to the market to buy some bread. See ya,
Karla

Forty Leggers

Karla wanted me to post a picture of our friendly house pets: in Russian, they're called 40 leggers (I don't count quite forty though...). We often wake up to find them on the walls -- this morning we had one in our kitchen sink. I try to scan the walls in the mornings so that I can kill them before Karla sees them, but I don't always find them before she does. She swears that one of them leapt from the wall with full intentions of biting her throat. (You can ask her for more details...)

Start of School

Although school officially started for us on August 13th with staff orientation, we made several trips to the school before then to meet with people, to get paperwork completed, to be picked up for rides to different places, etc. The school is located at a good location in terms of bussing, a little south of downtown. The main building is shown in the picture: the downstairs is K to Grade 6, the upstairs is Grades 7 to 12. The school looks pretty peaceful in the picture, but only because the students hadn't arrived yet. Things are a lot more chaotic now!

The first day of school was on August 20th (mostly a fun, kick-off kind of day) and then classes started on the 21st. I'm teaching 3 computer courses and 2 math courses; Karla's teaching 2 math course and a "Life Skills" course and then busses to the babysitter's to pick up Thomas. I go home with Will and Kate at the end of the day. The kids are enjoying their classes and making friends -- Kate has already been to a birthday party and Will went to a friend's for a sleepover!

Mountains!

The one thing here that I can't get enough of is the mountains. Here is the view from the upstairs (kids) bedroom. The mountains are just so close to the city! Some days it feels like you should be able to reach out and touch them. This picture was taken the day after it rained so all the mountain tops were still covered with snow. (The water runs down through the city and the kids love to watch it running through the sewers on the side of the road.) We haven't been able to take a trip out of the city yet, but I am hoping we can head towards the mountains sometime soon. Will and Kate are both looking forward to climbing to the peaks!

We were able to take a trip to one of the hills in the city, called Kok Tobe, that is nearer the mountains (tobe means "hill" in Kazakh and apparently kok means either "green" or "blue"). We took a short ride on a cable car up to the top and then walked down. This is a view of the city from the top of Kok Tobe. We haven't had a lot of time to tour the city, but we are starting to feel comfortable in our neighbourhood and in taking the bus to the school and back. Half of the Russian words I know so far are street names: Zhandosova, Rozibakieva, Timirayzeva, Auesova, Gagarina (named after the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin)!

Still trying to connect...

Well, we've been here for a month and we still don't have our Internet connection set up. We thought we had it working on Tuesday, but then it didn't work yesterday again. But we've been wanting to show some pictures, so here they are...

This first picture is our front door. Not very pretty to look at, but it does the job. Most houses have high metal fences for security reasons, but so far we have felt very safe in our neighbourhood. Most people don't greet us as we pass them on the street, but whenever I say Dobraye utro! ("Good morning!"), I always get a friendly response.

We had a lot of utility problems in our first couple of weeks. Our first day, we woke from our naps to find that the power and the water were out. We soon realized why there were plastic jugs of water sitting in the kitchen and bathrooms. It's a good thing that we have one another here, because its hard to pour water from a big jug onto your own dirty hands!

After shorter periods of no power during the first week, in our second week we were without power for over 36 hours. We weren't sure what to do with all the food going bad in the refrigerator and the freezer. I decided to offer the thawed meat to one of our neighbours, so with my Russian dictionary in hand I went over and knocked on their gate. I tried to explain that we were without electricity (elektrichestvo) and so our refrigerator (kholodilnik) didn't work and that I was wanting to give them our meat as a gift (podarok) and eventually made myself understood. They were very gracious and offered to store our thawed meat in their freezer (we didn't have the heart to tell them we wouldn't eat refrozen meat) but, in the process, another neighbour joined our conversation and after a few minutes one of them rode off on his bike and came back with another neighbour who could look at our electrical problems. He proceeded to climb up to where the electricity came into the house, pull off the old electrical tape, and reconnect the wires. There were immediate screams of joy from the kids from inside the house, so we knew that the power had come on. So despite the problems, we managed to meet three neighbours in one day and be at the receiving end of their help and hospitality.

Our house is located just outside of city lines and I think that is one reason why we have such narrows streets. It gets pretty tricky sometimes when we are trying to walk down to the market -- with Will and Kate wanting to pick up sticks and stones and Thomas in the stroller -- and cars are trying to drive down the streets in both directions. We are starting to get used to cars whizzing by us with less than a foot of space between us and them.

Our neighbourhood is also quite dusty and dirty and people throw their litter everywhere (Will is quite upset about the pollution -- he is sure that the polar bears will be extinct by the time he is an adult). But after a month now, we are starting to notice it less and less. We will have to take some garbage bags out one of these days and see if we can make a small difference in our neighbourhood!

We've Arrived

After a very long flight that took us to cities we didn't expect to visit (like Prague and Istanbul), we finally made it! By the time we finally reached the house that has been rented for us, we had been travelling for 43 hours! So we had a nap. But we're up posting our first real message on the blog (just to keep everything nice and orderly).

Getting Ready...

We are going to try to start a regular blog of our adventures. We're not sure how often we will be able to update this with new information, but we're going to try to be fairly regular. Hope you enjoy it!