Have I Mentioned It's Cold and Windy Here?

Just like the NASA astronauts returning from the International Space Station, I've been taking my first steps in the steppes of Kazakhstan. My first four weeks have been full of ups and downs, ranging from blues and loneliness to the exhilaration of new experiences and discoveries as I find time to to venture beyond Embassy walls.  In short, life is normal, following the pattern that I now recognize from my three previous foreign postings.

Have I mentioned it's cold and windy here?  Let's see how many times I repeat that over the coming three years.  Astana is at the same latitude as the northern tip of Newfoundland, which should put things in some perspective form my friends in Maine.  It is about -5C, about 20F, this morning, and yesterday's light snowfall is not melting.  The Esil' River is still flowing, but the pond in the park across from my building is frozen over.  The wind penetrates right through the winter coat that kept me warm in Bucharest.  I haven't switched to the Canada Goose parka that I bought before leaving the US, but I will soon.  Halloween is still a week in the future, and from all appearances it will be a white one.

Baiterek Tower in the New City

Well, O.K., it hasn't been entirely December in October.  The wind and cold have had the upper hand only about 75% of the time.  A week ago we had an unexpected Indian summer that lasted 3-4 days.  The thermometer rose all the way to +15-18C, and I spent Saturday and Sunday on long walks.  On my own two feet, I'm slowly learning my way around the city.

Astana is an amazing mixture of dazzling modern in the new capital and old Soviet from the days when this was a small town known as Tselinograd at the center of Khrushchev's somewhat misguided push to open the steppe to agriculture.  (Think of the U.S. dust bowl of the 1930s and you will have a sense of why cultivating grasslands might not be a good idea.)  I live in a complex called HighVille in a new part of the city.  About a forty minute walk or a fifteen minute bus ride away is the start of the old town.  Even in my short time I have found a hairdresser, electrologist, and a cosmetologist.  They are all in the old town.  I have also done much of my shopping in a Soviet-era mall called Evraziya, in the process making friends with a young woman in a cosmetics store who is in her final year at the university.  Her major?  Nuclear physics!  She is working in the mall on weekends to make extra money.  I wonder how often in the US I might find myself buying facial powder from a future nuclear physicist?

Evraziya Shopping Mall

On the streets and in the stores I'm hearing more Russian than Kazakh even though signs tend to be in both languages.  Television has both Kazakh and Russian language channels.  The largest supermarket chain is Ramstor, the same chain where I used to shop in Moscow.

In my first days here, I had to acknowledge that my Russian had suffered over the past four years while I lived in Romania and the the US.  Fortunately, it's been returning quickly.  It has just been a matter of getting out of the Embassy.

View from Top of Baiterek Looking Toward
Presidential Palace and Esil' River

Now there's the rub: “getting our of the Embassy.”  This has been a very busy month.  The learning curve hasn't been a curve at all but rather a vertical, almost a technical climb up a rock face with the summit still out of sight.  My start here reminds me of my start on the Russia Desk some ten years ago.  There are so many issues and events at play that one can easily be sucked into spending all one's time feeding the e-mail dragon and never getting out of one's cubicle.  In my darker moments I think that giving electronic communication to the State Department, where our business is the diplomacy of words, was akin to giving drugs to an addict.  No amount of electronic communication ever seems to be enough as rings of e-communication feed upon themselves and suck us, the humans, into them.

Those are the dark moments.  Then I remind myself that I'm a woman of a certain age who has little left to prove but who has decades of experience behind her.  In the end, I will tame the dragon.

Esil' River Waterfront

Meanwhile, I sit in a plane that is about to land in Almaty.  Tomorrow I assist at a conference on seismology; on Tuesday I fly off to Uzbekistan for a conference on water issues.  I'll return to Astana only on Friday and collapse into an exhausted heap on Saturday.  As our planed descends, I fasten my seat belt and put my seat back in the upright position.  My first foray out of Astana to the wider Central Asian horizons is about to begin..

A Timely Remembrance of Chester A. Arthur

It's time to say a few timely words about President Chester A. Arthur.

We don't think about time zones much when we are at home in the US.  We all know that California is three time zones away from the East Coast, but for the most part we don't give them much thought.

President Chester A. Arthur

It's a different story for me in Astana.  Even after getting over the jet lag of my arrival, I find that time has acquired a greater significance.  The East Coast is ten hours away from Kazakhstan in the summer and eleven time zones away during the winter months when the US -- well, Arizona and a few other jurisdictions excluded -- go off daylight saving time and return to standard time.  Those time zones are in the way when I want to talk by Skype with a friend or loved one at home.  

The imposition is all that much greater when one flies home or returns to Central Asia.  The human body just wasn't designed to absorb a 10-11 hour time difference in the blink of an eye unless, of course, it takes a week or ten days to blink that eye. 

It wasn't always this way, you know.   Two hundred years ago there were no time zones.  Each major city maintained its own time based on the daily passage of the Sun across the meridian, the line that connects due North with due South that passes through the zenith. Life was easy.  When the Sun was on the meridian, it was noon.   It's what we would call today local apparent time.  The time it took to travel from one city to another in Europe or the American colonies was so great that the local definition of time in any one city was not an issue. 

Things began to change in the early nineteenth century.  By then local mean time had begun to replace local apparent time.   Instead of the actual, physical Sun, the mean Sun's passage through the meridian is what determined the noon hour.  It had long been noted that the physical Sun sometimes took more than 24 hours between meridian crossings, sometimes less, with the deviation reaching as much as 16 minutes. 

 “The reason?” 

 “Why, it's elementary, dear Newton!” 

This discrepancy is caused first of all by the 23.44-deg obliquity of the ecliptic, the angle between the Earth's equator and the plane of the Earth's orbital motion around the Sun.  Secondly, the Earth's orbit is not exactly circular but is, rather, an ellipse, which means that the Earth's orbital motion around the Sun is faster at the time of perihelion -- closest approach to the Sun -- than it is six months later at aphelion. 

Now enter the railroads.  The first transcontinental railroad in the US was completed in 1869.  Each major city through which this and later railroads passed maintained its own time.  Roughly speaking, the time difference between two cities separated by 1-deg of longitude was four minutes.   If we complain of jet lag today, we should also pity the designers of the first railroad schedules.  Not only was it a pain to try to keep track of independent time systems maintained by hundreds of U.S. cities.  It was also a safety problem that could lead to head-on collisions of trains heading in opposite directions where one train engineer was using one time system and the other was using a different one. 
  
The U.S. experience in the mid-ninteenth century was quickly being replicated in much of the industrialized world.   It was compounded by the circumstance that different countries were using different prime meridians relative to which to measure longtitude and time. France used the Paris meridian.   Russia used the Pulkovo meridian.   Great Britain measured longtitude from Greenwich.  The US at times used the meridian of the U.S. Naval Observatory.   Several meetings and conferences were held beginning in the mid-nineteenth century to try to resolve the joint problem of standardized time and longitude.  In 1870, U.S. educator Charles F. Dowd proposed a system of U.S. time zones.  He was followed a few years later by Canadian railroad engineer Sanford Fleming who proposed that there be a worldwide system of time zones.  

Delegates to the International Meridian Conference

The Third International Geographical Congress in Venice in 1881 proposed adoption of a universal prime meridian.  Another conference in 1883 began to work through the details, and the U.S. Contress passed an Act in 1882 authorizing President Chester A. Arthur to call an international conference to fix the prime meridian for measuring time and longitude.  The International Meridian Conference convened in Washington in October 1884.  By a vote of 22-1, the Greenwich Meridian was adopted as the prime meridian for use by all nations. (Santo Domingo voted against; France and Brazil abstained with France only giving up on the Paris Meridian in 1911.)  A year earlier, in November 1883, U.S. and Canadian railroads instituted standard time in time zones in the US and Canada.  Between the Meridian Conference and the action taken by the railroads, the stage was set for the entire world to be divided up into standard time zones that were nominally 1-hour or 15-deg in width.  The Calder Act of 1918 made standard time in time zones the law in the US.  At the same time, the concept of Greenwich Mean Time, the time as determined by the mean Sun at the Greenwich meridian, had taken hold with each time zone measured in number of hours east or west of Greenwich.  

The Greenwich Meridian

And so, dear readers, you get some of the picture of how we got to where we are today.  Some countries and even U.S. states have chosen to bend time zone boundaries for their own convenience.   Some time zones, Newfoundland is a good example, differ by a half hour rather than an hour from their neighbors.  All in all, however, it's a system that works for commerce even as the physical human body groans under the the strain of jet lag.  The adoption of standard time and a prime meridian was also a triumph of international nineteenth century diplomacy when the needs of commerce and government brought all parties to the table to find a common solution to the common problem of longitude and time measurement. 

Is it all over?  Has time been resolved for all civil purposes?  Well, not really.   For the answer to that and more, look for a possible future entry on atomic time, Coordinated Universal Time, and leap seconds.  The story is just beginning.   

(Dramatic foreshadowing:   Greenwich Mean Time has not existed as an intenational time standard since Richard Nixon was President of the US.)

My First Week in Astana? Why, It Was a Gas!

I have been criticized by at least one long-time reader for sometimes making jokes or other comments that are science- or engineering-based that no one else gets.  I hasten now to add grounds for such criticism by stating immediately that all-in-all, my first week in Astana was a gas.  It just happens that the gas involved is not a gas that one usually associates with a good time.  Rather, it was CH4 (methane), a warming greenhouse gas, that dominated my week right out of the starting gate.

Balcony View with the River Esil and Presidential
Palace in the Background

I arrived in Astana at 2:30am on Saturday morning a week ago.  Middle-of-the-night arrivals and departures are the norm for Central Asia, something I got used to during my two years in Tashkent.  The Foreign Service (FS) has a good tradition of assigning a social sponsor for every new arrival, and L.I. was waiting for me just beyond customs.  She took me to the apartment that will be my FS home for the coming three years.  My bed had already been made, the usual FS welcome kit of supplies was unpacked, and L.I. had thoughtfully stocked the kitchen and refrigerator with enough food to get me started.  I finally crawled into bed at 6:30am.

Up in the early afternoon, I became better acquainted with the apartment.  The furniture is standard State Dept. issue that we are all used to, not so elegant but well made and functional.  I had gotten unused to it during my year in the US.  Some of the kitchen appliances and other creature comforts are top end.  I'm still not used to the electric stove, and the refrigerator is hidden away to blend in with the cabinets.  The guest room comes equipped with a huge stall shower and a toilet that has space-age controls that I still haven't figured out.  The master bathroom has a whirlpool instead of a normal tub, a bidet, and a personal two-person sauna.  Like most of Astana, the building is only a few years old and was built to impress.  After just a few days, however, I came to realize that Soviet-style instant aging has not been stamped out fully.  Some creature comforts such as the centralized vacuum system just don't work right.  The electrical outlets are in unusual places, and there is not enough lighting.  The computer-based front door lock is still there, but it doesn't work and has been supplanted by a more traditional set of dead bolts.

Living Room

L.I. came later that first Saturday to take me to a reception in honor of the person I am replacing.  The next day she took me shopping.  I seemed reasonably well rested and ready to start the work week.

Kitchen

Then Monday and a whirlwind came.  I can safely say that this has been the most challenging starting week I have had since being on the Russia Desk ten years ago.  There was scarcely time to complete all of the normal check-in activities before having to come to grips with the fact that a Washington group would be arriving on Tuesday for a series of meetings related to the Global Methane Initiative and coal mine methane emissions.  There is no reason for any FS officer (FSO) to expect an easy start, but in retrospect I realize I made a mistake in allowing myself to be talked into attending a Monday-evening reception that destroyed all hope of an easy jet lag recovery.  Getting home from the reception after 9pm and only getting to bed after 11pm, I had my first night of jet-lagged sleep that saw me wake up before 3am.  That was the way it was to be for the rest of the week, just 3-4 hours of sleep per night followed by a caffeinated struggle to stay awake through the day as I accompanied our Washington group to what otherwise would have been very interesting meetings.  Instead, my entire goal was not to embarrass anyone by falling asleep at the meeting table.  My body was steadfastly proclaiming itself to be on the U.S. East Coast.

Guest Bathroom

Another Monday shock came when I inquired about my unaccompanied air baggage (UAB) and household effects (HHE).  I had packed out of Washington in mid-August in full expectation that this early pack-out would allow enough time for my UAB to arrive in Astana before I did.  (When I was posted to Tashkent, both the UAB and HHE had arrived before me.)  Thus I was stunned by the cheerful reply to my question as to the whereabouts of my UAB:  "Why, it's in Baltimore!"  That is as far as it had gone in over a month and a half.  I was told that it was good news that the shipment could now be expedited and might arrive in Astana in 2-3 weeks.  I shuddered to think that all I had brought with me in my suitcase were light summer clothes.  I was already coming to understand that early October in Astana is more like late November or early December in Washington.  Thank goodness the skirt I bought on the way to the airport in Istanbul was a long one made of wool.  It was the warmest article of clothing I had until a colleague saw me shivering in my light fleece jacket on the way to work.  The next morning she had loaned me one of her own jackets, more appropriate to the season, until my UAB arrives.  Once again I had experienced both the down side and then the brightest side of our service.  We do look out for each other in our small communities sprinkled around the globe.

My Guest Bathroom Toilet Requires a Users' Manual

On Thursday, one member of the three-person Washington group failed to show up.  His colleagues told me that he was quite sick and had stayed at the hotel.  In fact, they said, he should not have been at the meetings on Wednesday.  I then recalled how this one member of the group had been at pains after each meeting to get physically close to me to give me a quiet, almost whispered run-down of the meeting's significance and what he was hoping to achieve in the next meeting.  I had been thankful for the explanations at the time, but now I started to worry.

Master Bathroom Tub Is a Whirlpool!

I finally slept through the night for the first time on Friday.  I had made it though a very busy first week.  I took a walk into the city on Saturday to stretch my legs and get at least some exercise.  As I walked out of my building, I was greeted by the strong wind that Astana is famous for.  Even with the borrowed jacket, I was cold.  It was snowing lightly.  I was out for about three hours, in the process buying a hat and some groceries.  After getting home, however, I realized I should not have gone out at all.  Sure enough, I had the beginnings of a sore throat, chills, and a full head that just got worse through the night.  Today I have almost no voice.  I have another Washington group arriving in mid-week, but I'm realizing that I will need to stay home on Monday in hopes of getting over whatever I may have picked up during this week that was, most likely, bequeathed to me during discussions of methane.

A Sauna for Two

So that's the way it was during my first week in Astana.  It wasn't the easiest start, but a year ago I got quite sick at the end of my first week working in Washington while also dearly missing the life I had left behind in Romania.  When I first arrived in Bucharest in October 2010, I had considered my assignment to Romania to be part of a career-ending disaster.  In both cases, my first impressions were the opposite of what I would feel when the time came to leave.  As I shiver in the cold and with a cold and miss close friends and family, I remember that I've been through this before.  

Another Balcony View Toward Pyramid
Palace of Peace and Concord

With a faint smile and looking forward, I affirm again that why, of course, my first week in Astana was a gas.  The new adventure is only beginning.