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..