Our October Visit to the Circus

The Astana Circus Building (not in October)

On October 25 we took the girls to the circus.  Astana, like most former Soviet cities has a permanent circus building and a circus.  Circuses travel around to other cities and so you get different programs throughout the year.  We took the girls to the circus in Krasnoyarsk when we were there visiting in summer 2012.  The program for the circus in Astana was The Moscow Circus.  Yulia got tickets for Saturday afternoon - we had to take Lina out of school for her to attend, but it was worth it.

It was already getting cold in October, so our trip to the circus on the bus was cold (waiting at the bus stop) and then hot (riding in the full bus).  We arrived  in time to check our coats and get our seats and to wait for about twenty minutes.

 The program was a great mix of danger acts, funny acts (with clowns that were actually funny), and animal acts.  The best of the acts combined two or even three of these different elements.Overall this was the best circus I've been to in this part of the world (twice in Russia and now here). After the circus was over we walked to a nearby mall and ate at KFC and caught the bus home.  It was a fun evening for everyone.

Ushers directing viewers to their seats before the show begins.

The ladykids waiting for the show to start.

Dog Act with Clowns.

Cat act.  Its amazing that cats can be trained at all - and these were good!

Horse act - he danced like a Lipizzaner Stallion and it was beautiful.

A talented musical clown, and one that was funny, too.

Djigiti - Old Georgian-Central Asian Horsemen and Warriors. 

The Finale - Tightrope with multiple walkers, including bears (seen on the far stand). Awesome!

With the bear on a tightrope.

Basketball

I have always loved playing basketball, but haven't played really competitively since early in high school.  When I was in the Army, I played three times a week in the mornings with a crew from the armory and from the neighborhood.  While I was in Iowa and Las Vegas, I played a bit at the church.

One of our first weeks at church we met the Craigs.  Brett teaches communication at NU and has been here for three years.  He has been coaching the girls basketball team on campus (actually he does everything for them: scheduling, procuring uniforms and equipment, etc.)  He was quite famous around campus because the girls had some success in the spring at a city-wide tournament.  They invited us over for dinner and while we were there we talked a lot about basketball.  One of my friends from the Army is also here in Astana and he told Brett how much I like playing.  While we were at their apartment, Yulia said that if Brett needs any help I would love to be an assistant coach.

I wasn't so sure how much I would love being an assistant coach.  I was still trying to figure out a new job, a new city, and an entirely new situation.  I was intrigued, though, and the opportunity to play and to be around basketball was appealing.

Game 1: 11/12/2014 - Getting back on Defense.

So I showed up to tryouts.  And I've been going to basketball practice three times a week since then.  We have great students at NU, and the girls on the basketball team are no exception.  Most of them had very little experience, but what they lack in experience we make up for in conditioning and preparation.  I have lost over 30 pounds since I've been here in Astana, thanks mostly to the running that I do with the girls at practice.  I still have a ways to go, but progress is progress!

Game 1 - 11/12/2014

Anyway, the past three months of practice culminated in us playing two games against other universities from Astana last week.  Our first game was a bit of a disappointment.  The girls came out a bit listless, trailed throughout the game, and lost by six points.  The second game was more exciting.  After some tough talk by Coach, the girls resolved to play with the intensity we practice with.  The result was a 29-4 victory over the team that we played.  The team came from the university that won the city-wide tournament last year, but they just sent their freshmen.  Now they are on notice that they need to send their A-team to play NU.

NU Vs. BC Astana Management

On October 7, the local professional basketball team used the NU sports complex to announce this year's roster.  NU was their biggest supporter last year.  As part of the announcement, we had a friendly game between NUs faculty and staff and the management of the basketball club.  The team president is named Valeri Tikhonenko.

The NU and BC Astana Management Teams after the game.  #9 is Tikhonenko - he's about 6-11 and big.  Look at him next to fluffy old me!

The NU team poses after victory with some members of the NU girls team and other fans who came to watch the game. Brett, the girls coach, is on the left holding his youngest son.

He played for the USSR gold medal team from 1988 and was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks in 1987. He played for the management team.  He was tall - about 6'11" and even though he was nearly 50, he was still a gifted athlete.  He kept their team in the game, but our ragtag bunch of professors and staff was able to win the "friendly" game.

After the game in my NU team uniform. 

One of the things that we told ourselves when we came to Astana is that we would remain open to new opportunities and adventures.  Helping to coach the women's basketball team has been one of those adventures.  It has been one of the most rewarding and fun things that I've done here so far.

Digest #1 - Some Odds and Ends of the Last Three Months in Astana

Sometimes something will happen and Yulia and I will look at each other and say: "We need to write a blog post about that."  But the thing isn't huge, and we don't have time right away, or life gets in the way.  So today I just wanted to put together a short digest of some of the things that maybe aren't full blog posts, or which won't be because their time has passed.

Fire Alarms

September and October were the months of fire alarms.  Apparently the fire system in our building is quite sensitive.  This is a problem when individual apartments are hooked into the central fire system.  This means that sometimes cooking mishaps turn into adventures for the entire building - or in our case complex of two buildings. We had a few very dramatic alarms that went off in the middle of the night.

The alarms are piercingly loud and are accompanied by loud instructions in Russian, Kazakh, and English to calmly exit the building.  We did so on a few occasions after the alarm had sounded for 15 minutes in the middle of the night.  That involved dressing the girls, ourselves, and getting the dog and making our way out of the apartment.  Because we had Yulia's mom here for all of September, she also came along!

These alarms turned out to be false alarms.  Some of them were due to a malfunction.  Although we did meet some of our neighbors at this community-building events, after the sixth or seventh alarm over the course of a few weeks we were all ready to be finished.  We haven't had an alarm go off for about two weeks, so we are hoping that the problem has been resolved.

Construction

We are living in the midst of a construction zone.  You can see from the model I am pointing at in the picture below, that the campus is going to be quite large.  As of now, however, we are a long way from complete.  From our building to the main campus (and also the main road with bus stops) we have to pass through an active construction site.  For a few weeks the route through the construction changed every day - sometimes with barriers around large holes, and sometimes not.  In general we understand the inconvenience and work through it, but sometimes it is a bit of a challenge.

Pointing out our apartment (the third building in the diagonal line of square buildings toward you the viewer in this picture). Our building and the middle one are built.  The first one (closest to the road on the left) is not yet built. This model is right outside the entrance to my building (in the background) and you can see my office at the left corner n the second floor - the one with the light on.

View of construction from our balcony window  The building on the right will be the new main administration building.  The two buildings straight out will be more faculty apartments

The "Berlin Wall"  This fence went up right outside our door in the course of a few hours one evening.  It is an improvement over the non-barriers that were there.  This sheet metal construction fencing is the national product of Kazakhstan right now - there is construction everywhere!

New Driver

In our school days posts we wrote about hiring a driver to take the kids to school.  She worked out really well for a few weeks and then began to flake out on us.  At the end of September we had to fire her.  We hired a new driver - and he is truly awesome.  We are paying him a salary between us and our friends the Petersons.  He is available all day from the beginning of school to the end of the day to take our kids back and forth to school. He is flexible and responsible and we love him!  He drives a nice Accura that he maintains very well.  In fact, his relationship with his car reminds me of my dad. He is the main reason that school is doable for us now.

School

All of the girls have had a breakdown by now.  Some of them multiple breakdowns, and some of them multiple times in a day.  School is very challenging for them.  The kids all have great teachers though, and the progress they are making in Russian (and math and even Kazakh) is awesome.  The unpredictability of day to day schedules is something we really have a hard time with, but the quality of the schooling they are getting is great.

Church

One of the great things about being a Mormon is that you always have a community wherever you go in the world.  The same has been doubly true for us here in Astana.  We moved in along with a big wave of church members who are working at the embassy.  My friend Jon and his family moved into our building at NU a few weeks after us after I encouraged him to look into a job here.  In fact, there were some other families from the embassy that we knew.  One was a missionary in Yulia's home city.  He and I had a Russian class together at USU about 10 years ago.  He works for USAID and has been here for about two years.  One of my friends from my national guard unit in Logan, Utah is also working for the embassy.  I hadn't seen him for about six years, but we are now both in Astana.

We have also made some other new friends and are having a great adventure.  Yulia and I were called to teach Institute, which is the church education system for young adults.  That means that we get to work closely with the Kazakh members of the church, most of whom are in their twenties.  They are a great group!

Astana as a Small Town

One of the things that has struck us about Astana is that it sometimes seems like a small town.  Part of that is the areas that expats hang out in are relatively constrained, but part of it is just the city.  There is a man who we flew in with (in August).  He also was missing luggage, so I saw him at the airport a few days later when we picked up our bags.  I have seen him in random places through town on two other occasions.

Just about every time we are out and about we run into someone from either church or the university.  Even though the city is about a million people, we feel like we are right at home in Iowa City or Logan on a lot of days.

Halloween 2014 in KZ!

We just celebrated our first Halloween in Kazakhstan! To tell you the truth it was the easiest Halloween ever! It is not part of the Kazakh culture and so there was nothing to remind you about its approach. No Halloween decorations at the stores, no costumes anywhere in sight, and no Halloween candy screaming at you “Buy me, buy me!” And so it just quietly snuck up on us!

We live on Nazarbayev University campus in a big apartment building. The building itself is somewhat unique (more about it in a different post) and so are the people who live here. In our building we have people from America, England, Netherlands, China, Korea, Jordan, Japan, India, Ukraine, Russia, Czech Republic, South Africa, Italy, Kazakhstan and other countries.

Our friends, the Petersons, proposed that we would have a Trick-or-Treating in our building on Halloween night. They received an OK from the building management, and an email went out to the tenants explaining the Halloween tradition of Trick-or-Treating and inviting them to participate in this American tradition. At first they received a very weak response but then more and more families expressed a desire to participate. In fact some of the people got so excited that they proposed a Halloween potluck party in the building with different activities for the kids. And then the University itself said they would also have a Halloween celebration (in a Kazakh way) that same night where they would show some Kazakh legends and also have activities for the entire family.  So many things to do! So many things to choose from!

Halloween Pot-Luck taking place in the 2nd floor common area. Taken from in front of our apartment on the seventh floor.

Our only problem was that our kids didn’t have any costumes to wear. We didn’t bring any with us from America because we couldn’t fit anything more in our 22 pieces of luggage and to tell you the truth Halloween costumes were not high on our priority list of things to bring to Kazakhstan. There are no costumes being sold here at this time. Not yet. I was told that at the end of November all the shops will be filled with costumes (it is a tradition here for the kids to wear costumes for the New Year’s celebration) but in October there was no costume in sight! I also didn’t have my sewing machine here to make some as I would have done in America and I also didn’t have any free time thanks to our kids’ insane school schedule! Besides that, one of our daughters would have to miss the party and Trick-or-Treating anyway because she has an afternoon school and doesn’t come home until almost 8pm. So, I told the kids that we will probably skip Trick-or-Treating this year but that we would go to the University party and see what our Kazakh friends had up their sleeves. The kids weren’t super happy about it but they agreed.

Then the University party got canceled because they scheduled some other event the next day and had to set thing up for it the night before. And then my friend Shari Peterson (the instigator of Trick-or-Treating in our building) said she would help me with the costumes for the kids and convinced me to join in trick-or-treating. Since the decision was made on Friday afternoon, we only had 4 hours to prepare for the evening! I told Veronika (our 9 year old) that if she wanted to wear a costume she would have to decorate our front door. In America people who want Trick-or Treaters come to their door, turn on their porch light. Here we had to put some sort of Halloween sign on the outside of our front door to let the kids know that they can ring the door bell and ask for candy. Veronika enthusiastically went to work and an hour later we had a nicely decorated door!

Our door decorated for Trick-or-Treaters

Also the 31st of October was the end of the 1st Quarter at the kids’ school, so everybody finished early, and our Polina who would have totally missed the event, arrived from school just in time to go out with her sisters, well just with two of them (one had to stay behind because she decided to try on a costume of a very naughty kid earlier in the day).

Three trick-or-treaters and one naughty kid! 

For Spencer and I it was really fun to stay at home and meet all of the Trick-or-Treaters while the girls went on their own on the candy hunt! It was so fun to see the excitement on kids’ (and their parents!) faces and see families from all of different cultures participate in this American tradition! Our girls came home happy with the bags full of candy, helium filled balloons in hand and a handful of French fries! Yes, some people were giving out hot French fries! Thank you, Shari and Jon, for organizing such a fun night!

Returning with loot - including balloons!  They already ate their french fries.

Eating part of their haul.

Three piles of candy - what's left after two days.

The Trick-or-Treating was taking place from 7pm to 9pm. It was pretty much done after about 8:15pm, so we let the girls have a few pieces of candy and put them to bed. And Spencer and I took our dog Yuki for our evening walk. When we got back home at about 9:30pm we found this sign at our door! Veronika and Polina said that after we left people were still coming and were waking them up, so they left some candy out for anybody who might stop by late!

We are looking forward to our next holiday in Kazakhstan!