New Year's Odds and Ends

Our kids at the NU New Year Tree Program on 20 December.

Happy New Year from Kazakhstan!  Tomorrow marks the five-month mark since we arrived in Astana.  With the new year, it is a good time to recap some of the things we’ve learned and to make some goals for our next year of adventures in Kazakhstan.

One of the big reasons why this job was appealing to us - besides the opportunity at the university itself - was the opportunity for our children to be immersed in the Russian language and to experience a new culture.  We sent them to a local school in order to get them involved. The progress report for this is positive.  They are all doing well in school - finishing the 2nd quarter right before our New Year holiday began at the beginning of this week.  Nika has made the most progress - she earned all As in the 2nd quarter and is really doing well with school.  Polina is working hard and is doing well.  Her teacher grades her the same as the other kids, so she is really having to work to earn her grades, especially in Kazakh and Russian. The twins are also doing well.

We are really enjoying life here in Astana in general.  Life is busy - as busy as it has ever been for us - but we seem to be doing really well as a family.  The kids are happy, we are happy, and the dog is pretty happy.  She would love to have a yard to run around in freely, but we walk her three times a day and she likes to look out the window on the balcony.

One thing that we haven’t done much of yet is to get out of Astana and to see the rest of the country.  I was able to spend a few days in Karaganda, a city a few hundred kilometers south of Astana in November.  I went on a recruiting trip to speak to high school students about the university and the school of humanities and social sciences where I work.

We would like to go and see some of the sites in the summer after the kids are out of school and before we head to America for our visit there.

Odds and Ends

We have had the national dish of Kazakhstan - beshbarmak - which is boiled horse meat over noodles.  We were invited to the house of one of the main administrators here at the university last weekend.  His daughter is good friends with the twins - they are in the same class at school - and we have gotten to be friends with the family.  We had eaten a version of this at our Thanksgiving feast with our church congregation, but not the whole thing.  The meat was really delicious and the overall meal - with the noodles, onions, meat, and homemade sausage (also horse) together was really awesome.

We’ll have some posts up in the next few days about the New Year’s celebrations that the kids had at school and at the university.  We also had a nice adventure at the Ballet last Saturday when we went to a production of the Nutcracker.

It has been cold - Yulia made a post about that a few weeks ago.  I got a great picture of her on the way to church a few weeks ago - the frost turned her hair gray!

Yulia's frosted tips!

Yulia’s mom is here visiting us for the holidays.  That is another blessing of living here in Kazakhstan.

We are looking forward to a wonderful and adventurous year in Central Asia.

NU Campus from bus stop across the street.  Winter in Astana.