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.
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| 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. |
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| 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 |
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| 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.
