Track and field

This year all four of our girls have been going to track and Field at the Children's Palace. Usually only Nika is old enough to go to the city track meets but in April all kids had an opportunity to try themselves in a track meet. It wasn’t a big one, just for the kids from their track and field class but still probably about 30 kids participated. They ran in groups according to their age and pretty much everyone won something. All four of our girls placed. Nika took the first place in her age group. Lina ran in the same heat as Nika, and came in third but because she was the only one in her age group, they gave her first place. Sophie and Lexa ran against each other and took first and third respectively. They were all happy.

Stretching before the meet. As always things started 30 minutes late (In Kazakhstan there is no concept of time but it will be a whole other post sometime later)

Nika and Lina running in their heat. The twins ran so fast that I didn't have time to focus my camera on them (of course, they also ran a much shorter distance).

The funny part was during the awards ceremony. For whatever reason they had a television that day. In fact our kids have been on television a couple of times this year. So, they sat up the podium and put some presents on each place. One would think the presents would go to the kids winning the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd places. Nope! They took pictures of the podium with the presents and then promptly took the presents away before the winners stepped on the podium. It was just for the television. Oh well, the kids were happy anyway.

Here is the set up with the presents for the photo only!

Nika took first, and her best friend took second (notice the presents on the left side behind the poster board).

Like I said, Lina was the only one in her age group, so they stuck her with another heat's winner.

And the twins. Sophie was running head to head with the girl who took second place but she wasn't going to let anybody else win, so in the last 3 seconds she stretched her body forward and won by a head.

All the participants. Their coach, Magzhan, is on the left in a blue shirt.

Our crew.

Hockey Game: Astana Barys December 2016

Last December we went to a Hockey game.  This year we decided to go again.  Last year we had gotten free tickets from the university.  The seats were pretty good.  This year, we bought our own tickets, and the seats ended up being amazing.  We spent about $42 dollars for all of us (including Yulia's mom) to go and watch the Omsk Avangard.

The stadium is just about a mile from our house and the busses don't run on the street it's on, so we decided just to walk.  We walked there in nice weather, unlike last year when we arrived and left in a blizzard.

By the time we got to the stadium, through security, and gave our coats to the coat check, we were about 5 minutes into the first period.  Our seats were about 7 rows up on the corner behind the goal.  We had a great view of the action on both sides of the rink.  The stadium is very nice and has a huge jumbotron as well and so we were able to see replays of the best plays.

The girls came straight from their figure skating practice, so they are in their special attire.

Dropping the puck. Barys is in blue.

Amazing speed and agility!

Barys fan section. It looks like Ded Moroz and Snegurochka came to cheer for the team!

The game itself was great.  The Avangard team scored in the first period.  The second period was scoreless.  Barys scored at the beginning of the third period, and about five minutes scored again, gaining the lead.  The other team pulled their goalie with about 2 minutes left and attacked furiously.  Astana defended, got the puck out, and scored in the open net with about 25 seconds left in the game.  Everyone immediately through stuffed animals onto the ice (something that was supposed to happen at the end of the game) to be donated to orphanages around the country.  It took about five minutes to clean up all the animals - and it was lots of fun seeing the players, referees, and rink staff gathering them up.

Action!

This #43 (Dustin Boyd, a Canadian) is a local hero. 

Every time our team makes a goal, the fans fly this gigantic Barys shirt.

Third goal with 25 seconds to go. The crowd just blew up!

Players helping to clean the ice. There are 25 seconds still left in the game.

Final score 3:1. We won!

We all had a lot of fun.  One peculiarity of the stadium here is that food is not allowed inside - and so when we sent our kids for treats they had to eat them.  I think the emphasis is on keeping the stadium looking nice.  In the US, of course, the emphasis is on making obscene profits on concessions.

The other big adventure was that Yulia and I were on the kiss cam during a break in the third period.  We totally kissed!

Hockey wasn't a game that I'd ever really been into before seeing it live, but it is a great sport to watch live.  It has a lot of action and is very fast.  We are going to try to go see a basketball game during the winter break as well.

Track and Field

Nika has being doing track. At the beginning of the school year I asked the girls what they wanted to do for their extra curricular activities. They all wanted to try different things but since there are only 24 hours in a day, I told them that the oldest two can pick two activities, and the twins can pick one (and if they can keep up with their school work, then the next year they can pick a second activity). I wanted all girls to do some sort of sport, and they all picked figure skating. It has been really good for them. They have a great coach and they improved dramatically in their skating skills in the last few months.

Then Nika and Lina picked guitar classes as their second activity (the twins really wanted to do violin but we decided to wait until the next year). Those have been awesome! Again they ended up with a great teacher, and they love it!

All of the activities are done in the Children's Palace which is kind of like a huge rec center with all kinds of sports, art, science, music, linguistic, craft and many, many more activities. And here is how Nika ended up with the third one, absolutely by accident. She and Lina were at their figure skating class which consists of one hour on the ice and a half an hour in the gym every time they come to practice. During their first gym practice their coach had them run a couple of laps on the indoor track. Then all of a sudden Nika shows up in the waiting room and says that the coach wants to talk to me. It turns out that it was the track and field coach who wanted to talk to me. She saw Veronika running on the track and went to beg her figure skating coach to let her go, so she could come and do track with her team. She is a 7-time national champion for Kazakhstan in track and said that Nika was born to run. Nika decided to give it a try and after the first day she fell in love with it. But she didn't want to give up figure skating, so she is doing all three now. Her track coach is super excited to train her, which is nice.

Nika is a little too young to go to track meets, but her coach wanted her to get a feel for it, so she sent her to a couple of meets already. The second time Nika took 6^th place in a 300 meters event, which is great! She is really enjoying it, and we are proud of her for not being afraid of trying new things in a foreign country.

The following pictures are from the two track meets that Nika participated in.

Getting ready to run in her very first meet

Getting ready to start

Running 300 meters (Nika is on the left, in blue)

All the kids that participated in the meet

Our Trip to Shchuchinsk (The Switzerland of Kazakhstan)

A few hundred kilometers to the northwest of Astana is a region of hills, lakes, and forests that many call the "Switzerland of Kazakhstan."  The most famous lake and town in the area is Burabay, but the largest town and the rail station is in the town of Shchuchinsk - which is named after a lake that is in the area.  We decided to visit the area in the week after New Year.  We went with our friends from church and the university - the Stices.

We met at the train station on Tuesday morning at around 10:30.  Our train arrived just then and we loaded on.  The train was coming from somewhere else and the seats where we were sitting for our 3 hour and 15 minute train ride had been occupied and were quite dirty.  The Stices have two fourteen year old daughters that they adopted from Kazakhstan about 12 years ago.  Our girls love them and really look up to them.  They had a great time laughing and talking and playing games on the way.  The adults talked as well.

Girls having fun on the train.

When we arrived in town, we took two taxis to our hotel - the Park House - which was located in the National Forest on the other side of the lake from town.  The hotel had been built just a year or two ago and was nice.  The rooms were small, but the beds were comfortable.  We checked in and then the girls spent the afternoon sledding on the ice slide hill that was right outside of the lobby.

Park House Hotel

This is the view from the top floor of our hotel. You can see the lake a little bit.

Just gorgeous!

Sliding hill right outside of the lobby

About ready to be pushed down

Tired but happy

Teamwork!

Train!

We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant to check it out.  It turned out that the food at the restaurant was good and very affordable, so we ended up eating there the entire time that we stayed.

Kids' table! They fell in love with the place!

The six of them also spent a lot of time playing card games at the end of each day.

Wednesday morning after our complimentary breakfast (which was also good), we took some taxis to the big resort hotel the Rixos that is just a few miles down the road.  They have a "Santa Village/Lapland" area that is a tourist area.  We went in and did a tour of Santa's house.  The tour was kind of like "it's a small world" at Disneyland, but without the boats, singing, and animatronics.  The tour went through India, Egypt, London, Paris, Astana, and finally Santa's house.  The kids took pictures with Santa and then wrote letters to Santa (we had them write thank you notes) and got glitter tattoos.

The quality of the pictures isn't the best because Yulia forgot her camera that day, and all of the pictures were taken with my phone.

Writing "Thank you" letters to Santa.

We also signed up to take a reindeer sled ride.  We walked out to where that was located.  There were three little reindeer tied to a sleigh.  Our four girls went, with the driver going along. He let me "drive" the reindeer with Yulia.  That consisted of me poking them with a long stick every once in a while so that they would remember to go - they knew where to go on their own since it was a circle.  There were also dog sled rides, snowmobile and four-wheeler rental, and other activities.  We signed up to go horseback riding.  We had to wait until they were ready and a van was available.  We were picked up and driven to the outskirts of Shchuchinsk to a horse farm.

Girls riding the reindeer sleigh

Everyone, including our 7 year old twins, got to ride on their own horse.  We went on a 5 km trail out in the forest and back to the farm.  The ride was beautiful - the area really is nice.  It is much different from the steppe around Astana (which also has a beauty to it).  The snow was on the ground and frosting the pine trees and it looked like something out of a postcard.  There was a group of four German tourists who were riding off the trail and faster than us, but we just had a nice walk/trot ride through the forest which lasted about 40 minutes.  The total cost was about 8 dollars per person, and it was very much worth it.

Nika got on her horse first. Everybody else is still waiting.

The camel in with the horses - he'll be important later.

Waiting for our horses to be saddled.

Lexa is getting her stirrups adjusted. The dark brown horse is Sophie's.

Yulia on her horse with German "cowboys" in the background. Unfortunately we do not have any pictures of our ride through the forest for the same reason: Yulia forgot her fancy camera. So, you will just have to believe us that it was beautiful scenery. 

When we arrived back at the farm and dismounted, one of the "cowboys" asked us if the kids wanted to ride a camel.  We had seen a large Bactrian (two-humped) camel behind the horse pens when we arrived.  The cost was about $1.60 for each of the girls, so all six of the girls took a trip around the yard on the camel and had a great time.

Lina and Lexa on the camel.

Taking a camel ride.

We had a nice big dinner at the end of the night back at our hotel.

Our last full day at the Park House was nice and quiet.  After breakfast the kids spent the morning sledding on the hill.  We had a nice late lunch and then went out and rented skis (about 50 yards from the lobby) and spent an hour and a half skiing on the trails through the forest. It was the first time any of our girls had skied, and they all did great.  My skis were a bit short and my boots a bit small (I'm bigger than the median Kazakhstani), but we all had a great time.  We had one last nice dinner that evening.

Our happy Lexa

I think kids spent about 8 hours just sledding in three days that we were there.

More sledding

Beautiful trees

Beautiful nature

Lexa trying to figure out how to move on skis

Nika got the hang of it on her first try.

Sophie was a good sport even though her ski poles were too long for her.

Lina did a lot of this in the beginning and was very upset when her mom took her pictures. That didn't stop Yulia though!

Mountain Man

Sophie with papa

Sophie

Friday morning we woke up and had breakfast and then checked out of the hotel.  We took the train back to Astana and arrived back at our house on campus by about 4:00 p.m.

Riding a taxi from our hotel to the train station through the forest.

Ready to get on the train.

We had a very nice mini vacation.  We were glad that we got to see another part of Kazakhstan and to spend time doing some winter sports.  The horse riding was definitely the highlight for everyone (when we include the camel ride as part of that experience), but the whole retreat was great.  Now we want to go back in the summer and hike and swim in the lake.