22.11.2007: the slow reveal

When you've no hot water in your flat, your day-to-day rhythm inevitably changes. Filling a bath is the work of perhaps three or four hours - boiling kettle after kettle and saucepan after saucepan, dumping each new load into the tub, trying to perceive a noticeable increase in depth, re-filling the vessels to get the next load underway and so on. Each rise in the water level tends to punctuate your morning, dividing everything else into discrete intervals so that you can see precisely what you've managed to accomplish since, say, an hour earlier. It's quite an interesting process.

But don't get me wrong here: after nine days of the boil-and-fill routine, the sudden sputtering of your hot water taps is almost cause enough for a party! In fact, thinking back to early October (when our hot water was cut), I did decide to celebrate on the evening after it returned, sharing a bottle of savyetskoe shampanskaye (literally, "soviet champagne") with my flatmate. And even though I had a lesson the following morning, the weeknight indulgence felt entirely justified :-)

If you've yet to experience life without hot water, picture yourself waking up one morning to discover that you can have your first shower for nine frikkin' days. You'd be in heaven, believe me. (NB: in Moscow it was longer - almost three weeks, from memory.) So you lather and scrub yourself to within an inch of your life, emerging from your flat red-raw but ridiculously well-disposed toward almost everyone and everything. "Hey there, neighbourhood dogs!"; "Mornin', local loitering folk!"; "How're ya doin', Mr. Invisible Speed-Hump, over whom I trip almost every day!" It's a wonderful, almost giddy feeling.

Continuing on (and trying to regain the dignity lost when you stumbled over Mr. Hump), you pass the old bar heater buried in the park behind your block - an icon of soviet-style domestic life, which someone has transformed into urban sculpture by submerging it waist-high in dirt. A little further, and you're walking beside the dusty courtyard where a group of babushkas frequently sit around an old picnic table, chilling out and playing cards with one or two elderly gents from the adjacent buildings. Holding your camera down at your side, you try (not for the first time, nor the second nor the third) to snap them surreptitiously from a distance, without the aid of the viewfinder to help you take aim. Chances are you're just going to end up with a few more pictures of dirt, but your mood is so buoyant today that photographic roulette seems like a pretty fun thing to try.

A couple of minutes later you're on Ulitsa Gagarina, your nearest main road. Looking right - and assuming it's a clear morning - you're thrilled to see mountains towering majestically at the end of the street. Better enjoy them while you can: they'll be gone in a couple of hours, completely erased from view by the build-up of petrol fumes in the air.

Heading around the corner, you pass an attractive woman of about thirty who's washing her BMW on the footpath. She's wearing skin-tight designer jeans with jewel-encrusted decorative stitching across the back, PVC boots with stiletto heels and dangly diamond earrings. Completing the ensemble is a low-cut slinky black top, which she almost falls out of as she leans forward to buff the rear bumper with a soft foamy sponge. Being from a western country, you naturally expect a large yellow phone number to appear in front of her at any second, obscuring the naughty bits and inviting you to exchange some text messages with a computer program pretending to be the car-wash woman. It doesn't.

Soon you arrive at the bus stop on the intersection of Gagarina and Timiryazeva, where buses of various shapes and sizes fight their way through the throng of ancient Ladas, shiny Mercedes and SUVs to compete for your custom. Some of the buses have decorative sun-visors made from curtain material draped across their front windscreens, hung with tassles and looking a bit like belly dancers' veils. Most have cracks in their windscreens, and the occasional one has tape and clear plastic over a missing window - all evidence of past collisions.

As each bus pulls over, a conductor leans out of the window (or occasionally swings out of the centre door, holding on to a railing) and 'sprukes' the bus route to prospective passengers. The one you need goes something like "Timiryazeva-pa-Atakent-ee-Ramstor-Centralni-Stadion-Abai-Furmanova-Zelyoni-Bazaar!!!!", all run together into a single, epic word. You're listening for the "Furmanova" part of that, so when you hear it you quickly cram yourself onto the bus and get your 40 Tenge ready for the conductor. He might take it now, he might take it later, or he might leave it to you to pay him as you get off. (Part of his job is to memorise the faces of passengers, in case any of them try to avoid paying.) And you most likely won't get a ticket, though it's not entirely unknown; probably depends on how honest he's being about the daily take.

So that's your day so far. You're about two hours in - almost half of which was spent in the shower - and it's another ten or eleven hours until your work day ends half-way across town from where it began, and you hail the 'taxi' (i.e. private car) which will bring you home.

Welcome to my new(-ish) life in Almaty.

I have to say, when this whole adventure started two months ago, I really wasn't sure if it was for me. I mean, for one thing, I felt as though I'd left my heart in the Far East, so to speak. I loved South Korea almost immediately (at least after the inevitable Day One hardships were out of the way), and if I had to sum up my thoughts about it while I was there, they'd probably be along the lines of "Gosh, I so belong in a place like this!". The same was true of Japan last year and the year before. Both countries felt 'right' somehow, and appealed more or less continually to my sense of "huh?" - i.e. to the strangely addictive feeling that you really don't comprehend much of what's going on around you, but finding out about it promises to be a load of fun.

By contrast, my first couple of weeks in Kazakhstan saw me swinging on the mental pendulum. I swung repeatedly from "Wow, it's just amazing to be here!" to "Oh my gods, what have I done?" and back, passing through "Yeah, it's okay I s'pose" and a few other points along the arc.

I've since discovered, though, that there quite a lot to appreciate about The Big K, and as it slowly reveals itself to me I'm enjoying it more and more. I mean, those crazy days like the one I described above are exhausting but extremely fun. Just like in Japan and Korea, your "huh?" sense is always being stimulated by one thing or another, and (as you've probably guessed) I love it when that happens. You get that feeling of "This is a truly foreign country - I've got so much to learn about it!"

Having said that, there are definitely elements of the familiar here. Russkiy culture is quite prevalent, though it's generally a much softer version of same than I experienced in Moscow. But Kazakhstan is much more than just 'Russia lite'; you're always aware that you're in Asia, and you rarely go for too long without being reminded that this country also marks one edge of the Islamic World. So really it's quite a melting pot - a blend of the three great cultural blocks I mentioned, spiced up by some bonus influences from elsewhere in Asia and Europe.

On the downside, the traffic is a frikkin' nightmare. If I die in Almaty, it won't be over-zealous muggers or corrupt police or xenophobic skinhead types who take me out. I can tell you now what the murder weapon will be: it'll be either a trolleybus or, more likely, an SUV. My flatmate Scott says that Kazakhs have "a childish attitude towards their cars", and I'm afraid he's right - a disturbingly high number of them drive like drunk P-platers. Car accidents are legion, and seemingly regarded as a normal part of everyday life. And of course, the fact that you can buy a driver's license doesn't help matters much.

Another thing I found off-putting at first was the amount of construction going on. It varies from one 'hood to the next, but in some parts of town about a third of everything you see seems to be scaffolded &/or surrounded my workmen. Even in nouveau riche areas like the emerging financial district of Samal, you can find yourself walking through a half-completed pedestrian underpass which is only partially-lit, with exposed electrical wires on the ceilings, rubble strewn across the unsealed pavement and workmen smoking and chatting in a shadowy alcove on one side of the passageway. In other parts of town, cranes are almost as numerous as they were on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz after the wall came down. Add to this the ill-maintained footpaths and the apparent lack of anything resembling health & safety standards, and it means you always have to look out for things that could poke you in the head and watch where you put your feet at the same time.

As far as I can make out, much of this construction has to do with the changing fortunes of Kazakhstan over the last 16 years. The BBC calls this country "the success story of the former Soviet Union", and there does seem to be quite a staggering boom happening here - along with a lot of people walking around in clothes I could never dream of affording! There's a lot of bling on display as well (especially if you consider fancy cars to be one of the principal forms of 'man-bling'), which of course is a sign of newly-acquired affluence.

Depending on your mood, though, even the annoyances and inconveniences can become part of the appeal. Exampleton: ul. Gagarina (my nearest main street, as I mentioned before) is a continual roadwork and construction zone, and the chaos of the streetscape can be strangely enjoyable. At times there's just so much crap lying around that making your way down Gagarina can feel more like climbing than walking, and it's kinda fun to see how the path changes from week to week. Not so great when the whole place is iced over, though. When the ground gets all slippy, you start to notice once again just how many opportunities there are to fall over and impale yourself in this split-level, sharp-cornered, exposed-metal city.

The construction boom also gives rise to some nice little idiosyncracies - like the fairy lights that bathe sections of Ulitsa Auezova in a festive glow, wrapped jauntily around the giant arms of cranes on the many building sites there. When the great arms move (as they often do at night), you get a free light show. It's just one of those things that tickles my joyful sense of absurdity.

Of course, if I was sharing this city with a bunch of cranky, stick-up-the-arse Muscovites, none of this silliness would be enough to make Almaty a pleasant place to live. It hinges on the locals being sufficiently friendly and worthwhile to make you feel happy about being in their town. Which, I'm pleased to say, they usually are. When you're finding the whole thing a bit of a strain, you can quite often be hauled out of Angstville by random friendly interactions with students &/or local people. This effect is greatly enhanced by the fact that, at my school, there are about 20 local (i.e. Kazakh) teachers, who are essentially now my colleagues. Several of these guys (or girls, actually, since all but one are female) have been enormously helpful in the whole settling-in process, and they're excellent sources of information, re-assurance and general good cheer. I feel quite privileged to be working with them. But the random friendly strangers do their part from time to time, too.

On a purely aesthetic level, I definitely wouldn't put Almaty it in the same category as, say, Weimar and Erfurt (former East Germany), or Tallinn, or Tokyo, or Seoul - basically any of the cities I've 'fallen in love with' when I've visited them. I mean, it does contain some beauty spots, but many of them are surprisingly well hidden. You don't come here and immediately go "Wow!" the way people do in Paris or Prague or wherever; you need to hang around for a while and let the slow reveal happen. If you can excuse the dodgy metaphor, it could almost be said that Almaty likes to perform a little 'civic striptease' for its visitors - have a little patience, invest a little time, and you'll probably end up seeing what lies beneath her veils. But like the much classier belly dancer she aspires to be, Almaty's not going to take it all off at once; no matter how much you've paid to come in, you're gonna have to wait for the good stuff.

That's actually true in a lot of ways - not just in terms of locating the pretty parts, but also in uncovering the fine cultural detail, finding the stuff you need, the best food, the best places to go out and so on. In any case, though, it's as I said before: the people, not the place itself, supply the charm. (Except when they get behind the wheel of a car, and some kind of Jek&Hyde transformation renders most of them horn-crazed, risk-addicted and generally sanity-free.)

Before I leave you alone, I just want to mention one very pleasant feature of Almaty's urban face: namely, that it's free of some of the scars which blight most other cityscapes around the world. Like the Golden Arches, for example. Apparently McDonalds did some market research here and concluded that there wouldn't be enough interest in its product, so they decided against opening franchises in Almaty. Consequently, the only arches you'll see here are of the Islamic variety, like those gracing the entrance to Atakent recreation park / conference centre (about ten minutes' walk from where I live).

Personally I think that's something for the Kazakhs to be proud of.

Anyway, those are some of my current feelings about the new digs. They can still bounce around pretty wildly at times, depending on what's happened in the last couple of days. I'm not convinced that I've had my last "Get me out of this place right the Hell now!" moment, but I'm pretty sure that I won't act on it if it happens again; there's just far too much to learn about the Life in The Big K. Last week one of the local teachers told me about her holiday in Turkey, saying that when she first arrived there she felt like "a kitten whose eyes hadn't opened yet". I still feel that way here sometimes, and I'm looking forward to loads more eye-opening moments in the months to come.

Okay, that's plenty for one ramble. Over and out.

Bye!