8.06.2008: random sources of illumination

Earthquake predictions were rife in Almaty last month. The local media spent the week of May 19th-23rd telling residents that we'd be hit on the evening of the 24th, and people were being urged to prepare for anything up to an eight or a nine. A few students gave me advice like "Sleep in your clothes" and "Make sure you have your documents with you when you go to bed on Saturday". And actually, I almost followed their instructions! Not because I believed the predictions - I mean, the Japanese can't predict an earthquake more than 20 minutes before it happens, so if Kazakh scientists could see one coming a week in advance that would put this country at the forefront of seismic research worldwide. Seems a bit unlikely to me!

No, the reason why I nearly slept in my clothes and with my documents was this: my school threw a 'farewell party' in the mountains on the day when the quake was supposed to hit. See, about half of the foreign teachers who were working at my school in Almaty have already left, since their contracts expired around the beginning of June. So before too many faces disappeared, the Powers-That-Be decided to send everyone off in true Kazakh style. Which means with a lot of meat, dancing and vodka.

As it turned out, 'Quake Day' was the rainiest day of the year so far. As we climbed out of our tour bus and headed to the mountain café where the party was to take place, the heavens opened and spilled extravagant amounts of water onto our (thankfully covered) outdoor dining area. Ten minutes later, as food and drink were served, I noticed a few people counting the seconds between lightning flashes and thunderclaps. Couldn't really tell, though, whether the storm was heading closer to us or further away. In fact it seemed content to just hang around, which it did for a good couple of hours. By the end of the party, trekking the 30 metres to the (extremely grim) outdoor toilet was like competing in some mud-themed event on a Japanese game show.

Of course, none of this stopped the locals, or even noticeably slowed them down. A bit of rain was never going to come between them and the prodigious quantities of meat, vodka and dancing they'd come here to enjoy! And when it got chilly, a few resourceful folk produced traditional Kazakh rugs to wrap themselves in between twirls around the dancefloor. Result: it was a great party :-)

So at about midnight on the 24th, having kicked on to a restaurant with half-a-dozen other teachers for some more chit chat, I stumbled home and fell into bed, passport copy in my back pocket, as per my students' advice. Then I thought "No, too uncomfortable", removed the jeans and promptly fell asleep. I woke up at 8am the next morning with the following three thoughts pressing on the walls of my brain:

1. "Oh gods, my head!";
2. "If the bastards on that construction site across the road don't stop drilling, I'm going to kill every last one of them"; and
3. "Hmmm, still alive. Guess we didn't have that catastrophic earthquake".

That, btw, was just one in a small series of parties that have punctuated KZ life lately. I think the best of them was a costume party that Scott and I threw for teachers and students, held here at our flat a few weeks ago.

House parties are rare in Almaty, and some of our students thought we were a bit nuts for holding such an event at home. Still, they turned up ready to play hard. We had quite a few impressive costumes - among which Katya's amazing Pink Angel outfit took out the prize - acoustic guitar singalongs, some party games (which are de rigeur here) and a series of odd 'tasks' that were assigned to people as they came through the door. (These were typically things like "try to make someone angry", "tell three people you love them and say why", and "feed everyone at the party" - the latter of which may explain the grape.) The festivities concluded next morning, with a breakfast of (you guessed it) meat at a local 24hr shash'lik* and beer bar. It was a fabulous night, and I still hear people talking about it even now.

But on to slightly less frivolous matters. I want to tell you about one thing I've come to appreciate about being a foreigner: namely, how random your life can be when you don't really understand who or what is driving the society you live in. In your own country, you more or less know the range of things that might happen on a given day or in a given week, but elsewhere - especially in a somewhat unpredictable place like Kazakhstan - trying to guess what will be going on in a month's time (or a moment's) is usually about as fruitful as ... well, as trying to predict a major earthquake.

Let me give you an example: in Almaty there are frequent blackouts. Typically they'll happen while you're wandering down the street; suddenly a city block or two will go dark, with sometimes hilarious and sometimes frightening consequences. Crossing a major intersection during one of these localised blackouts is a nightmare - it's every SUV for itself, and you just can't tell where the next one is going to come from. It's even worse if you happen to be riding in an elevator at the wrong moment - that's a place you really don't want to be when the power grid fails!

At the same time, though, the blackouts can have some memorable results. One night I was ambling past Arabeska middle-eastern restaurant during a power outtage, and was fascinated to see the diners inside, poised over their plates and sitting almost entirely still. I couldn't decide whether they looked more like real people who'd been 'frozen in time', or shop-window mannikins arranged to look as though they were enjoying a hearty feast of plastic iskender kebabs and ladies' fingers. Either way, it was a surreal, almost cinematic scene.

On another occasion about six weeks ago, the blackout happened while I was heading towards a local supermarket on my way home from work. The supermarket was in the affected area, but as I strolled past I noticed a slight yellowish glow emanating from inside. I decided to stick my head in and see if they were open, and sure enough they were. At every cashier and at strategic points along the aisles, candles had been set up and were flickering silently in the otherwise-darkened hall. It was obvious that the illumination they provided wouldn't be enough for me see exactly what I was buying, but as the dim light played over tins and jars and tetra packs and bottles of vodka, I thought "Cool, grocery shopping by candlelight!" and went in.

My first candelight shopping trip was an experience I'll remember fondly. Being in an almost-dark supermarket felt pretty weird at first, and as I rounded the end of the first aisle I sensed that someone was creeping up behind me. Turning, I saw a staff member holding a little blue flashlight and smiling shyly. Every time I approached a shelf and showed interest in a product, she shone the flashlight onto the label, like an usher helpfully illuminating row numbers in a theatre. She followed me right around the supermarket this way, ensuring that I could see everything I might want to buy. Then, when I finally got to the checkout, the atmosphere was jovial - the cashier and her bag-packing colleague were obviously quite tickled by the situation, even though they'd no doubt been through it before. And I 'bonded' a little with them, to the extent that I now get a much friendlier greeting when I go into the same supermarket.

Almost as memorable was the time when a power failure happened while I was en route to my favourite hangout in Almaty, a café about two blocks from my school called Zuma. I'd discovered this place more or less by accident about six weeks earlier, as had my colleague William (a Canadian teacher). We'd had a similar reaction: "Finally, a decent place to get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine after work!". So we've convened at Zuma quite a few times to unwind after Friday night lessons, and introduced numerous other people to it as well.

On the evening in question, it became clear as we approached the café that it would be within the blackout zone. We thought we'd probably have to find somewhere else for our Friday night chat, but no ... Zuma had stayed determinedly open. Votive candles had been placed on each table, and the low light made the place quite atmospheric - in fact you could almost say "romantic". As we set down our stuff and the waitress lit our candle for us, William said "Listen, Anthony: you know I like you and everything, but don't go getting the wrong idea about this". I laughed, and wondered if he was referring to the recent incident where I was pulled out of my classroom to kiss another Canadian man.

And yes, I do intend to explain that.

Earlier that week, my colleague Nico (he of the groovy headwear, who had accompanied me a few months earlier on the deathride in the Lada) had been planning a lesson on culture shock. Nico was born in France, and as a discussion-starter he'd decided to demonstrate a traditional labize** to his class. So he'd texted me that morning to say "Hey Anthony, can you wear your berét to school today?" I was a little bewildered by the request, but on the subject of headwear I rarely take much convincing, so I said "Yes". The next thing I knew, I was being coached on French greetings and doing 'practice kisses' in the staff room.

When the time rolled around, I got a knock on my classroom door and was summoned. Expecting a series of airy, minimal-contact gestures, I instead found myself standing in a room of complete strangers going "Ay Nico, como ça va?" and having another man's face firmly, almost violently planted on my own, four times in rapid-fire succession. Had Nico greeted me with much more enthusiasm, there may have been some embarrassing bruises to explain the following day! This caused much laughter among his students and, consequently, some rather inquisitive stares in my own classroom when I returned. As I explained to my advanced class what had just happened, I could see a few of them thinking "Well, we kinda like this guy, but he's definitely a few sandwiches short of the full picnic".

This was just a precursor, though, to the real strangeness.

The day after the labize lesson - Thursday April 17th, to be precise (or Sunday October 5th, to be imprecise) - I woke up feeling a little disoriented. The temperatures in Almaty had been around the 15-20C mark, and very humid; I'd even started carrying deodorant in my school backpack, to help me remain fresh and pleasant-smelling during my later lessons. But on this Thursday morning, something was different. It took me a few seconds to pinpoint it, and then the following thought landed: "Why is everything so white today?"

To be fair, the mid-spring snowfall is something that most of us foreign teachers had been warned about. Spring in Almaty apparently goes like this: the weather warms, the ground-cover melts, and touches of green begin to make their way half-heartedly into your surrounds. However, you get the feeling that spring doesn't really mean it - the green is nowhere near as vivid as you'd been led to expect by local residents, who are always telling you what a beautiful time of year it is in their city. Then the temperature drops suddenly and dramatically, and you get a freak snowstorm. About three weeks later, the greening of Almaty is almost complete, and it really is a remarkable transformation - but you need that one final burst of winter to set it off. This happens every year without fail, and people who grew up here like to recount stories of the spring snowfalls they remember from their childhood.

Bearing all of this in mind, it probably shouldn't have surprised me much to wake up to falling snow on that Thursday morning. It was just a challenge to the logic circuits. We hadn't seen snow for over a month, the icicles had long since lost their grip and fallen from the buildings, and winter seemed a distant memory - and then it was back! It felt like I was living in a parody of those old Queensland*** Tourism Commission commercials - "Almaty: beautiful one day, permafrost the next".

Meanwhile, as the weather has warmed up to its present level (which frequently tops 35^oC), I've started experiencing ever-more-frequent urges to leave our humid classrooms and take my lessons out into the cafés and green spaces of Almaty. As a result, I've spent some great hours in parks with students, alternately teaching grammar and vocab, leading discussions and just being silly. (There are loads of activities you can do when you've got so much more space to work with.)

This almost backfired on one recent occasion, though, when I'd arranged to meet my advanced class at a café/bar called Bistro (which means "fast" in Russian, btw). When the students arrived there, a dancefloor atmosphere had unexpectedly replaced the quiet, calm ambience I'd experienced at the same place a week earlier. So we decamped to the park.

The problem with this strategy was that the lesson started at 8pm. The days here are quite long now, but not that long, and about 1/2 an hour into the lesson darkness began to descend. I thought "Oh no, this is going to be a disaster!". But not to worry: a student called Andrew helpfully offered to go and grab a light source from his nearby flat. A few minutes later he returned with a kind of miner's lamp attached to his head. So there we were, sitting in the dark on Friday night, as 'normal' people sauntered past en route to restaurants and nightclubs, half of us using mobile phone lights to read our text books while the other half relied on Andrew's headlamp for illumination. It was a strange lesson ... but a cool one!

The headlamp lesson was also a small reminder of something I really like about KZ: namely, that people here seem used to things not going 100% to plan, and it makes them quite resourceful and inventive in solving life's minor logistical problems. I've seen loads of examples of this. I find the ability to improvise when stuff falls apart, breaks down or goes awry quite admirable - especially coming from a country like Australia. Where I'm from, people like to think they're good at improvising ("Will you tie it up with wire just to keep the show on the road?" goes a famous song about the Australian character), but actually their lives are increasingly ruled by occupational health and safety standards which make a lie of this particular national myth. From that perspective, it's cool to be in a country where people really do know how to "tie it up with wire" (or tape, or whatever else comes to hand). Of course, there is a downside ... but that's a whole 'nother story!

Incidentally, a lot of my students have responded very well to this "take the lesson out of the classroom" approach. After that odd incident with the headlamp, some of my (thoroughly awesome) advanced class came with me to Zuma, where we passed the hookah pipe and chatted for a couple of hours. This in turn seems to have started a little Friday night tradition - we went to Zuma again this Friday, and are planning to do the same next week. They're keen to make 'café lessons' a regular thing.

And so now here I am, with just two weeks left in Kazakhstan, and I've begun to feel a certain sadness about leaving this place. Through all the weirdness, the discoveries and the difficult times, I've come to realise certain things. The first is that I actually have a much wider social circle in Almaty now than I did in Sydney a year ago, and my current lifestyle strongly reflects that. It's kind of amazing, given that I've only been here for nine months, and it's helped me to regain the feeling that I lead a slightly 'charmed' life. I've just had so much fun in the last six weeks or so, spending loads of time with Quality Folk who I would never have met if I hadn't made some very specific - and yet quite random - decisions about what to do with myself last year. It's as if I've been rolling a dice for the past few years, and suddenly it's started coming up all sixes. Or as if someone has just switched on a headlamp, or lit some candles in the aisles, illuminating all the possiblities for future fun and frolics in KZ. All of which makes me feel that I'll be losing quite a lot by leaving.

*sigh*

Oh well ... I guess this is all part-and-parcel of the 'moving on' experience. I mean, a certain amount of nostalgia and regret is bound to creep in when you spend most of your time with people who will be permanently gone from your life in the very near future. It's a weird and confusing headspace.

Anyway, there'll be more news very soon from this Land of Spring Snows and Candle-lit Supermarkets. I've got a bone to pick with you Australians (again). So ... prepare yourself to be grossly offended by my anti-patriotic ramblings!

Bye :-)

* Shash'lik: marinated meat on metal skewers, served as a snack or a whole meal. The accompaniment is usually no more than some onion rings, though if you're lucky you might get a few cucumber and tomato slices and a bit of sauce, brought to the table in a little pewter jug.

** Labize: The custom whereby French men kiss each other twice on each cheek as a greeting.

*** Queensland: a northern state of Australia. Years ago, their State Tourist Commission ran an advertising campaign with the slogan "Queensland: Beautiful One Day, Perfect The Next". Inevitably this inspired a lot of parodies, which (far more than the ads themselves) made it one of the most well-known advertising campaigns in Australian history.