12.12.2008: Chile Nado?

I had an idea for a book once. The basic thought was this: I'd choose the beasties I most wanted to see in their natural habitat, then plot a course around the world, stopping at all the places I'd need to go in order to see said beasties. Of course I'd make sure my path led me through some difficult-to-traverse areas, so as to ensure plenty of food for anecdote along the way. Then I'd work out exactly how to get to all these places and what documents were necessary, make contact with local naturalists to let them know I might be coming and find out what possibilities existed for guided tours. The last step would be to approach a publisher and say "Look, I've got this great idea and the research has all been done. All I need is the finance."

Naïve, I know. But it does sound fun, doesn't it?

Anyway, high on my list of must-see creatures were hummingbirds. I've never seen one in real life, but they've fascinated me for years - it just seems that the more you learn about them, the more bizarre and beautiful they become. For that reason, see a hummingbird has been on my "must do before you die" list for about as long as I can recall. So you can imagine how blown away I was in late summer when people started telling me that they're actually here in Almaty. Before that, I'd assumed that satisfying this particular weird ambition would require travelling to some madly far-off location like Chile.

Needless to say, when the hummingbird thing came up I went immediately into Seek Mode. During August & September I spent a good portion of my time scanning flower beds and poking around in parks, hoping to catch a glimpse of tiny whirring wings and flashing feathers.

Unfortunately I struck some problems on this mission. Problem #1: I seemed to keep missing the birds, turning up too late to see them. Example: one Sunday in early September I got a call from my colleague Gabriel saying "Get yourself down to Temiryazeva/Zharokova (near my old flat) right now - there are hummingbirds here!" But I was too slow, and they were gone by the time I arrived. This little drama repeated itself a couple of times, with similar results.

Problem #2: it seemed that Gabriel (who showed me footage of hummingbirds he saw at a flower show) and the other 'believers' may have been mistaken. See, depending on who you talked to, the creatures in Gabriel's video were either a) actual hummers or b) a kind of insect with a long proboscis that looks like a hummingbird, but isn't one. But the evidence either way was inconclusive, so I continued hanging around roadside gardens and peering into flowers, drawing bemused stares from locals (which I'm used to now).

Finally, just a couple of weeks ago, my friend Svetlana solved the mystery with a link to some Russian sites that featured pictures of the creatures I'd been chasing. Turns out they're a large species of moth-like bug called "brazhniki" (cute name, no?), which are often mistaken for hummingbirds because of their long proboscis, their spectacularly colourful wings and their ability to hover above the bud of a flower and suck up the juices from its sugary reservoir. So it seems there were never any hummingbirds here, despite reports to the contrary.

Result: I may have to go to Chile after all*.

Hummers aside, though, my first couple of months back in KZ were generally pretty good as far as the Beastie Factor was concerned. A few weeks after returning I went to see the berkutchi - traditional Kazakh hunters, who hunt on horseback in co-operation with (get this!) eagles. It's like a precursor of European falconry, and a pretty darn spectacular one at that. The berkutch chooses an eagle at birth, rears it, develops an almost brotherly bond with the animal ... and then they go out and kill stuff together :-) This was a pretty amazing thing to see, even though the display of eagle-hunting was quite minimal, and we spent most of our time watching a demonstration of how different birds of prey do the various things they do. (Seeing an owl squeeze between members of a crowd, or feeling the whooosh of a falcon passing less than a metre overhead, can never be a bad thing, so I didn't feel ripped off.)

Soon after that, the wildlife started encroaching on our flat. Late one night Dave (ex-flatmate) and I decided to head down to the local 24hr supermarket for some supplies, and as we emerged into the stairwell outside our door, something swooped in our general direction - and very fast! After a few seconds of "wtf?", we realised it was a bat. Then another one arrived, flitting through the small open window at the top of our staircase, and began circling around wildly inside the building. Rushing to get my camera, I stood on the stairs and asked Dave to snap me with the batties. They were so cute!

When we returned from the supermarket about 1/2 hour later, there were a dozen or so bats darting around in the stairwell. It was thoroughly bat-tastic, and I felt like quite the privileged foreigner. Then it was just a question of getting through our front door as quickly as we could, so that none of them flew into our hallway and got stuck there!

The batties returned about a week later and put on another spectacular little airshow outside our door. Then they disappeared again, leaving me thinking "Hmmm. Cool."

But what have I been doing besides chasing actual and hypothetical creatures around town? Well, I've basically spent my last four months settling back in to the 'stan that makes all others look like mere stanlets. With Year Two well underway, I've got a weird dual time-perception thing happening. On the one hand, weeks have a tendency to zip past like those ludicrous formula one cars, creating a curious doppler effect that renders Sunday a couple of semi-tones lower than everything else. But on the other, when I think back to the August morning when my plane landed at Almaty International Airport - touching down near a solitary Lada parked in a huge grassy field next to the runway, stark against its breathtaking backdrop of pre-Himalayan mountain scenery - it feels like a long, long time ago. The whole summer sojourn in Finland seems to have receded far into the distant past, like a sneaky recedy thing.

So anyway ... Year Two. Having initially been dumped back in my crappy old flat, I pleaded to be moved to a better location, and eventually the school agreed. My new place has a sweeping view of the Zailiyskiy Alatau mountain range - although, living as I do in the world's 9th most polluted city, I have to be up quite early to see it. Unleaded petrol never quite made it to the former USSR, so by about 10am the mountains have usually disappeared behind a cloud of lead pollution. Even so, they're pretty damn cool, and I was thrilled to be within visual range. The mountains have this habit of putting on different costumes through the week; they might go stark and monochromatic on a grey Monday, dusky blue with little shawls of cloud on a cold, clear Tuesday, then bright and crisp-edged as Wednesday kicks in. And then just occasionally, they'll pop out looking all crystal-clear and crinkly on a Sunday afternoon after rain has cleared the air, and I'll lose my breath for a second when I look out the window.

I often find myself wishing 'my' mountains a good morning, and as I stare at them over coffee it's tempting to think little compliments about their look for the day. ("Hey there, Zailiyskiy Alatau. Nice silhouette effect you've got going this morning!") I realise this is completely ridiculous, but I have an excuse. See, live in a place where you can see mountains from your window has appeared annually on the same list as visit Slovenia and see hummingbirds ever since I was ... well, a lot younger than I am now. That makes TWO things knocked off the list in a single year, which quite frankly renders me a pretty happy camper. So I'll keep saying "good morning" to my tall and stately friends while I can :-)

Interspersed among these mountain chats and free-flight bat shows have been a few other memorable moments, like my visit to the Kazakh capital of Astana in September. I went with two colleagues to help out at the grand opening of my employer's new school there. While in town I got a tour of the city, and I have to say, it was weird and impressive.

Astana is known in some circles as a kind of evolving Central Asian equivalent of Old Europe's royal capitals. The nucleus of its town centre is laid out as a vast promenade, with the opulent Presidential Palace at one end and a mad architectural jewellery box stretching for a couple of kilometres outside Nazarbayev's front door. Occupying centre stage in this multi-ringed circus is the Norman Foster-designed Baiterek - an outlandish piece of vertical exuberance which is arguably Central Asia's answer to the Eiffel Tower.

Baiterek is featured on KZ's currency, and nicknamed "The Chupa Chup" by people here.) In the daytime, its jagged edges reminded me a little of the tower of Barad-dûr (where Sauron/Vincent Lee hangs out for most of the Lord of The Rings trilogy), while at night it rotates through a mesmerising series of hypercolours, from electrified canary yellow to high-beam indicator blue, "make your way to the emergency exits immediately" red and "relax, it's only a hospital" green. Surrounding it are other, similarly well-nicknamed architects' waking dreams like "the lighter" (Ministry of Transport) and "the coffee pots" (some other governmental office), but Baiterek manages to outweird them all.

Meanwhile, behind the President's Residence you can see the result of an even grander undertaking, known as The Palace of Peace and Concord. Like Baiterek, this project was born in the imaginations of Norman Foster and President Nursultan Nazarbayev. To quote a Norman Foster fan site, "The building is conceived as a global centre for religious understanding, the renunciation of violence and the promotion of faith and human equality". And yes, they really mean it. Much of the palace is subterranean, with just a pyramid-shaped glass thingie protruding above ground (presumably so that it doesn't dwarf the Pressie's house). Inside are Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and other 'facilities' (meaning churches, mosques and so forth) along with a 1,500 seat opera house, a culture museum and a "University of Civilisation" - basically an enormous research library.

The main purpose of this 'palace' is to host triennial conferences of world religions, whose leaders will sit in a circular room modelled on the Security Council chamber at the UN in New York, suspended about 200 feet off the ground near the pyramid's pointy roof. But it's also open to the general public. The opera house is underneath, and the middle level has shops, conference centres and a series of zig-zag walkways leading through "The hanging gardens of Astana", an incredible profusion of greenery growing in the walls of the pyramid. In short: it's frikkin' mad.

All of this stuff, btw, lies about three city blocks from the absolute emptiness of the Kazakh steppe. You can stand inside the ball at the top of Baiterek and look out over miles of stunning grassy void, beginning just a few hundred metres away. And you can walk there from the centre - or at least, you can if you're not travelling with a woman in heels who doesn't fancy walking that far to see ... well, nothing, basically.

Shame.

Reactions to Astana tend to be extreme: one American journalist I spoke to recently told me he felt outraged when he went there, having just toured some of the poorest areas of Kazakhstan. And it's an entirely fair comment. I mean, billions are being poured into the Central Asian dreamscape while poverty reigns elsewhere in the country. Also on the negative side, the city has risen from nothing in ten years, and hasn't had time to find a personality yet. At night it's as dead as a single brain cell floating in a vat of scotch whisky. And the winter temperatures fall below -40C, with a pretty vicious wind-chill factor. Still ... if you can suspend your sense of social justice, the whole city is just a head-trip, fascinating to walk or drive around (especially in a Lada) and quite unlike anywhere else I've ever been.

Of course, like everything in this scotch-taped country, even the monumental central boulevarde of Astana is just a few good kicks away from falling apart. Twice while I was walking along, my foot snagged a paver stone on an elegant staircase and the paver slid out of its place. I could've lifted it out and taken it home if I'd wanted to. And aside from the ubiquitous tower blocks of suburbia and the generous scattering of cranes along the skyline, this was pretty much the only similarity I saw between the old capital (Almaty) and its gleaming new successor: namely that both were clearly built by cowboys.

Back to my new(ish) home town, though: Almaty hasn't stopped entertaining me with its talent for producing odd little bits of randomness that make you go "Huh?". People tend to report things quite calmly and off-handedly here that would be big news in other places - like the occasion about six weeks ago when most of my students were late to their lesson because there was "a bus under fire" on the main road near our school. When I heard this - reported as matter-of-factly as the contents of one's packed lunch - I naturally asked "Excuse me ... a what under what?" Turned out that said bus wasn't under fire, but rather on fire. It was apparently just sitting in the middle of the road, blazing away happily and holding up the peak-hour traffic. Y'know, like buses do.

The bus incident made me recall a sweltering May evening when an upstairs office in our school building suddenly burst into flames while I was teaching a lesson downstairs. Once again, it was handled in such a low-key fashion that you'd have thought there was nothing more going on than a broken lift. In fact, when I came out of the classroom to ask our security guard what was happening (because my students could smell smoke), he told me there was no problem and I should just continue the lesson. Ten minutes later we were evacuating, holding sleeves over our mouths as we descended the stairwell so as not to inhale the thick smoke that was floating down from above like dry ice. (The same stairwell was covered in exploded computer parts and charred pieces of office equipment the next morning.) When we got to the street, we could see that the whole roof of our building - which occupies an entire block - was smoking. Walking around the back, we saw angry flames pouring out of a fifth-story window, threatening to engulf the offices around and set the whole roof alight. Just another day in Almaty. Things happen here.

More disturbingly, about two weeks ago there was a gas explosion in a Turkish bakery on Ulitsa Temiryazeva, in which two people were killed and about 15 injured. This was quite a sobering reminder of how poor the health and safety standards are in this country. Just three weeks before it was blown to smithereens, I sat in the same Turkish bakery with my flatmate enjoying coffee and baklava, not imagining for a moment (of course) that it would be a scene of devastation just a short time later. I've since walked past a couple of times, and the site has been levelled and covered with concrete, in an apparent attempt to literally bury the entire episode. But on top of the grey slab, underneath a gathering film of dust and grit, lie a few withering roses.

Sorry, got all serious there for a moment. Back to the fun stuff ...

Er, let's see. Oh yeah ... I've been doing a bit of the 'social organiser' thing, trying to keep up the tradition started last year by Scott and myself. Had a house warming party in October, organised karaoke last month (from which I walked home through flash-flooded streets in the midst of a wonderful snow storm), invited guests around a few weeks back to play poker and nardi (essentially backgammon on a very oldy-worldy playing board) and other such capers. However, if I had to name my most treasured experience of the academic year so far, it'd probably be this: I'm teaching teenagers every day now, and I love it.

Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while will recall me rambling fondly about my teen class in Moscow. For those who haven't, let me recap very quickly: generally speaking, Moscow and I didn't get along at all, and there were plenty of times when I wanted to leave. I was held in place, though, by two things: first, there was my small circle of valued colleagues (Hi Astrid, Reinhard, and Jane!) who were worth their weight in gold. And second, there was a class of nine people aged 13-16 who were just amazing, and who always made me feel I was in the right place, no matter how lost/stressed out/frustrated I was at the time. And in the end, that period of my life boiled down to a single, simple fact: I couldn't leave the city, because I couldn't leave them.

This was the beginning of maybe the most surprising realisation I've had while teaching English: namely that I enjoy teaching adults, and I can teach little studentini if I have to, but what I really like is the people in between. I'm talking about the ones who are starting to experiment with 'adult' notions of who they are and to form their ideas about the wider world, but who still have enough mischief in them to play ridiculous games, to sing (and sometimes dance), to throw stuff around the room, make posters, play 'verb tennis' (with table tennis bats), colour in their homework assignments and write their names on test papers in spiky letters, as though they were tagging a wall or designing a metal CD sleeve. This is where my heart is right now.

The lessons you have to prepare for teenagers are much more creatively demanding (for me at least) than adult lessons, so I'm constantly straining my brain, trying to think of new stuff we can do. So far, my main teen group and I have had a picnic, done science experiments, written and presented TV weather reports, been Greek philosophers, founded a couple of new countries (my favourite being "Aidastan", of which my student Aida is President), started an agency for people who want to hire ghosts or mummies, transformed class members into punks, hippies, goths and rappers, investigated the murder of Pierre Bouvier (the lead singer of Simple Plan, a Canadian punk band who several of my students love), hidden around the school and texted directions to each other ... and the list goes on. And every Friday we study a pop song - most recently Madonna's Frozen, which fit really well with our "Holiday in Alaska" lesson. (Thanks, Assel!) Then we warm up our voices with a round of "do-re-mi", and end the week by singing together.

It's a rather wonderful way to earn a living, methinks :-)

The downside is that making up all these activities chews through ideas at an alarming rate, especially when everything we do has to link to whatever language point we're studying. I get through one week and think "Wow, I actually did it" ... but then I have to turn around and do the same again the following week. On top of that, I have to find another pop song that I can stand to hear over and over again! So it's quite exhausting and difficult work. But the upside is huge: give these guys a weird little project to sink their teeth into, and they surprise and entertain you every time. Plus they reward you with a level of devotion that you rarely get from adults. My teens are definitely my students, and not afraid to show it ... as three of them did this week, when they snuck into the classroom where I was teaching another class and tried to persuade me to let them stay, "Because we miss you!". Hard to imagine a better upside than that :-)

So there you go. Now you know most of what I've been doing, and why these pages have been silent over the last few months. Now I'm bracing for another winter, working hard, planning a bit of travel around KZ, and generally immersing in my surrounds as much as possible. My colleagues here are great, especially those who make up the "Friday night drinking circle". Apart from me and my flatmate Tania, the circle are all locals, and they're a very chatty, sociable bunch who like to go out and be silly whenever the opportunity arises. So I guess you could say it's been a "work hard, play hard" kind of year so far. Hope it stays that way :-)

*Hence the title of this entry. Loosely speaking, "nado" (actually pronounced with a final "/ʌ/" sound, like the "u" in "cup") is Russian for "necessary" or "needed". It's often used in sentences like "Moloko nado" - "I/we need milk", or literally, "Milk is needed". (Russian speakers, please correct me if I've explained this wrongly.) So ... for me, Chile is needed!