An Exquisite Delicacy

My nice apartment came with promises of good cable television and DSL internet. It took a few weeks for them to get connected, but they have finally arrived and they are awesome My cable tv includes all of sorts of programming from Kazakhstan and Russia, with a few English-language channels thrown in as well. So I now get CNN, Fox News, BBC World, as well as an American movie channel and an American tv channel. The American tv channel is great, but would be even better if they didn't show American Idol reruns 5 times per day.

My DSL internet is also working, so I am no longer stuck using an expensive dial-up connection. The DSL took some patience to hook up, and required me to stay home most of last week waiting for the technicians to arrive, then eventually spending 2 hours on Wednesday morning at the central office of Kazakh Telecom (the communications monopoly), where they finally got the connection working. The Kazakh Telecom experience was amusing in itself. The strangest people kept wandering through the waiting room, including a guy who at 10am was walking around with a bottle of whiskey and some coffee, and came back 30 minutes later conspicuously hiding the whiskey bottle in his jacket and looking rather guilty. (For the record, I suspect that he actually worked there.)

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to my point. The DSL modem that we purchased was made in China and came in a box that advertises its selling points in English. Most of the points are standard-- high speed, convenient to use, safety features, etc. But one of the points advertises the modem's "Exquisite Delicacy: Fashionable outfit that meets modem heimish trends." I'm not sure what "heimish" means, and I had no idea that a modem could be exquisitely delicate. This is obviously a case of something getting lost in the translation.

Happy Nauruz!

While most of you are celebrating Easter this weekend, Central Asia is celebrating a holiday called Nauruz. Nauruz has its origins in ancient Persia and Zoroastrianism and honors the first day of spring or, in the ancient calendar, the new year. So while many of the holidays here are really leftover Soviet holidays (like International Women's Day), Nauruz is a chance to celebrate being Central Asian... with all the kitchiness that comes with that! There are many traditions associated with this holiday that are followed in the villages, including a ritual housecleaning for the new year, and certain customs of visiting friends, family, and neighbors. Here in the city, though, the main event was a big street festival yesterday. They shut down several main streets and the city set up a huge block party on one of the central squares. There was a stage with Kazakh musical performances all day, they had yurts set up and big inflatable replicas of "traditional" Kazakh things, like musical instruments and camels. And of course, there were lots of people dressed in traditional Kazakh clothes for the occasion. The crowd spilled over into the adjacent park, where some people had set up shashlyk (kebab) grills and were selling food and souvenirs. Because the holiday fell on a Saturday, the "official" state holiday is on Monday, so I get another three-day weekend. Woohoo!

Sundays

Sundays are my favorite day of the week here. The whole city slows down, and there are noticeably fewer people on the street. I'm not sure where everyone goes, though I have heard that a lot of people just relax at home, while others go skiing, ice skating, or hiking up in the mountains right outside the city. And certainly are out walking in the parks or other public spaces in the city. It's great to have one day a week when I know I couldn't do research even if I wanted to!

The best part about Sundays is that the traffic jams disappear, and with that, also disappears the need for drivers to honk their horns. Almaty drivers love to honk. The light turned green? Honk! See a pedestrian in the street several blocks ahead of you? Honk! Another car is turning into the lane next to you? Honk until they honk back! Sitting in traffic and going nowhere? Lay on the horn! All this honking can give you quite a headache 6 days/week. On Sundays, though, the streets are empty. As you can see, the view out my window this afternoon shows not a car in sight. Come Monday morning (Tuesday this week because of the holiday), the entire block will be filled with 2 lanes of cars each way sitting (honking) in gridlock. But today, the loudest noise is the cable car going by every half hour. Not so bad!

Happy International Women's Day!

Today is International Women's Day. This holiday was invented by the Communists (actually, originally invented in New York) to celebrate the achievements of women. (For more on the history of Women's Day, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Day) At this point, it is a semi-major holiday throughout the former Soviet Union and mostly involves giving flowers, chocolate, and perfume to mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, etc. Basically, it is Valentine's Day and Mother's Day all wrapped up into one. Although the holiday is officially today, March 8th, the long weekend started here yesterday. It seemed as though no one was at work yesterday, but instead running around to buy gifts for their family members and friends. Kiosks selling flowers cropped up across town (see the picture) and the streets were filled with men carrying cakes and flower bouquets. Since it falls on a weekend this year, the official state holiday is Monday so businesses and government offices are closed officially until Tuesday. I'm a little out of the loop, though, and only found that out last night... I'm still trying to figure out if they observe Daylight Savings here...

The students at the National Conservatory put on a free concert yesterday afternoon in honor of the holiday. One of my friends here is an ethnomusicologist from UCLA and is affiliated with the conservatory, so she invited a couple of us to attend with her. The performances varied a lot, but were all really excellent. I was so impressed! One student played a Bach piece on the organ, another one played the accordian, a choir sang an African American gospel spiritual, and the orchestra played Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Also included were several pieces of traditional Kazakh music, performed by students dressed in "traditional" Kazakh costumes. In case some of you have been puzzled by the "national" costumes I have brought home from my travels, I caught one of these traditional performances on camera. See, people actually do wear them on select occasions!

I've moved (again)

Just a quick note update on my housing saga. I gave the bathroom sink-less apartment my best try for a week and then decided to ditch out and find a new place. Perhaps the last straw was the cockroach infestation, but I will spare you the details on that one. So on Saturday, I rented a new apartment--my third apartment in four weeks. I then wandered the city looking for enough ATMs to put together the cash for a month's rent (which also involved calling my banks to find out when their business day ended so I was no longer over my daily maximum withdrawal), wandered the city further looking for the exchange points with the best exchange rate (so I could change the Kazakh tenge from the ATM into US dollars required by the landlord), and packed and moved my belongings into the new place. Phew, it was a long day.

Now I am living in a very comfortable apartment with almost all the modern amenities of home. In short, it is amazing. The apartment is in the city center, a block from a nice grocery store, in a neighborhood that feels more like a European city than Soviet or Central Asian. Of course, my electricity problems continue to plague me. Within 2 hours of moving in, the electricity blew out in the apartment and it took about a day to get that back up and running. But it is all fixed and life is good.

Research Update

My mother suggested that I post an update on how my research is going. Perhaps she thinks that I am not working hard enough, or wanted to distract me from complaining about my living conditions. In any case...

For those of you who don't know, I am working on a dissertation on political protests in non-democratic regimes. In particular, I am interested in how these regimes respond to protests, what laws are in place regarding mass demonstrations, when protests are allowed to occur, etc. And I'm looking at this question in 3 post-Soviet countries: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Belarus.

In a nutshell, research is going well. It was slow to start off, because it took a while to identify who I might want to interview, how to contact them, and what institutes and libraries are available. I have made a lot of progress on that front. Last week, I had four interviews with journalists, people involved in protest issues, people who know people, etc. And they all gave me the names and numbers of other people to contact. So by Friday afternoon, I was reading the newspaper and realized that I have the cell phone numbers of several important people they were quoting. Score one for Jody. I also attended a press conference/round table on the subject of fraudulent contractors. Last year, hundreds of people invested money in the construction of new apartment buildings (and for new apartments) that never ended up being built. It has been a major issue in Kazakhstan recently and the subject of several protests. The meeting was attended by some of the defrauded investors, lawyers, representatives of the government, some of the investment agencies, and members of the press. It didn't resolve anything, but was interesting no less. They ran out of extra seats, so I sat in the place reserved for the tax police. I was a bit worried about doing that, because no one wants to get on the bad side of the tax police, but luckily they never showed up.

This week I plan to do more of the same. I will call the people who were suggested to me in last week's interviews and try to set up meetings. I also want to hit up the National Library and to see what types of resources they have. And in the meantime, I am doing background research (online, newspapers, etc) to get more information on the protests and issues that have been mentioned to me as important. I am still trying to track down the key people for my research (government officials, protest organizers) but I am getting closer to them and should be able to pinpoint and contact them within another week or two.