National Library

I am now the proud owner of a Kazakh library card! On Friday I went to the National Library of the Republic of Kazakhstan to see if they had any useful material for my research and to figure out how things work. I have never seen such inefficiency. First, I went to get my library card. The woman at the registration desk took issue with the fact that I had a US passport and that it was written in English. (Her: "Why is this passport not in Russian?" Me: "Because it is an American passport." Her: "Why do you have an American passport." Me: "Because I'm American." Her: Deeply skeptical look in my direction.) I also knew that you needed two passport-sized photos of yourself, but had heard that they could take those photos there at the desk. The woman refused to do that, saying only Almaty residents can have their pictures taken there, and sent me down the street to get it done. Phew, that process in itself took about an hour.

Then I got to the fun part of figuring out how to find and check out books. Kazakhstan has the closed stacks system, so there is no option of browsing through books on the shelf. First, you have to go through metal detectors and get a slip of paper from the security guard. This slip of paper must be signed and stamped by a librarian before you can leave the library, supposedly guaranteeing that you haven't any stolen books. Then you have to *buy* slips of paper (at 1 tenge, or less than a penny, per slip) to order books. Once you find the book you want in the card catalogue, you have to fill out these slips (one slip per book) with the appropriate information and give them to the librarian, who goes and finds the books for you. For no apparent reason, you have to write the book's information twice on the same slip of paper and you have to wait at least an hour for them to return with your books. Once you get the books, you aren't allowed to take them out of the library, but you can either read them there or photocopy them. Naturally, you aren't allowed to do the photocopying yourself. You have to pay for the librarians to do the copying for you, and there are only two librarians that do copying. Are you confused yet? I was.

After figuring this all out, I was so exhausted that I didn't actually get any research done. I had to come home and take a nap.

Snow

Today is April 17th and it snowed almost all day. Ooof. It is weird seeing snow accumulating on green leaves and spring flowers. Suddenly, I'm not so excited that the city turned off everyone's heat, and I'm regretting my decision to leave all my warm winter clothes at home last week. I could really go for a pair of mittens and my warm hat right about now...

Back in the USSR

I have been absent from blog-land for the past couple weeks. (I was going to say that I have been "conspicuously absent" but that is probably an overstatement.) As most of you probably know, my dad passed away two weeks ago and I went back to the U.S. to be with my family for a little while. I don't really feel like talking about the terrible-ness of the past two weeks. Suffice it to say, yadda yadda yadda, I'm back in Almaty now. I'll continue to update the blog periodically with insights and adventures from Kazakhstan as they come... though I sadly think I have lost the blog's biggest fan.

There have been a few improvements here while I was gone. First, Almaty is in bloom! All of the leaves have come out on the trees, the grass is green, and flowers are popping up. All of this green stuff makes the city a lot prettier, and is going a long way towards covering up the dirt and pollution. In a recent study, Almaty was rated the world's 9th dirtiest city... right behind Baghdad. Second, they finally have turned off the heat in the apartment buildings! Heat here is centrally controlled (I have no idea by whom) and there is no way to adjust the heat up or down inside your single apartment. Before I left two weeks ago, the outside temperatures were in the 70s every day and they were still pumping heat into all of the apartments. It was stuffy, to say the least. They have now turned off the heat and things are more comfortable, although the weather forecast for Friday is snow and highs in the 30s.