……but mostly good, I guess. On my off day, I got both TV and Internet in
my room. Now I can watch Russian soap
operas and check my e-mails. Funny thing
about the Internet, every day at 4:00 pm, I would walk down to the kiosk and
ask for a 14-day wireless card (I even had it written down in Russian to show
her) and she would shake her head no and point to the next day on the
calendar—meaning, I assume, they were out of Internet cards. Well, today I went down and since I’m leaving
in a week I changed the 14 to a 7 meaning I wanted a 7 OR 14-day card. She shook her head no and wrote “21” on my
note. They had 21-day cards all along
and they cost less than $10. At that
price, I’ll leave the card here in the room when I leave for the next guy. But I’m online again. I was able to post my first things on the
blog, email people, and even Skyped with Devin for a while this evening.
I knew the Soviet Union, and now Russia, has operated a space facility from Kazakhstan almost from the beginning and the Russian and American astronauts from the Space Station still land here but the Soyuz 23 was nearly 800 miles off target. A little local history lesson.......
The bad news is that all my training materials were
sent to the wrong city in Kazakhstan and won’t be available until after I leave
next Saturday (and I ain’t hanging around for them). I have an emergency procedure for this and
keep a copy of the more important training documents in the local language as
an extra. This has happened to me before
in Ethiopia and South Africa and once I got to China and found they had sent me
Japanese materials. I will still be
missing a lot of stuff I need though and this is going to be interesting.
My day off was uneventful but passed pretty
quickly. The compound may be pleasant
for evening walks but when I tried it this morning, it got miserably hot
miserably fast. I spent the rest of the
day in or around my room reading, listening to music, and—after 4:00
pm—watching Russian soap operas and playing on the Internet.
There’s this little corner of the dining area that I
have been checking out because it is so out-of-place: the Zona Mexicana. At supper I decided to jump in and try it
out. I scanned my security card, which
gives me dining privileges, and the woman warmed a tortilla up on a
Mexican-style press. I swear this
tortilla was at least 18” across but was an authentic flour tortilla just like
they have at La Casita in Friendswood.
You then walk down a serving line and point to what you want in the
tortilla and she spoons it into a Styrofoam to-go box. The rice was either Asian white sticky-rice
or a brown, thin wild-rice and I went with the brown. A couple of the meats were suspect but I
chose a taco-flavored chicken and a ground beef, black beans with a red sauce
and pico de gallo. I passed on the
grey-colored guacamole. They even had
sliced jalapenos and you know what? It
was pretty darned good. That’s right,
for authentic Mexican, you gotta head to Tengiz, Kazakhstan. I’ll give credit where credit is due—it was
pretty good (or I’ve been gone from home too long).
After talking with Devin this evening, I looked a
few things up about Tengiz. It is 383
feet above sea level and was once a Russian outpost. The airfield here was once a Russian
field. It is thought to be the largest
oilfield compound in the world although I haven’t seen a single Chevron logo
here. Summer temperatures routinely go
above 100 degrees and the winters are especially brutal with sub-freezing
temperatures for months. It’s really hot
here right now but I suspect I may have caught a better period to be here.
I started the first day of my current 2-day recertification class and had a good couple of guys for the class. The people in the program have all been really nice to work with. I have a translator who is pretty good but is amazingly getting better each day. Her name is Gulzhanat which I probably mess up really badly when I say it.
In the morning, I leave my dome and walk a short distance to the bus stop. This compound is so large it has it's own bus service. Every fifteen minutes a chain-bus comes by (at least a couple of people who follow this blog will get that reference) and I ride it about fifteen minutes to the training compound where we have the classes. And yes, it is a Blue Bird Express--American made.
At lunch today, I ate for the first time at the cafeteria in the training compound. That location has a Chinese food section and I tried it--not bad, but in Kazakhstan I recommend the Zona Mexicana. I did like the fact I could have stir-fried vegetables, though. Pretty much back to the vegetarian diet for now.
I also learned today that I have daily unlimited free laundry service in the dome. I wish somebody had told me that earlier as I was about to start washing stuff in the sink. It really is a different world over here.
Here's some trivia I learned today--Lake Tengiz near here was the dramatic scene of one of the Soviet Cosmonaut emergency landings. We drove by it today and one of my students tried to tell me about it but the translator was having trouble understanding him. I looked it up when I got to my room and here's what I found:
Lake Tengiz in the winter is almost Siberian. The incident happened in October so it probably wasn't at it's most severe.
Lake Tengiz in the winter is almost Siberian. The incident happened in October so it probably wasn't at it's most severe.
Soyuz 23 landed in northern Kazakhstan in
mid-October. Weather conditions at the
landing site were awful. It was nighttime, -8 degrees Fahrenheit, in the middle
of a blizzard. The lake was fogged in. The craft landed 5 miles offshore, and
its landing shattered the surrounding ice. Its parachute soaked through, and
the weight of the wet parachute flipped the capsule upside down so that the
hatch was submerged. That was when Soyuz 23 became the first space-faring
submarine. Its air intake valve was also underwater, so the astronauts had only
the time-limited air supply that came with them from space. The cosmonauts cut
off most of their instruments to conserve power and thus managed to keep the
CO2 scrubbers running. That way, they could breathe... though they must have
been pretty chilly.
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