Good News and Bad News Today......

……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.

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.

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.

 

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.......