Going to court

So we had our court date on Tuesday and everything went well. The judge granted the adoption subject to the normal fifteen day waiting period so on May 6th we can officially take custody. Unfortunately that week is a mess of local holidays and the passport offices aren’t really going to be operational. So the paperwork to allow Jennifer to leave the country will start on the 11th or 12th of May. So cross your fingers and she might make it stateside the week of the 18th.

Getting used to cold showers

In my opinion, one of the signs of civilization is the ability to take a hot shower every day. When you are backpacking in the wilderness you suck it up and jump in the cold lake but when you are staying at a hotel, getting hot water out of the shower in the morning should be assumed.

Not so at the Hotel Skif. If you don’t get yourself through the shower prior to 9:00am you are out of luck as around that time the water runs cold. The funny thing is that there isn’t any hot water for the rest of the day from what we can tell. Luke-warm is the best you can hope for.

Bit of a mystery here….

More pictures of Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan

There aren’t a lot of pictures of the town of Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan on the Internet from what I can find so here are a bunch more that we’ve taken as we travel about the town. They will give you a flavor for the town and what it looks like.

Art Gallery in Petropavlovsk

We had a chance a few days back to visit the local art gallery. It is located in a 100 year old building in the traditional Kazakhstan style that used to be the home of a wealthy merchant. It was renovated a number of years back and turned into an art gallery.

It is small but has a pretty varied collection of more traditional art as well as modern interpretations from local artists. We got a tour from the Director as we were the only people there. It is worth the hour or so it takes to walk through.

Are here it is on Google Maps:

Some pictures of Jennifer

It has been awhile since I posted some pictures of Jennifer so here they are. Bonding period is officially done and the court date is this coming Tuesday.

City wide heating in Petropavlovsk

One of the weirdest things we found when we first came to Petropavlovsk is that the majority of the buildings in the downtown core are heated centrally. I don’t mean that they have central heating systems but that they are all heated from a central, city-wide heating plant and the heat is piped to each building via a network of above ground and below ground pipes.

Each residential or commercial building has pipes running to it in which hot water (or steam?) is moving to transfer heat from the central plant to the building. The entire city is covered in these huge pipes.

The other strange thing is that there is no way to limit the heat from this system. The buildings don’t have thermostats or any other limiter on the radiators. So whenever you walk into a room, the hotel Skif included, the temperature is always sweltering. We’ve spent the entire trip wearing t-shirts inside and leaving the windows open even though it has almost always been near or below freezing.

Apparently in early May the heating system is shut off for the season and for several weeks the situation changes and everyone freezes. Then in the fall they flip it back on and for awhile the residents of the town are back to roasting until it gets cold again.

I guess this is the result of Soviet central planning at its finest but in today’s age of green heating technology and skyrocketing fuel costs, just keeping the heat on must be a huge financial drain on the town of Petropavlovsk.

So bring light clothes to wear around the hotel or rented apartment if you come…you are going to need them.

Here are some more photos of the pipes:

Do not stay at the Hotel Uyut in Almaty, Kazakhstan

I had to take a three day trip to Almaty this past week to sign some papers at the US Embassy and was initially booked into the Hotel Uyut in the downtown area. When I arrived at around 6pm the lobby seemed decent and although I got the normal scowls from the reception staff (who didn’t speak any English) I’ve gotten used to it at this point so it didn’t throw me.

The Uyut has a series of clocks in back of the reception desk showing the time in London, New York and so on. I guess no one told them that putting clocks up like that is supposed to mean that you are an international hotel and the staff speak the corresponding languages.

I paid my $80 for a couple of nights at the Uyut and headed up to the room to try and get some work done. The Internet is 1,000 Tenge an hour (about $6.50) which is a complete rip-off but I’ve also gotten used to that here in Kazakhstan so I sucked it up and pre-paid a bunch of hours so I could be productive. I couldn’t face the restaurant as after three weeks I’ve had my fill of Kazak food so dinner was a yogurt, a chocolate bar and bottle of water from a local market.

Around 11pm I started getting ready for bed, and when I sat down on the bed the thing was hard as a board. I pulled back the sheet and this is what I found:

In furnishing the room they had neglected to include a mattress in the list of necessary items. They put a mattress pad and sheet on top of the box-spring and called it a day. Now I’ve slept on train station floors, second class sleeper cars and $10 a night hotels in the south of Greece but there is absolutely nothing as uncomfortable as trying to sleep on a box spring.

Of course when I complained to the front desk I got a lot of blank looks (no English) and when I showed the security guard what the problem was his solution was to hand me a couple of pads to put down (you can see them above). Demands for a new room were met with frowns and the comment that there were no rooms available.

I suffered through three hours of fitful sleep and then gave up and just worked the rest of the night. In the morning my translator called the hotel from Petro to try and convince them to give me a room with a mattress and their response was that it was a “special mattress that was good for the back”. Needless to say I booked myself into the Hyatt about 15 minutes after hearing that response (wonderful hotel if a bit on the pricey side).

Of course they refused to refund my pre-paid night or give me any compensation for the night I suffered through. Oh yeah, the “free” breakfast in the morning completely sucked – worst food I’ve eaten since I arrived in Kazakhstan.

So the Hotel Uyut gets negative three stars from this traveler even though on their website they claim three stars. Not likely.

[UPDATE] I found the website for the hotel in case anyone is interested in ensuring they steer clear of it:

The Kazakhstan Museum in Petropavlovsk

Petropavlovsk has its own museum just off the downtown area and we finally got a chance to visit it today. Our previous attempts had been thwarted by power outages (which are common here).

The museum is small but has a really nice collection of original Kazak artwork, weapons, armor and dress. It is definitely worth the hour or so that it takes to get through it and is especially educational if you bring a translator to read all the information that goes along with the exhibits as everything is in Russian and Kazak…neither of which I can read.

Here are some pictures from inside and outside the museum:

And here is where it is located. What is interesting is that the Google satellite shot is obviously a couple of years old as it shows the ruin and not the fully renovated building (started in 2005 and finished in August of 2008).

truphone saves my communications challenged $%#$

Taking four weeks off work wasn’t really a possibility for me so I’ve also been putting in a solid day while doing the adoption thing here in Kazakhstan. It has meant a lot of late nights (we are ten hours ahead of the east coast of the US) but that isn’t anything new for me.

Given that calling from Kazakhstan to the rest of the world is 50 cents a minute even on the cheapest calling card I could find, I’ve been relying on VOIP calling to keep me hooked up with the office.

I’ve been almost exclusively using truphone on my iPhone to do it and the truphone VOIP network has worked perfectly. You can get the applet for free from the iTunes application store and then you just create an account on the truphone website and give them your credit card. They hit you every time you get below $10 on your account and at something like one cent to five cents a minute it takes a long time to use up that $10.

So far it has worked even on a low bandwidth connection and with the except of a slight delay on some calls I may as well have been on my mobile directly.

I’ve also been using the Skype client for the iPhone as my backup and it has worked solidly as well. So if you are travelling to a communication challenged location these two applications will save you big cash.

So now that I’ve bubbled about both of these applications I think both truphone and Skype should be showering me with free minutes…guys…you out there? I’m waiting….

Improved WiFi at the Skif Hotel

I know this seems trivial to those of you back in the land of high speed Internet access but the Skif Hotel in Petropavlovsk (our home for the last month or so) has finally added a couple of additional WiFi attennas to floors two and three. The previous single, lonely antenna was down on the front desk and every time someone walked in front of it I lost my connection up in our room on the second floor. Plus I had to do calls to home out in the hall to get enough signal for VOIP.

Think about having dial-up speeds for a month and a crummy connection and you’ll feel my pain. Anyway, as of a few hours ago we’ve finally got a solid signal in the room and I’m almost fully functional again. Of course the Internet connection is all of 1 Mb for the entire hotel so if a few rooms get active online things tend to slow to a crawl but hey, this is Northern Kazakhstan after all.

Beggars can’t be choosers.