Instant coffee…ugh…

For those who are not quite right in the morning until they have had their cup of coffee, keep in mind that Kazaks drink instant. I have yet to see a place to get a proper cup of coffee, never mind the mind-numbing combinations you can get at your local Starbucks (there aren’t any in Petro…in case you thought otherwise…no Dunkins, no Tim Horton’s, no coffee shops that I’ve been able to find).

The restaurant at the Hotel Skif will serve you a coffee in the morning (for free, breakfast is included) but it will definitely be instant. We had been forewarned about this travesty so I brought a pound of ground coffee with me and an REI French press mug. Add to the portable coffee kit a Bodum travel kettle and you are good to go. The one mistake we made was the kettle is not dual voltage so I had to also bring a 2000W transformer with us. A bit of additional searching in the Internet just now came up with dual voltage options which is the better path to take.

So plan ahead and you can get a good cup of coffee in Petro despite the best efforts of the locals.

Turkish Chuck’e'Cheese

We had dinner a couple of nights back at the Petro version of Chuck’e'Cheese. Otherwise known as the “Turkish Restaurant”, it served a combination of Turkish food and a good selection of “American” food like hamburgers and pizza. Everything is just slightly off though as if they couldn’t resist adding a Kazak spin to it. It was decent food though.

The highlight for our daughter Sam was the playground where she spent most of the meal.

And just for fun the Google map via GPS (54.873458,69.131320):

Baby “pod”

The kids in the baby house all live in groups of 10 or so in a set of rooms or “pod”. This is the one where Darya is currently.

Darya's Room

Internet at the Hotel Skif

My...desk

Prior to leaving for Kazakhstan I asked a number of times whether or not the Hotel Skif (or Skify as they call it here) had Internet access. I was finally told that they did in fact have Internet service in the hotel. Imagine my surprise when I got here and was told it was dial-up and handed a telephone number (I use a Macbook Pro…no modem). Contemplating trying to communicate with work crammed into an hour a day down at an Internet cafe for three plus weeks definitely caused my blood pressure to rise.

After a quick recheck with the front desk our translator learned that they had in fact put in wireless just a day before our arrival. So I can confidently say that the Hotel Skif now has wireless. Unfortunately wireless here means a DSL router and wireless access point down at the front desk. All the decent rooms are on the second floor so the only way you get wireless up here is to either sit in the hall or in my case shove myself as close to the inner wall of the room as I can – and then can I only just get a signal. High speed it ain’t.

The connection also tends to drop occasionally (2-3 times per day) but we’ve now managed to teach the front desk how to reboot the DSL modem. I had to endure numerous deadly stares from the staff and the security guard when I calmly reached over the desk to reset it after being ignored or dismissed while trying to explain that their DSL connection was down. They even complained about me to our translator (few of the staff here speak English).

I did learn yesterday that the manager is thinking of adding another antenna – hopefully on the second floor as it would be nice to be able to sit on the couch and stay connected. So we are keeping our fingers crossed that it actually happens. Always on Internet no matter where you are has definitely not come to northern Kazakhstan. I’m going to appreciate those access points on every floor in the hotels I stay at back in the US that much more after this (not to mention my cell modem!).

More pictures of Darya

I promised more pictures of Darya so here they are.

Petropavlovsk Baby House

There are three orphanages in Petropavlovsk that serve all of northern Kazakhstan. They are divided up by age and the one for the youngest kids (up to approximately 4 years of age) is called the Baby House. At any time there are up to 80 kids in residence although not all of them are up for adoption. Right now they are not full fortunately.

In all it is a pretty depressing place even though they are in the process of renovating it and bring it up to something that can be called modern standards. The older sections are definitely falling apart although I bet you could find a number of retirement homes in the US that looks pretty much identical. So it is more a statement on how societies care for their less fortunate than anything specific to Kazakhstan.

I’ve posted some pictures in this gallery to give you an idea. Most of them are of the outside. I’ll try and snag a few of the inside at some point. They are best viewed in full screen mode (click the little square in the bottom right of the picture when you roll over it with your mouse).

Decent bakery near the Hotel Skif

Our translator took us by a decent bakery (at least by the standards of Petropavlovsk). I grabbed some beef and potato filled pastries for lunch and they were not bad. Apparently the pastries are decent as well although we didn’t sample them this trip.

Bakery in Petropavlovsk

For those that care, this is where it was:

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Decent pizza in Petropavlovsk

We were getting tired of the food in the hotel so on the advice of another couple who are also adopting we headed out to look for a pizza place they had tried and liked.

The food was decent and although they didn’t have English menus it was cafeteria style so pointing and grunting was sufficient to get what you wanted to eat.

In addition to pizza they served salads, ribs, rice and a range of other sides. It was a pleasant change to what we had been eating for dinner and we’ll be back. I will snag some pictures of the outside of the building and the restaurant itself the next time we go and post them but the highlight of the trek for our daughter Samantha was the attached playground.

For the map deprived (in other words pretty much everyone), here is where the restaurant is located:

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Hotel Skif – Location

I took a GPS fix outside the Hotel Skif this morning as I could never find a map of Petropavlovsk anywhere on the Internet. So here it is courtesy of Google maps.

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Introducing Darya

We’ve been visiting the baby house for a few days doing our “bonding” with our to-be new daughter. So here is the first picture of Darya (we are still discussing a name change when we file the official paperwork with the court next week…more to come on that front).

She is 14 months old and has been at the baby house for about a year.

The process from this point forward for those who are not familiar with how Kazakstan adoptions work is that we spend 2 hours a day with her for 14 days and then our dossier is submitted to the court. Approximately 10 days later we get a court date and the judge makes a final decision on the adoption. Assuming it is granted, there is then a two week waiting period for any final objections to be raised and five days for paperwork with the Kazakstan government and the US government. Then she can come home.

It is a long, involved and rather frustrating process but you just need to suffer through it.

I’ll post a gallery of photos in a couple of days.