Kazakhstan foreign investment not so hot anymore

Those of us adopting in Kazakhstan tend to get 100% focused on the adoption process but it is good (I think) to pop our heads up now and then and see what is actually happening in the country itself.

From Bloomberg news today:

“The crisis in Kazakhstan is a legacy of banks that piled on debt as the economy soared and couldn’t repay when credit dried up. Gross domestic product shrank 2.2 percent in the first quarter. Foreign investors are drawing back capital as their favorable terms with lenders evaporate, said Kieran Curtis, who helps manage $800 million in emerging-market debt at Aviva Investors Ltd. in London, including Kazakh bonds.”

It seems like Kazakhstan is having as much difficulty with their banking sector as the rest of the world.

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….

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:

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.

Almaty places #4 in a Business Week survey

Ok…it was the top worst places to work in the world but hey, any PR is good PR right? Almaty got #4 on the study done by Business Week. They commented:

“The remoteness of Almaty, largest city in Kazakhstan, is one of the city’s biggest problems as far as outsiders are concerned. Other significant hardships include pollution, the threat of disease, and poor medical facilities. “Inadequate infrastructure, substandard housing, crime and difficulties with communications are additional drawbacks,” says ORC.”

I just spent three days in Almaty and while I didn’t get to do any sightseeing (the US Embassy was nice…) the city seemed decent. The streets were clean, the trees were coming into bloom which was a sight for sore eyes after the winter weather we’ve been having in Petro and the downtown area looked nicer than a number of major cities I’ve been to around the world. From a glance at the “attractions” list in the hotel it also seemed that there was at least enough to see to burn a few days looking around.

The hotels do manage to ding the credit card pretty hard though. A night at the Hyatt made my wallet about $450 lighter but I definitely recommend a stop to eat at their Grill Room. Yum. Funny thing was that the Hyatt in New York City quoted me $339 for the same night. Competition is a wonderful thing.

The full Business Week article is here.

Parents of kids from Petropavlovsk Yahoo Group

Just found a Yahoo group online that is focused on adoptions in Petropavlovsk and I have applied to join.

There is also a much larger Yahoo group that is focused on Kazakhstan adoptions in general. I’ve also just joined that one.

If you do a search for Yahoo groups using “Kazakhstan adoption” you will find a whole bunch more dedicated to various areas of Kazakhstan and different geographic regions in the US.

To get to space you need to pass through Kazakhstan

One of the cooler things I’ve learned since coming to Kazakhstan is that Russia still leases a huge block of land to operate its space launch facilities. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is where all of the missions to service the International Space station originate and pretty soon, once the Space Shuttle is retired, it will be pretty much the only way to get to space in the world. Or at least until the Chinese or a whole range of potential space tourist outfits get going.

So unless you’ve purchased a ticket from Virgin Galatic, or NASA owes you one hell of a big favor, to get to space you need to come to Kazakhstan. Bring your wallet.

Kindle2 – My new must have travel gadget

I travel a lot but normally only for two or three days so I can usually toss a paperback in my bag for that period during take-off and landing where they tell you to turn off all electronic gadgets and cell phones (but of course no one actually does). For this trip I was trying to figure out how to bring enough reading material to cover me through two 30 hour plan trips and three weeks in Kazakhstan.

Given the 50 lb weight limit on most airlines I didn’t really want to be hauling books so I sucked it up and bought myself a Kindle2. Actually, I took the coin jar that we’d neglected to empty for the last two years to the local grocery store and fed a mountain of change into a CoinStar machine. They have a deal with Amazon where you can get an Amazon gift certificate and avoid the approximately 8% coin counting charge that they normally levy.

So with all my coins counted I could nearly cover the cost of a brand spanking (just released) Kindle2 ($349).

I must admit I love this device. I had tried the Kindle reader on my iPhone and while it is nice, the backlit screen really wears on you after awhile. Once you get used to the screen flickering when you turn pages, the Kindle2 is even better than reading a book as it is much lighter and you don’t have to hold the pages open. I quickly downloaded a couple of dozen books to my reader and have worked through about seven on this trip so far. Plus they are quite a bit cheaper than the ones printed on dead trees.

I’ve converted. I won’t say every book I buy will be electronic as I still like to add to my ever growing library at home but for most I’m going to be grabbing them wirelessly in a single click to my Kindle2.

Worldwide poverty

If you travel any amount you are sometimes amazed at the level of poverty that exists. You see it on the streets of New York City, in the less prosperous neighborhoods in London and Paris and in pretty much in every country in the world to some degree or another. I was pretty shocked when I first went to Sri Lanka and I can only imagine what exists in sub-Saharan Africa (I’ve not yet made it there)

While there is poverty here in Kazakhstan I’ve actually see fewer homeless and less evidence of it that might be expected given that the entire ex-Soviet union went through a pretty bad spell when it broke up. It is obvious not everyone is living well but generally people seem to be getting by – even outside of the city core where there is less in the way of facilities. The rich natural resources of this country are more than likely helping.

Of course those of us from the West shouldn’t ever point fingers as things are pretty bleak back home as well. From a recent article in The Independent:

“Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.”

Anytime anyone gets self righteous around me I simply point them to pictures from the aftermath of Katrina. Definitely a case of “fix your own problems first”.

Kazak’s don’t like diet…anything

One of the most striking things when you land in Kazakhstan is that every woman under twenty-five is tall and model thin. So imagine my surprise when I realized that there are no diet soft drinks to be had anywhere. If fact there is no “diet” anything. Normal, sugar laden drinks are everywhere but nothing with the word diet on it – in Russian or not.

Very strange…I smell a conspiracy here somewhere.

So if diet is your thing, I’d suggest you bring your own if you come and visit Kazakhstan. But of course with luggage weight limits being what they are you can’t  do that either. So no good coffee and no diet soft drinks. I’ll keep my eye out for what else is missing and perhaps we can get to the bottom of this.