Medical surprises

One of the things you do immediately when you get home is take your newly adopted kid or kids to the doctor to get a complete workup. There are adoption specialists that you can use but here in Massachusetts the waiting period for an appointment is crazy so we just went to our normal pediatrician.

When our daughter came home she was eating like a horse and could never seem to get enough to drink so we wanted to get to the bottom of it. What we found was that she had a parasite which was likely starving her for nutrients. One cycle of meds and problem solved – she is eating like a normal toddler again. This also likely explains why she was under-weight in the baby house and had a nasty skin infection (since mostly dealt with).

One thing I did learn is that these parasites are hard to test for (so you need to look multiple times and over multiple days) and that there are two tests run – one for domestic exposure and one for international exposure. A US medical lab won’t do the international test automatically (and many doctors don’t realize they need to order it special) so you need to make sure it is included in the workup.

Given how many people we met in Kazakstan who got sick, it would seem parasites and other baddies are pretty common in the water and food. So watch yourself and your newly adopted kids (and any kids you bring with you).

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:

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:

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….

Don’t drink the water and carry a SteriPEN

One of the things that was echoed by everyone who had previously been to Kazakhstan is not to drink the water but instead to rely on bottled water exclusively. The trouble with even bottled water when you travel is that some shops just refill empty bottles with tap water and resell them. So far I haven’t seen any of that behavior here in Kazakhstan but I have certainly run into it elsewhere in Europe.

So to protect myself, and more importantly my daughter, I carry a SteriPEN with me when I travel. It weighs almost nothing and the UV light it puts out kills all the nasties in water. Of course it doesn’t filter out particles like other water filters but it is also a lot less bulky and it is really easy to zap a bottle of water before drinking it.

It is one of my favorite travel gadgets as getting a stomach bug while traveling is about the worst thing that can happen.

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.

Tipping in Kazkahstan

One of the things I always try and figure out before I go to a new country is their opinion on tipping. Unfortunately I forgot to look it up prior to coming to Kazakhstan so it took me a few days to determine whether it was appropriate or not.

What I’ve been told is that since Kazakhstan’s independence from the Soviet Union, tipping has come back into vogue and is welcomed by most people in service industries. We’ve been leaving a tip (15% or so) whenever we go out for meals and the housekeeper who takes care of our floor here at the hotel is great and every time we give her a little extra for the great service we get a beaming smile (she doesn’t speak any English) – which my daughter Samantha returns just for fun.

We took a cab today and had to convince the driver to take a tip (he did after a couple of attempts to give it back) so perhaps it is not universal but plan on tipping for good service when you visit.

Sightseeing in Petropavlovsk – Google map

I was going to put up an overall Google map of the things we’ve found here in Petro but it would seem Jennifer at Convergent Paths has done it for me. Hopefully she’ll add some of the additional locations we’ve found to it.

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.