Kazakhstan Adoption

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.

The Pizza Place in Petropavlovsk

We stumbled upon a new restaurant a week or so back. Going by the name “The Pizza Place” as well as “The New Turkish Restaurant” it is focused on kids and has a decent collection of Turkish food like kabobs as well as a pretty extensive collection of western food like pizza, hamburgers and chicken wings. It is a popular place for dinner for couples in the middle of adoptions.

The food is sort of what you would expect from a place like this – good but not great – and like most of the restaurants in Kazakhstan that try to do western fare they don’t quite get it right. But it is a nice change from the food at the hotel. The breaded hamburgers were a special surprise.

Of course the giant blow-up playground was the only thing Sam was interested in although we did manage to get a bit of food in her between rounds. The meatballs were particularity popular.

Some shots of the place:

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.

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.

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.