I’m supposed to be on a vacation in St. Petersburg right now. Instead, I’m waiting for a visa to enter Russia. I gave my passport over a month ago, and I’ve been sitting in Almaty for the past week. Every day the agent says “tomorrow.” There have many excuses to this point, but always the same. Don’t worry, you’ll have it tomorrow. Let’s see if today is the real tomorrow.
I woke up this morning, anticipating another warm shower. After 10 minutes of waiting for the hot water to clear its way through the pipes and into my shower, I understood that I had been relegated back to “not cold” water. Well, it’s better than the goosebump inducing water that I’ve been using for the past few months.
I arrived last night in Almaty, and this morning I finally took a nice, lukewarm shower. I would have preferred hot, but I’ll take what I can get. For the past three months, I have lived without hot water. First, in St. Petersburg, it was shut off from June until the beginning of July, when I left for Kazakhstan. Then, when I got to Aktau I had hot water for about two days, and it too went away.
Since September 1st, the weather has gotten considerably colder. Yesterday morning, I was literally shivering while washing myself in very cold water. The other inconvenient thing about Aktau’s water is that there is no water pressure other than that which gravity provides - I could wash myself better in the rain. Also, the water smells very strongly of sulfer, and if any gets in your mouth while showering, it has a strange salty taste. For the two days that we had hot water, it was brown. Not see-through brown, but dark, opaque brown.
Months of cold, dribbling, sulfer water will take its toll on you. Especially when it’s so cold that your body shakes while holding the soap. I hope to be working in Almaty from now on, and for the moment, they have hot water.
The corner store near my house has a television, and when I stopped in last night, they were showing news. On the screen was a standard, drab Russian city, the caption read “Mordovia.” I had heard of this place, but didn’t know where it was, so I asked the clerk, who is Russian, “Mordovia, is that in Russia? Where?” To which she responded, “It’s next to Russia, ex-Soviet Union.” Well, since I recently obtained by degree in “The Newly Independent States,” I was pretty sure that I knew all of the 15 ex-Republics. “Isn’t that Moldova,” I asked. “Uh, yeah, ex-Soviet Union,” was her response. In the end, my intuition was correct, Mordovia is a part of Russia, not next to Russia.
The moral of the story is that Americans aren’t exceptionally stupid when it comes to geography. One of my teachers in St. Petersburg is originally from Turkmenistan. When he first moved to Russia, people would often ask, “Oh, where is that?” Well, there are 50 states, and there were only 15 republics, so you’d hope a citizen of the Soviet Union would have known them. Most people around the world are ignorant of geography. It’s basically Eurocentric Europeans (and Americans) who have perpetuated this claim that Americans are dumb because we haven’t memorized the map of Europe, and sometimes cofuse the Danes and the Dutch. Well, your average European confuses Slovenia and Slovakia, and they’re both in the EU.
Not many people can claim an office with a view, but it’s one of the fringe benefits of my current job. At any point in the day, I could stand up, turn around, walk three feet, and stare out at the landscape. The view is not usually spectacular, you sometimes get some foot traffic through a barren alley by a dumpster, but occasionally a mini-herd of cows comes to graze on trash. Where I’m from, you will see mostly squirrels and dogs scrounging about in the trash, but out here, there’s so little grass, that the cows have to survive somehow. If it’s true that you are what you eat, no wonder the beef in these parts leaves something to be desired.
When I woke up this morning the ground was wet, a shocking experience for this parched town literally built on sand. Apparently it hasn’t rained since May. In fact, since the first of September I’ve noticed a distinct turn in the weather. It seems to very quickly be getting darker earlier, and it’s only 35C at night, instead of 40. Though looking at the extended forecast, it’s probably not going to rain again any time soon. Which is a shame, it seems to do a lot to cool things down and freshen them up a bit.
In fine Soviet tradition, (almost) every profession has its own day. Today, “Oil and Gas Industry Worker Day.”
The secretive artist has smuggled 500 doctored copies of Paris Hilton’s debut album into music stores throughout the UK, where they have sold without the shops’ knowledge.
On the back cover, the original song titles have been replaced with a list of questions: “Why am I famous?”, “What have I done?” and “What am I for?”
Instead of Ms Hilton’s own compositions, the replacement CD features 40 minutes of a basic rhythm track over which Banksy has dubbed Ms Hilton’s catchphrase “That’s hot!” and other extracts from her reality TV programme The Simple Life.
Posting has been nonexistant for the past two weeks, because I’ve been out of town. For the first week I was in Almaty, which was a pleasant experience, then I was out on the oil field, which was torture. I’m back in the Aktau office now, trying to recover my senses. I need to restock the apartment and get a good night’s sleep. I have a lot of writing to do over the weekend, so the major post about the trip won’t come until sometime next week. For the time being, enjoy this close-up of a camel, that most graceful of animals:
