Arrived in Astana

счастливого Рождества (schastlivogo Rozhdestva)! 

Happy Christmas!

Well I've arrived in Kazakhstan after a "relaxing" 20+ hour flight via Calgary/Frankfurt, apparently just missing a major snowstorm in Germany. Traveling anywhere via Calgary is notoriously painful for me, going only 1 issue-free trip out of 5 trips in 2018 (one flight through Calgary to Wyoming ended with an all night 12-hour-red-eye return drive home to Saskatoon with insurance brokers in a rental SUV). The most satisfying part was seeing all five hockey bags of gear roll off the conveyor at 12:30 am in Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport Astana - a technical success.

With a couple of days to turn over (Monday, January 7 is Russian Christmas and a national holiday in Kazakhstan), work at Kazatomprom begins on Tuesday. My first week or so will be spent at the Rixos President Astana hotel while searching for a flat near the office. Once I figure out where the office is - shouldn't be a problem with a company driver (a driver who doesn't speak a word of English).

First day's task was to swap USD for Kazakhstani Tenge. The Tenge is a closed currency, so a person can't grab any cash in their home country prior to arrival, but conversion of USD was cheap and simple. It's generally "illegal" to transact in anything but Tenge, so to avoid credit card exchange fees I was sticking with cash until banking is in place. There's the usual embarrassment of trying to figure out what bills and coins to use at the till, but it helps that the color of the bills is the same as in Canada (with a couple of added zeros).

At the moment, $1CAD = about 280₸ and I was wondering how the high prices would be represented on store signs...solution is adding a decimal place! A ~$2,000 TV priced at over a half million Tenge shows as "575.990" on signage at GALMART (not a typo).

Had a chance on Christmas eve to wander around the Keruen City mall to grab a real coffee at Starbucks (everything at the hotel was instant) and get a feel for things:

1. English is spotty on signs and very roughly spoken by a few staff. I studied up on the Cyrillic alphabet over the last month...but pronouncing a word doesn't help when I don't know what it means yet...
2. Lots of Canada Goose jackets...but even more knock-off Canada Goose jackets...
3. January temperatures are similar to the coldest days in the field at the Key Lake mine: -35C, and well into the -40C's with the wind.
4. found a few edible odds and ends to try, with a spiced whiskey and чечил (chechil - braided smoked cheese) to celebrate Christmas!

 

Back at the hotel, I ordered up supper and my first (and last) dirty gin martini. No idea what I received at the table, but it seemed to involve orange juice.

Christmas is much lower key over here, as the Kazatomprom HR folks are taking me out to tour the city and look at a couple of apartments on Christmas day, despite the holiday...so hopefully I'll be settled in no time!

I'll touch back on this blog here and there...though there are spells when Blogspot is added to the list of sites blocked by the government telecom company (illegal for websites to allow anonymous commenting sections)...so I'll do what I can.

Happy new year and have a safe January!

Ck.