Even though the population of Astana is around 600 000, everyone seems to know everyone and news travels fast.

For example: As I mentioned, I had a problem back home and had to leave fairly quickly. I work as a consultant/writer/translator for three different companies here. For two of them I have a permanent contract and one of them works a bit like a temp agency; if I show up, I get work. If I don’t show up, no work. I had time to reach the first two organizations and get a leave of absence, but I didn’t have a chance to get in touch with the third organization, which was fine because I have no contract there.

The day I returned to Kazakhstan, I called the third organization to let them know I had been absent but was ready to work again. My supervisor said, “Yes, we heard about your bad news.”
“How did you hear?” I asked.
“X [who works at one of the other companies I work for] applied to work here and your name came up. He told us about your problem.”

Not ten minutes later, my cellphone rings. It’s my boss from Company #2, where X works. “Aha,” I say, “X must have told you I called Company #3, right? That’s how you know I’m back.”
“No,” says my boss, “Our accountant saw you in your car taking your wife to work this morning.”

There’s no hiding, even in the capital. Everyone is watching you and everyone in your life knows everyone else!

Thank you for the concerned comments and emails. I did take a leave of absence, so to speak and returned home due to a family tragedy. But I have returned. Between the aftermath and the jetlag, I’m not up to a substantive post, but I will note that not only is our hot water working again, they have turned on the heat and our normally freezing apartment is actually quite hot. Now at the moment the temperature is hovering between +10 and -10 Celsius, so we’ll see how the heating (or more accurately the heat that doesn’t escape through the cracks and holes in our walls) stands up to -30 C weather. But for now we are more than comfortable.

Expect more exciting posts in the future when I am recovered and thanks again for the concern. I didn’t expect my readers that I don’t know in person to notice or particularly care!

A man in Kazakhstan was arrested for drinking under the influence of alcohol but charges were dropped because he was drinking kumys, not beer. Kumys is, of course, fermented mare’s milk and it is slightly alcoholic. But apparently drinking 1.6 quarts of it is not enough to impair your driving legally. Especially if you have a doctor’s prescription. It is widely believed that kumys can treat or cure a number of problems including asthma.

While I do think kumys is not particularly alcoholic, 1.6 quarts is a lot of drinking. And I have to wonder why the method of getting drunk matters in a legal court. In most states in the US, at any rate, you cannot drive if your blood alcohol content is 0.08%. It doesn’t matter if you have been drinking beer, vodka, wine, homeopathic remedies, preservatives from pickled fruits, jet fuel or home brew. Drunk is drunk.

I suppose it also depends if this guy was actually driving recklessly when police pulled him over or if the police saw him coming out of a cafe and assumed he was drunk. In other words, if he wasn’t posing a danger with his vehicle, I guess it’s ok to let him go.

Nevertheless I wouldn’t want to be on the roads with someone who shot back 4 bowls of kumys!

What do you do when you spill paint in the middle of the road? Cover it up with boxes and then hold the boxes down with bricks. Never mind that that makes half the road impassable because there are giant bricks in the way. I didn’t have my camera ready when the inevitable moment happened, or the aftermath but let’s just say that a fast-moving and not particularly aware BMW now has a lot of scratches on its bumper and undercarriage. That big brick must have flown a good 10 meters when it got hit!

In Digging the awesome post at Chris Merriman.com on a Russian solider who covered Eminem’s Stan in a video showing the squalor of the Russian army and got exiled for dishonoring the image of the Army, I found a YouTube video of a Russian guy praising Barak Obama and disparaging John McCain.

At first I thought the video was an American making of Russians but I am pretty sure that this guy is Russian from his accent, his intonations, his inconsistent grammar mistakes (he makes a mistake, then the next time he doesn’t make the mistake), and the fact that in the middle of the video, a colleague approaches him and shakes his hand! Only in the former Soviet Union can a good morning handshake not wait for anything! It’s not particularly funny if it really is a Russian, so I think it is meant to be a sincere endorsement of Obama-but primarily because he is afraid McCain will start a war with Russia; it’s more anti-McCain than pro-Obama.

So I’m curious, is Obama more popular with foreigners? Who do you guys support and why? Is it a question of supporting one candidate or disliking the other candidate?

Here’s the video:

The best line is probably, “The next time you see McCain, you tell him ‘Go on dick’; it mean something like ‘Fuck you!’ but Russian style.”