I’ve been reading articles about how rising prices are affecting Kazakhstan. A lot of inflation statistics are cited along with comments from government officials. I thought people might be interested in how the financial crisis is affecting real people. Now my salary and my wife’s salary are significantly above the national average. I do know people with salaries of $500 a month who forgo eating dinner a few days a week just to get by. I can’t claim any sob stories like that. Nonetheless, beef at Gros supermarkets here in Astana just hit 1200 tenge a kilogram (about $4.54 a pound). A few weeks ago, it was 1000 tenge. A few months ago, 850 tenge. A year or so ago, it was 600 tenge. Prices visibly go up, especially at the larger chain supermarkets. Even at the bazaars, 400 tenge a kilogram was the market price for ground beef two years ago. Now people ask for 600-700 tenge. It gets to the point where planning a budget is impossible because you never know how much something will cost.

Taxi rides are another area that has seen serious inflation, presumably due to rising oil prices. Until last year, 200-300 tenge was a normal price to pay to move around the center of town. Now taxis don’t move for less than 500 tenge, according to the drivers who wait outside our door. If you want to go two blocks, that’ll be $6.

The spikes that occurred in prices of cooking oil, bread, flour and pasta have not receded at all. Cooking oil prices went up 50% last year and stay at 320-400 tenge per liter. Even Sultan pasta, made here in Kazakhstan and always the cheapest bargain, raised its price from 55 tenge a bag (since I first came here, Sultan has costs 55 tenge a bag) to 65-75 tenge.

How has it affected us? We are eating a lot more chicken and ground beef than we used to. Lamb (at 1600 tenge a kilo) is off the menu pretty much, as is fish that doesn’t come in a can. I’m hauling out to the bazaar once a week or so to buy the giant bags of generic pasta. We have a car so that makes it possible for us. However, hauling back huge bags full of food from the bazaar on a bus is a whole fun experience that many people have to suffer through.

At the same time, Astana has never been a cheap city relative to the average income. Real estate prices are equivalent to big cities in the US (if you don’t believe me, look up what $500 000 will buy you in the US and what it will buy you here). Gas has long been close to the same price as in high income countries as well: 90 tenge a liter is about $2.80 per gallon (which now seems quite reasonable a price, I realize).

In short, the crisis in prices is real, it affects real people, it has been going on for a while and it shows no signs of going away.

As always, I love getting comments, critiques, disagreements, other stories or anecdotes. How are you coping with the pricing crisis?

Thanks to Tom Toomey for pointing out that recently the New York Post published Cindy Adams’ latest column where she does Kazakhstan. Disclaimer for those who don’t know Cindy Adams: she’s a gossip journalist and scandalizing is her job and her style. Don’t be too offended. She has to say bad things about everything she writes about; that’s why people read her. And incidentally the article has many good things to say about the nation.

The article is funny in bits. I thought she got some things very wrong though, even allowing for her style.
She wrote: “FASHION: For a man, black tie is a T- shirt worn outside the pants. But the local ladies are nifty.”

You do occasionally see business men out on the town in appallingly informal clothes. I recently spotted a big man on the town in an old sports suit and no T-shirt underneath. The zipper was pulled way down so all the chest hair showed. But it is much more common to see dark suits and colorful ties. Kazakhstani dress extremely formally by US standards, even when going out to a cafe. Sunday I see people walking in the park with their kids wearing khakis and an Oxford shirt. Especially in Astana.

She says: “Kazakhstan is the world’s ninth largest country, and the 375th ending in the suffix stan.”
OK, it does get old hearing about -stan. There are plenty of countries that end in -land (Iceland, England, Poland) and a fair number that end in -ia (Albania, Romania, Latvia). Why does -stan bother people?

The highlight of the article, I thought, was this bit on her first taste of beshbarmak. Or her first non-taste.

ANIMALS: This is the beginning of the horse family, 55 million years ago. They began on the archeological site Krasnyi Yar in northern Kazakhstan. I don’t know how to break the news . . . but in the mountain region of Borovoe, they served it to me for lunch. With noodles. I had a salad.

Around 4pm yesterday it began to snow. And it hasn’t stopped yet. Temperatures were around -5 in the morning and obviously colder at night meaning roads are icy. This is I believe a heavier storm than we got even in winter. It does take away some of my desire to celebrate Astana’s birthday in June. But hopefully by then the snow will have melted!

This is what my trip to work looked like this morning.



As usual the city fathers called out a dozen plows to cover the same area.



Poor street cleaners!



The sudden winter scene was not without its beauty



Particularly where the wind created dunes. Which was everywhere as the wind has been very heavy





Some people were more energetic than others cleaning off their cars.

Another one of my beloved posts on a food product and/or interesting marketing campaign. I love this packaging for sugar, which is made by a Kazakhstan company in Kazakhstan. It’s called Zaxar, which is sort of clever although it did lead me to believe the company was Ukrainian or Czech or something. And every bag has a little funny cartoon on it! This one shows chickens talking to the man carrying an axe, whose name is Zaxar and saying:

Zaxar, why do you love us only for our legs, but you don’t value our minds?

Which I thought was pretty clever. Plus there were a variety of cartoons in the store at the same time!

English Advantage Blog has a post up linking to a story about missionaries who use ESL courses as a cover for converting people in Bosnia. I’ve heard of this sort of thing going on in Kazakhstan and other countries for that matter.

I was told one story, which might be apocryphal, about an “English lesson” to demonstrate the use of the present progressive: Mohammad is burning in hell for his blasphemy
We use present progressive is burning to show that he is still in the process of burning, like all sinners burn for eternity. The discussion then went on to discuss how Mohammad sinned against the one true Christian God by setting himself up as false prophet, denying Jesus’ divinity, etc. and how all Muslims should convert unless they too want to suffer eternal damnation. Good English lesson there.

It’s sad because besides propagating the stereotype that Westerners are here to ram ideology down people’s throats, it also gives a bad name to Christians. There are some Christian groups who come to genuinely help and their faith is a motivation for their desire to come to a strange country and do good work. But that faith doesn’t get in the way of their mission to teach English or fund raise for orphans or volunteer for a hospital.

So please evangelists, stop giving Christians a bad name. Be straightforward and if you want to convert people, invite them to Bible Study or church service, not “English lessons!”

Having been away in the US for the holidays and returning to Kazakhstan, I feel like I am going through a renewed wave of culture shock. It’s not that everything is unfamiliar, it’s that certain things that I had gotten used to are newly irritating. There are a number of every day experiences that certainly got under my skin before, but that I quickly brushed off. Now I suddenly feel angry, “Oh God, not this again!”. It’s perhaps unfair of me, as if I expected the country to change in three weeks just to suit me. Nevertheless it provides an index of what is hardest for an American in Astana. So what follows is a list of the five daily experiences that I am newly rubbed raw by:

1) The elevator doesn’t work. Returning home with a lot of heavy bags, we are met by a broken lift. It did get fixed that afternoon, only to break again in the evening and remain broken for 2 days. Just an irritating reminder that things in Astana don’t always work–or get fixed.

2) I went out to get some sausage, milk, bread and cheese for breakfast our first day back. At the store we regularly shop at, the woman who sells sausage wasn’t in yet and the woman who has to hand you the cheese over the counter was also missing. So even though there was sausage and cheese there, I couldn’t buy it. I went to another store which had a sausage lady, but no cheese. At a third store, they had milk but only whole milk and I wanted 2.5% fat. So I had to go to a fourth store to get cheese. As I tell people at home, you can get anything you want here; you just can’t get it all the time or in the way you want it. It’s also annoying that even small convenience stores sublet space out or have certain things you can’t get yourself, so even if the store is open, not all the products are available all the time.

3) Ok, the cold is horrible but I don’t think anyone can do anything about that so I won’t complain. I will complain however, that no one plows the small roads or sidewalks. They run a tractor over them, which presses the snow down turning it into ice. Uneven ice at that. Why do I have to walk on ice from November to March? And I don’t mean only on small roads or in the yard of my apartment complex–I mean on side streets off the main street. Meanwhile the parks are clear of snow in case anyone wants to go have a picnic in February!

4) I had also not missed everybody’s favorite game: “Guess which door is open?” Going to the supermarket, of the three outside doors only the one on the far right was unlocked. But getting out of the entranceway, only the far left inside door was unlocked. Why is there always only one open door? Don’t stores want people to be able to come in easily and efficiently? I suspect there is some logic at play here, since many stores tie doors shut with tape or rope, so dear readers enlighten me.

5) The pushing! I had forgotten that no matter how close to a store window or store counter you stand, someone will still try to push in front of you. Or coming up to a bus stop, if you are not pressed right up to the door, someone will push their bag in front of you, to open a gap and then push you back. I did love being able to look in the windows of stores without keeping my elbows out to threaten anyone who tried to block my view or get in first.

I hope that this list doesn’t offend–it is written partially tongue-in-cheek. But for a country that is trying to build international tourism, maybe you could work on some of these things instead of building five-star hotels where the elevators still won’t work, people won’t come to work on time and you will fall on your butt two seconds out the door. Please!

EDIT: Chris Merriman has posted his own list of pet peeves for foreigners, so check that out too if you like.

Just a quick word of praise for the best beer in Kazakhstan-one that to me is fully competitive in the international market, Tyan-Shyan Gold. The Tyan-Shyan (named after the mountains, probably more familiar to western eyes as Tien-Shien) brand is not a new one and for a while they have sold light and dark beers. But the new gold label beer is unusual for its sweet and nutty flavor. It really reminds me of McEwan’s and other Scottish beers which are also distinctive for their sweetness. You wouldn’t think a sweet beer would be good, but it is.

Unfortunately Tyan-Shyan is a cheap beer. I say unfortunately because it means that it is not sold in the elite supermarkets like Ramstor or Gros. I have to buy it at the little convenience store next to my house and they don’t always have it in stock. A larger store would have the storage space to keep it on the shelves permanently. I am always afraid that, not being featured prominently in the big, cool stores, sales will never be high and eventually the brewer will discontinue it. So please buy this beer at least to ensure that I have a constant supply!

The other funny thing about preferring a cheap beer (Tyan-Shyan and Derbes are the Bud and Coors of Kazakhstan, always the cheapest buys) is that my friends sometimes assume I order it to save money.
“Come on, get an Amstel or a Hoegaarden.”
“No, I really want Tyan-Shyan.”
“We’ll pay for it, if you want.”
“No, seriously, I want a Tyan-Shyan.”

Anyway, just wanted to give credit where credit is due and encourage Kazakhstan to put this beer up on the international market–because someday we might move back to the US and then what will I do for beer?

The Library of Congress has put up four albums of photographs of Turkestan commissioned by the first Russian governor of Turkestan, Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman, which were taken from 1850 to 1860. The Archeological Album focuses on Islamic architecture, mainly in Samarqand. The Ethnographic part includes individual portraits of different ethnic groups (c.f. the Kara-Kazakh girl pictured on the left) and notable people, including the Khan of Kokand and his sons. The Trade Album shows occupations and the Historical Part depicts Russian soldiers and battle maps.

It is fascinating for the casual observer and no doubt an incredible resource for the scholar. All descriptions of photos are presented in the original Russian and translated into English.

Another old one—ignore the word recently and pray that the links still work! What slowed me down posting this one was finding sources for a lot of my claims here but I think by now they are old news and don’t need referencing, right?

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Esther Dyson of theNational Endowment for Democracy
recently was in Kazakhstan and published an account of her trip on Release 1.com.

There are many interesting observations here from an intelligent and experienced observer, who is not immersed in the region:

For example, they visit the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (chaired by Madeline Albright and Senator John McCain respectively. Both are branches of the NED, set up to promote democracy in the region. About the type of training in political activism these institutes provide—criticized by many political leaders and observers of the region as ‘illegitimate interfering with politics’ or ’secretly supporting opposition,’ Ms. Dyson says:

To be candid, this notion had left me a little uneasy until now. How can you non-partisanly train people in partisanship? But after meeting the players - Josh Bergin of the IRI and Mary Cummins and Sameera Ali of the NDI - and hearing them describe their work, I felt a lot better about the whole thing. They are indeed mostly going around teaching people how to run a mail-merge program, how to craft a clear message, how to measure public opinion, and so forth. There are certainly ways you could mis-apply the learning, but in this world where 1490 of 1500 newspapers are government-owned or aligned, teaching people the nuts and bolts of bottom-up communications seems pretty one-sidedly good.

Yet, as it happens, the activities of NDI and IRI have been in suspension in Kazakhstan since last spring, courtesy of the Kazakh government. This issue was raised in DC during Nazarbayev’s visit, we hear, but there has been little news since. This report Governo-Kazakh, does little to clarify things.

She also gives a description of the Polyton Club, run by Masanov who recently passed away. In this particular session, a number of bloggers and website admins were there and the question rose about how much access people have to these Internet sources;

This community is active and engaged among themselves, but they don’t reach much of the broader public. A typical home/small business Internet account at 512k - but hardly affordable by a typical home - costs $300/month, so Internet users number about half a million of Kazakhstan’s 15 million people (3 percent). Censorship is active, but it’s not like in China …In Kazakhstan, sites are simply blocked. There’s certainly a correlation between political edginess and blocking, but it’s not precise or predictable.

The government is promoting programs for computer literacy and for access everywhere—including 400 new Internet cafes (reportedly the PM gave the order that they not be ugly little holes in wall with crap computers, but actually be nicely decorated with excellent technical facilities) and the Ministry of Information, Tourism and Sport, has already announced, in no uncertain terms, its readiness to deal with criminal or slanderous websites. And a new law is already Don't be naive. This isn't just about money; it's about control. They don't want us to have access.

She also got a chance to talk to opposition politician, Galymzhan Zhakiyanov and the Eurasia Foundation as well as Green Salvation and it's worth reading her experiences and impressions.

Most interesting was her visit to the Shanirak region of Almaty, where there were recently riots between police and residents—some of whom apparently had their legal registrations but the officials claimed they were out of date. Another large population were oralmen, repatriated Kazakhs from other countries, and not given enough material support to establish proper homes. And some people were both oralmen and possessors of suddenly outdated documents. The whole area is supposed to developed for commercial uses and people were kicked off the land, without compensation. It turned out to be quite ugly with a young officer killed, and raising embarrassing questions about social development in Kazakhstan and how responsive the akims are to the people of their cities.

She writes:

As we stood out in the sunshine, we could see destroyed houses, amidst standing houses that also looked fairly decrepit. There were outhouses, and one shack with a plastic bucket atop, which passed for a shower. Various people came up and joined the conversation: they could all remember the time in July when city authorities, along with security police and bulldozers, showed up to raze the buildings. The villagers protested, standing in front of their homes. The most voluble of the women told us how she had doused herself and her children with gasoline, and threatened to strike a match. The forces stood down, but not without wrecking part of her house. More alterations ensued, and some rocks were thrown. The police claimed that the settlers had stockpiled rocks as weapons; the settlers said they were just construction materials lying around. At the end of the day, one of the policemen had been burned to death in a gasoline fire. The police attributed it to the settlers; the settlers attributed it to a provocateur.

Hopefully Ms. Dyson will continue to write similar pieces so we can get more of her perspective and her adventures.

As work is piling up on me a bit, I thought I would post some things I wrote a while back. This one is dated only by it’s reference to an article on Neweurasia which is now ancient, but I think the topic—the foreign fiancee or spouse—is still relevant and interesting.

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I highly recommend Aiman’s post on Kazakhstan Neweurasia (in Russian) about the myth of the foreign fiancee (English translation here, and I am working off the English translation because I am lazy!), about her experience of having her foreign fiancee come, and local attitudes about foreigners. As a quibala amerikandan (son in law from America, yes?) I thought it would be fun to respond.

As Aiman points out, incomes in Europe (and the US) are higher, and tend to be calculated with a living wage in mind as opposed to here where incomes are much lower, often much less than what is needed to live on, and here prices of some big ticket items such as apartments, cars, and services are on a level with the West. My savings from working in the US are enough to let us enjoy some luxuries and not to worry if wages are late by a month. I must say no one expected me to rent them a helicopter (read the post, it’s funny!) for the wedding, but that is probably because her family knew me for a year before we got engaged. They saw first-hand that I was not a millionaire (However, acquaintances have asked me to buy them DVD players, digital cameras, apartments for free!).

I think Aiman was a bit unfair to her compatriots however. While Americans are richer than Kazakhs on the whole, Kazakhs live much more richly. Any Kazakh celebration will involve a ton of food. The best food they can afford. A wedding is ten times more important and will involve ten times more parties, with ten times more food, ten times better food. In some cases, I knew full well that these people were blowing their wages for months just to feed their guests, set a good dastarkhan, make the foreigner feel welcome! The rest of the month they will eat boiled meat with rice, but for us the finest beshbarmak, tables buckling under the weight of salads, presented in fine china, and a display of fresh fruit despite its being winter. If I were a Kazakh, I would not bemoan my low wages. I would be grateful for the hospitality of my family, and the skill the average housewife has in stretching a budget and cooking well with a few simple ingredients.

As for special treatment for foreigners, I am eternally grateful to my wife’s family who always buys me instant coffee when I go to visit and then gives me the rest of the jar when we leave. Even though I am quite used to drinking tea and prefer to drink tea with them so I don’t get any special treatment, they always buy me the coffee, give it away, and buy more when I come back (and coffee ain’t cheap in these parts).

I always am vaguely amused that people don’t understand that I knew what I was getting myself into when I came here (or in some cases, to paraphrase our former Secretary of Defense, I knew that I didn’t know and that was ok). I wonder if it is because Kazakhs tend to be picky eaters: a colleague of mine went to Korea and tried to ask for some bread at a restaurant, not a big staple in Korea. When they couldn’t find any, he refused to eat; another friend of mine from Almaty ate some salad here in Astana and said,
“It’s not the same as they do it in Almaty.”
“Is it good?” I asked.
“Yes, very good. But I won’t eat it!”

On the other side of the coin, one of the most common compliments I hear is that I am easy-going (prostoi), earnest, sincere, not complaining. And they usually add, “which we didn’t expect from an American.” So it is nice to have it acknowledged that I eat their food, I don’t expect special treatment, I don’t talk down to them. Really, not all Americans are snobby ethnocentric bastards, I swear.

There is a small category of people, usually older, who note the slightest criticism of anything in the territory of Kazakhstan and take it as a declaration of international war. What can you do when your wife’s older cousin who helped raise her and who fought in the Afghan war, gets mad and calls you a snobby American because you said the store was out of dish soap? Nothing.

What is annoying is the people who test you: Do you like Kazakhstan? You probably miss your food? How is the weather in Astana? Ah hah, you said the weather was cold! You think you’re better than us! But again these tend to be my seniors, so what can you do but smile and take it?

As for alcohol, I remember going out with a friend of a friend once and he insisted we drink vodka. He kept pouring me drink after drink, proposing toast after toast, insisting I drink it all down (Nu, davai vipim!). After the liter was empty and I was still standing, he said, “I made you drink a lot on purpose. I never saw a foreigner drink so much. I always thought Americans were weak, but now my eyes are open!” I would have explained something about Scottish blood and strong livers but the brain wasn’t working that fast. Many people say my wife is lucky because her husband will never come home drunk from parties with his buddies. While I’m not the world’s greatest drinker, I wouldn’t say never. I also wouldn’t say that people in Kazakhstan drink more than foreigners–everyone comes home a bit drunk from a party! I would say that Kazakhs and Russians usually drink for the primary purpose of getting drunk, to feel kef and thus tend to drink only hard liquor and when they do drink, they drink a lot, whereas in America it is common to have a beer or two and call it a night, or have a glass of wine for dinner and stop.

Many people also tell my wife she is lucky because I cook and clean and do the laundry. I go to the store to buy things. The typical Kazakh male would not dream of doing any kind of housework. Gendered labor division is much stronger here than in modern day America. It is not unheard of for a husband to wait hours for his wife to come home in order to eat dinner because he cannot or will not cook for himself. However, this has its own complications because it can be stressful for my wife to see me doing the dishes, thinking she is a bad housewife for making me do this women’s work. Furthermore, I expect her to do some traditionally male tasks, like decision-making or handling money and household finances. So in reality it can be quite difficult for a woman with an Eastern mentality to have a Western husband.

But enough about me, tell me about you. I’d love to hear your stories or observations on the foreign fiancee or spouse.