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.

There is an interesting post up on the Russian NewEurasian Kazakhstan blog about how government workers stretch those meager salaries. For those who don’t ready Russian, basically, a German company was celebrating with a big lunch in a hotel. An entourage was waiting for them at the bar, including both police and civilians. After they paid up, some government officials came out of a backroom and one of the entourage that had been waiting spoke to the restaurant manager and sped out of the bar with the government officials.

A waiter come over to the Germans and say, “Sorry, you need to pay for your friends at the bar.”

Of course, the Germans didn’t know these people but by the time someone got to the street to call the freeriders back, they were all speeding away in government cars.

As the author noted, it’s a little hard to see how this will encourage foreign investment in Kazakhstan or spread the word that Kazakhs are so hospitable. Borat himself couldn’t have thought of anything worse.

The other day I got hungry, it was hot in Astana, and I thought an ice cream bar was just the thing. And then I saw it in the freezer at Gros and had to buy the USSR Ice Cream bar. It wasn’t anything fancy, just vanilla ice cream with a chocolate coating. Perhaps it was an attempt to pick up the popularity of that song that was popular a while back, “Я сделан в СССР” (I was made in the USSR). I could make endless jokes about how the chocolate coating was cracked into little bits, or how cheap it was, but I won’t bother.

Then the other day, I noticed an unusual new series of chips from SMAK, a Kazakhstan based snack food maker. Including horsemeat-flavored (the package says kazi-flavored) as illustrated on the left. They also had pickle-flavored, fish-flavored, onion and fish-flavored, and caviar-flavored. At first I thought this was a bit silly but then I realized that most Kazakhstany buy chips or snacks to accompany drinking beer or vodka. And kazi, pickles, fish and onions are all popular accompaniments for drinking. So go SMAK for trying to be a bit innovative and give the customer and interesting experience. Also, Kazakhstan surely will be the world leader in horsemeat flavored snacks. For the record, they weren’t bad. They tasted much like any other fake meat flavored snack, but there was a hint there of something kazi-like. I still prefer the real thing, to imitation but if one must have faux-horsemeat, these are the way to go!

Just noticed on Chriss Merriman’s site that he has a new page up where you can find some of his posts on life in Kazakhstan, and links to some other sources of basic information about the country. Check out if you want to get an idea of what life is like from the point of view of an expat.

You can also check out Chris’ posts tagged with Kazakhstan. And if you want my humble opinion, check out my posts tagged with life in KZ for more on what it’s really like to live in Astana.

Bonnie Boyd provides an update on the trial of Mark Seidenfeld which opened on 15 June, after a delay earlier. However, the complainant, Zhunssov was not in court, because he was too busy running a marathon in China. Clearly either this case is not very important to him, or he has watched to many Western movies in which cool people carry out business from mountain retreats while underlings do the dirty work. However, the nasty judge seems to think Zhunussov should be there 18 June when next trial date is set.

The Spectator has an article from last week provocatively titled Why Come to Kazakhstan?

According to the article, government controls are getting too tight for many foreign businesses and creating a disincentive to invest there. Most interestingly, the article claims that in terms of energy and mineral resource rights, things are about to get a lot more difficult:

Meanwhile, the straitjacket into which Astana is trying to squeeze foreign corporations is about to be tightened. The country’s subsoil laws, which have been successively reinforced over the years, now grant the state first rights over any energy or mineral wealth. Not content with that, this February the country’s new premier, Karim Masimov, said the government was prepared to alter, and even cancel, existing operating licences (sic) held by foreign energy and mining firms.

This is a controversial issue and there’s certainly reason to believe that foreign companies took advantage of Kazakhstan in its formative years and that many oil companies in particular pushed for some seriously beneficial deals basically saying, “without us, you won’t see a penny of profit on your oil or resources.” However, the fact that everything in Kazakhstan changes all the time, without warning, is likely one of the biggest blocks to cooperation. Projects that have been agreed to by government officials suddenly have to be renegotiated as officials can change several times a year–and apparently new officials are not always debriefed by the previous officeholder. Rules and regulations change, even locations of key offices. Along with the bureaucracy, corruption and strict government control–all cited in the Spectator article and elsewhere ad nauseum*, this love of change (or perhaps lack of appreciation of stability) make Kazakhstan a hard country to work with.

* Perhaps the most notable case of late of problems working in Kazakhstan is that of Mark Seidenfeld, imprisoned for stealing funds from his own company, Golden Telecom. Evidence seems to indicate that he did not steal the funds and his arrest is simply a punishment for not selling his company directly to a Kazakh company but instead offering an open tender. The accusers alleged close relations to powerful government and business people indicate that the trial will not be fair, creating a serious barrier to foreign desire to work in Kazakhstan.

Happy Subbotnik

Why is this Saturday not like other Saturdays? A subbotnik, derived from the Russian word for Saturday, is a day when all workers clean up their office, when students and teachers clean the school grounds, when community members sweep the yards around their houses, when everyone pitches in to make the town a little bit cleaner. It’s like a giant communal spring-cleaning.

While I’ve noticed this sort of behavior before, this is the first year I saw such a mass effort on one specific day. Even as I walked to work today at 10am, I saw students at the nearby university being given brooms and heading out to different parts of campus to sweep away dirt and liter. Workers at the construction site nearby are also busily sweeping away and hauling spare parts over to the dumpsters.

It’s a neat idea, especially as it is entirely democratic. The teachers and the students work together, do the same manual labor. I was assured by one acquaintance that even Ministers have been known
to spend the day filing their own papers, straightening and polishing their desks. This is not abuse of power to get free slave labor from underlings; this is community spirit in action. Of course I may only be being so optimistic because I have other work today, and can’t join my fellow residents in sweeping our litter-filled yard.

Even so Happy Spring Cleaning Day everyone! And may people learn by their efforts to not litter in the first place and make their community dirty at all.

The scene: a government agency which gives grants for innovation projects.

A man, middle-aged, dressed in a bright yellow velvet suit, enters the reception area for the head of the agency. The secretary asks him who he is.
He answers, “An individual person.(физическое лицо)”
“OK then, how shall I announce you?”
“Not in any way.”

The head of the agency at this point steps out of his office, making introductions unnecessary.
He invites him into his office and asks what he wants.
“I have a brother-in-law in Leningrad (Note that this scene is taking place in the present day). He has written a letter.”

The head looks over the letter. The author claims to be the greatest scientist in the world in the area of laser technology, who sells his research to the US and other Western European countries because they are behind him. But he has no patents because he does it all for the love of the GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, HIS MOTHERLAND, THE HIGHLY LOVED AND HONORED REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN.
(more…)

Irene has an interesting post up at Neweurasia on the number of bloggers in Kazakhstan: 3450 blogs registered in Kazakhstan. Compared to China, which has 19.87 million blogs(!), the number is very low, especially when you look at it per capita. 1 in 65 Chinese has a blog, but only about 1 in 4347 Kazakhstani is a registered blogger. The post then asks why Kazakhstan is so slow. It led me to thinking about the Internet and Kazakhstan. There is an assumption generally that new technology is good and that people will naturally incline towards use of new things, if any technical barriers are sufficiently reduced. So in the interests of making Kazakhstani computer-literate and Internet-savvy in general, the government is working on a program to provide cheap, high-speed Internet cafes throughout the country, as well as trainings. The theory is that Kazakhstan doesn’t use the Internet because it is expensive, not widely available, and because they don’t know how. Reduce those barriers and everyone will be jumping on a computer to use Wikipedia and start a blog! In turn this will help convert Kazakhstan to a knowledge-based economy and the money will start pouring in!

This begs the question of whether the Internet has anything to offer Kazakhstani. We assume that technology is good and everybody needs it. However there are features of Kazakhstan culture and social life that make me wonder if Internet usage will ever reach the levels of the US, for example. (more…)

In answer to the PETA’s demonstration in Almaty to encourage Kazakhs to become vegetarians with lettuce ladies, Kazakhstani newspaper Megapolis staged its own protest with Lamb Ladies. Two models dressed in sheep skin bikinis held signs that read: “Let goats eat cabbage ” and “Our meat helps us study and live!”

The comments on the article are also worth checking out; one reads: “Horsemeat, not only delicious but also healthy. Poor horses.”

Kazakhstan 1: vegetarians 0