The Top Ten Things We Have Learned in Kazakhstan

A Super Brief History:

Kazakhstan is a vast area of northern latitude ‘steppe’, or grassland, and is much the same landscape commonly associated with neighboring Mongolia. In fact, the native peoples of Kazakhstan are of close kinship with the Mongolians thanks to the virility of Ghengis Khan and the many other passing hordes of Mongolian hell-raisers. The large swath of steppe that encompasses Kazakhstan is believed by historians to be the scene of the original domestication of the horse. Horseback riding is a national pastime in Kazakhstan and the horse is also part of the traditional cuisine.
As history progressed into the 1800s, and Russia pushed the frontiers of its expanding empire into Central Asia, Kazakhstan gradually succumbed to its sovereignty. During the interim between the World Wars, Stalinist Russia engaged in an abrupt transformation and the Iron Curtain fell over Kazakhstan. The USSR collapsed in 1991, freeing many of the non-indigenous citizens to leave, and Kazakhstan struggling to rediscover its own identity. Still, however, the Russian influence is huge.


Without further ado, Charles and Becky's observations and musings:

1) Your chauffeur is the perfect victim for testing your pigeon Russian: you have him right where you want him and he knows no English to bail you out. (Poor Vladimir, our driver, must cringe as he rear-view-mirrors us flipping feverishly through our Russian dictionary.)
















2) White Kazakh anyone? It’s the new Ryon-house specialty! Warning: Even vodka and coffee liqueur cannot rectify the potent off-color taste of horse milk.

3) The Clean Air Act is our friend. The apparent lack of automobile and industrial emission standards in Karaganda blankets the area in a thick haze and gives even the snow a greyish hue.












4) The animal has to stand still for the meat to be tender. This may help to explain why the galloping horse hasn’t won over the cow for your rib-eye steak. I (Charles) bought some deli-sliced horse meat at the supermarket, and it was chewy enough for the first bite to last through an entire episode of The Brady Bunch (dubbed in Russian).

5) Being able the to read the cooking directions is not necessary for making good food. The nightmare strings of Russian Cyrillic characters of the back of food packages didn’t keep us from inventing a new dish every night.

















6) A jacuzzi without warm water just isn’t the same. Have you ever heard the saying that you can’t warm a cup of cold coffee with a teaspoon of hot water? Becky and I could not produce enough pots of stove heated water to make this thing worth while.











7) Don’t take your high speed internet for granted. I did manage, however, to produce at least a few pots of water while my email pages loaded.

8) Don’t judge a glass of water by its color (or maybe you should). While it is true that we had to boil the tap water for drinking, we weren’t aware of its true color (brown) until we produced enough of it for a luke-warm bath.

9) Beer is part of the shared human experience. Even our driver, Vladimir, who only knows the English words ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, made sure to point out the local Karaganda brewery for what it was (in English).

















10) Kids are astonishingly resilient. Witnessing the inner workings of an orphanage can be trying on anybody’s heart, but amazingly the children are still smiling, playing, and acting like children should. Even if adoptive parents are only able to provide a home for one child at a time, they are helping to support a process that will continue to find new homes for the others.














Charles and Becky