Petro Day 1 - by Keith

Another old entry from the written files, this one penned by Keith himself...

Well, we flew across the earth today. The fun began once our English speaking friend left us at the airport in Almaty. We went to check our bags and they said we were 22 kilos over their weight limit, little turds. We flew from Nashville to Chicago to London to Almaty and all is fine, and now we are 22 kilos over. There was nothing we could part with, so we gave them about $60 and magically 22 kilos was fine. Then we sat and waited for our flight, at least we thought we were. We tried to listen for our flight number in Russian, funny how difficult that is without speaking Russian. At some point we decided maybe we should wave around our tickets and see if that impressed anyone. Sure enough our flight number had been called, so they rush us on to a bus where everyone is waiting. I think that bus drove about 10 feet to the plane (which I guess was only funny to me) and everyone got off and climbed the stairs to get on the flight.

I don’t remember much about the flight due to our giving up sleep since we’ve been here. I seem to recall waking up and seeing a tray of food and then waking again and handing the uneaten tray of food back. After about and hour and a half we landed and Robyn thought we were all going to die, which is pretty common. I had no idea that she was so frightened of landing. After all, she flies fairly often. Oh well, we lived.

We packed into a hot van and began our drive to Petropavl. This is when we found out that our 4- or 5-hour drive was a 7-hour drive and in fact turned out to be a 9-hour drive.

We did see some interesting sights, though. The town we landed in was Astana, so we saw some of the area while we were driving through. This is the new capital of Kazakhstan (moved from Almaty) and everything is brand new. Being a recently independent country (since 1991) apparently the President decided they needed a new modern city. Robyn said it looked like a Hollywood set. All the streets and buildings were either recently built or still being built. It was quite amazing to see. More cranes than you could count putting tall building together. Our translator told us a funny story about one of them. He said that it caught fire recently and the ladders on the fire trucks could not reach the top, so it burned down all the way to where they could reach.

The first third of our drive was smooth sailing. The translator said that there is a resort that the President frequents in this area, so all roads are smooth. After that point, not so much, it slowly became worse and worse. There were two bench seats in the back so Robyn and I could lie down and sleep. It was so bumpy at one point I am pretty sure that we bounced high enough to switch seats. It was intense. We did get to stop at a little strip of cafes and eat and use the restroom. And by restroom I mean outhouse. At least that is what they called it. I went inside expecting to see sort of target, if you know what I mean, but there was none. I couldn’t tell if the hole was full or what. The stench was so bad, though it didn’t appear that anyone cared, so I didn’t either (for the record I am speaking of #1 only). Robyn got within about 15 feet and opted out. We went into one of the cafes and ate some kind of chicken and noodles with “special sauce.” Then back to the road.

Most of the drive was wide open spaces. All you could see was flat empty land, a drastic change from all the mountains that are Almaty. Still, it was beautiful just to see it.

We are finally here if Petropavl and so far we like it. They people seem to dress more relaxed, and by relaxed, I mean naked like Americans. No shorts though. I so wish I was a woman so that I could where a skirt and one of those barely-there shirts because man is it hot. As a whole I think there is much more Russian influence here, which makes sense because we are less than an hour from the border of Russia. The people are more European-looking as opposed to Almaty where the majority of people looked Asian.

That is about all the rambling that I have for now. I think I will have Robyn post this separately so that everyone can skip it and just read her post as she is much more interesting.