Happenings Around School

We had a little TedEx conference here.

It was organized by Olzhus.  He has now left Taraz to go to England to work on an advanced degree.  He was the young man who helped out the international staff -- getting us to our apartments, helping us with our settling in -- our "go to" guy.  We miss him.

Most of the speakers were students, but my friend Charlene was asked to speak.  Here she is with an outstanding student I have had the pleasure of working with: Zhansaya.

At the other extreme, there has been 2 head of cattle grazing in front of the school:

In this shot, he is just a black dot in the distance, but I wanted you to see how he is right up on school property!

I saw the owner leading them over one morning.  He just puts stakes in the ground to keep them from wondering away.  It makes me happy to see them when I leave school.  I don't know why.

Traveling

I was able to head back to Chicago for a couple of weeks over the holidays.  It was great to see family and friends, but 2 weeks is just enough time for your body to fully adjust to the time difference -- and then you fly back and do it all again!

Taraz is in the process of building a new airport.  We are all looking forward to that because rumor has it we will be able to fly out of the country right from here.  That is exciting.  As of now, we need to fly to either Astana or Almaty to get an international flight.  I believe there is 1 flight a day out of Taraz. Not 1 flight to each city: 1 flight a day. I could be wrong.  On some days there might be 2.

It's a cute little airport.  After you go through "security," you go to a waiting room with a little (very little) bar:

From there, you exit to walk across the field to the tarmac to board the plane.  I thought the sign above the exit was an interesting choice:

I was fortunate that Terry came back with me.  It has been nice to spend some time together after all these months.  We flew from Chicago to London, where we spent the night rather than do the straight through travel that takes over 24 hours.  From there we flew to Istanbul.  The Istanbul airport was a flurry of activity -- and certainly a place where East meets West.  When there, you clearly know you aren't in Kansas anymore.

From Istanbul, we flew to Almaty, where we caught a taxi to the train station to take the trip to Taraz. (We arrived on a day when there wasn't a flight to the Taraz airport.) At the train station, we were immediately met by a man who insisted on "helping" us.  He spoke no English, yet continued to talk to us and lead/follow us around.  It would have been easier to get our tickets without his help, but we gave him a few tenge for his trouble.  As it turns out, that was a wise choice!

The announcements at the train station are all in Russian and Kazakh.  We had no idea when or where we would be loading our train.  This guy came back for us, grabbed my bags, and led us up and down over the tracks (yes, that is how we needed to go) to the train.  He got us to the right car and even the right cabin.  We handed him a few more tenge and he was a happy man, waving good bye as the train pulled out of the station.

The train was great.  Our porter pulled down our bunks and we had 7 hours to just sleep and look out the window.  Not much to see out the window, but we got a good idea of how big this country is. . . and how empty it is.  Here are a couple of pictures out of our window:

The vast Kazakh steppes.  We would occasionally see horses and/or sheep grazing close to the tracks.

Our porter was very young and excited to have Americans to take care of.  As we neared Taraz, I think it was his bed time because he had changed out of his uniform.  But he wanted to take a picture with the Americans.

We were met at the train station by our taxi driver Vadim.  He apparently was at a loss for two weeks without his English speaking friends to drive around!  He loaded up our luggage and took us home, where Terry and I shared a bottle of wine from Azerbaijan -- a gift from Vadim.

The Team

Sorry it has been so long since my last post.  Keeping up with the blog is harder than I imagined!

First, here is most of our international staff (and a couple of local teachers) at our Thanksgiving party at my flat.  It is a great group of people from all over the world.

Back row left to right: Victor (Uganda), Kristijan (Australia), Larry (USA), Me, Ryan (USA), Rae (USA/Portugal), Stephen (Uganda), Peter (UK/Portugal)Seated: George (USA), Keeling (Jamaica), Deborah (Jamaica) Charlene (S. Africa) Nagima (KZ), Jorja (Portugal), Aaron (USA), Medina (KZ), Jorje (Portugal), Ben (UK).

Prior to break, Rae, Aaron and I taught a 3 day workshop for English teachers from some of the NIS schools in the south of Kazakhstan.  Here are a few pictures from that.  It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun.  We hope we can do it again since we created all the materials.