I’ve arrived!
For anyone who followed my Peace Corps journey, I’d just like to stress what a completely different experience it is to move overseas with the Foreign Service.
Private hotel rooms, furnished apartment ready for you when you land, work-issued iPhone, your possessions shipped to you… #yourtaxpayerdollarsatwork
After a fun last few days in DC I took my government sanctioned overnight rest stop in Frankfurt (allowed if your total flight time is over 14 hours #yourtaxpayerdollarsatwork) and then headed to Almaty.
I was met at the airport by my government issued friend (newcomers are assigned a social sponsor to help acclimate you to your new life) and a consulate driver who deposited me at my apartment post haste.
I then plunged into a week of recovering from jet lag, getting oriented to home and work, using google translate to figure out what I was purchasing at the grocery store, and meeting with the med staff to learn about medical care in country. Great news! I got a new vaccine: tick borne encephalitis. I also found out that instead of using local facilities for my next mammogram they suggest I go to a private clinic…in Bangkok. “Take a few days, relax, eat good food, get a massage.” Well, if you insist!
A surprising bonus was the delivery of most of my possessions. Home furnishings and shipment of stuff must be the #1 and #2 issues discussed on the Foreign Service FB group. Despite some horror stories, I was pretty happy with the furniture in my apartment. The couches have a bit of the color and upholstery of Grandma’s davenport circa 1975 but I’ve also got a washer/dryer and a dishwasher, which more than compensates.
The apartment also comes stocked with a welcome kit including sheets and pillows, dishes and silverware, cheapie pots and pans, etc, to tide you over until your possessions arrive. God bless the parents of whomever it was who told me to bring my own sheets in my checked bags. Everything else in the welcome kit was pretty good. The bedding? Not so much.
Your own stuff generally comes in two shipments: 250 lbs of Unaccompanied Air Baggage and up to 7,000 lbs of household effects (HHE) shipped via boat and/or truck. Everything from my DC ho-partment that would not fit in my luggage went UAB. My HHE was everything last seen in my Seattle apartment, en route to a government storage warehouse.
For some unknown reason, the Almaty-bound can use 750 lbs of that 7,000 lbs and send it by air. The Foreign Service gods are capricious so who am I to question their ways? Since I barely own anything, everything I wanted sent from HHE (basically everything except furniture) left on a jet plane a couple of weeks before me. Normally people are waiting months for their HHE but there I was, chilling with my robovac on week one. Now I am just awaiting my UAB, which left a few days before me, and is mostly hot sauce and wine.
I used my first two weekends walking around on my own to help orient myself. I walked past museums and the opera house, and stopped by some parks and monuments, mostly simply to file things away under “now you know where that is when you want to visit it later.”
Almaty is a very clean city, full of Soviet building ranging from fascinating to demoralizing. I’ve not discovered much in the way of “old town Almaty,” which makes sense as the city was mostly destroyed by an earthquake in 1911. There are parks aplenty, many filled with Soviet or post-independence monuments, and I’ve discovered some isolated pre-revolution/pre-earthquake buildings. I’ve also discovered a website that exhaustively details the city, which will be invaluable as I explore further and farther.
While I wouldn’t say Almaty is the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited, I would say it is the most beautiful former Soviet city I’ve visited (sorry Chișinău!). And I suspect it will be a city that rewards people who search out beauty in random places. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking. But I know not every place can thrust beauty upon you like Croatian islands, Welsh countryside, or the Essaouria medina.
My ultimate destination, and the place where I stopped and spent some time, was the Green Bazaar, a food+souvenirs+clothes+everything else sort of sprawl. As a veteran of the Pike Place Market and Morocco’s many souks, I’m not easily impressed by a market but I really enjoyed the Green Bazaar. It was clean and airy and made for pleasant wandering.
With everyone trying to lure you in to taste some of their goods, there are nearly as many nibbles to be had as you’d get in a stroll through Costco. I was particularly taken with some delicious almonds that are roasted with something a little sweet and a little savory and I cannot stop eating them which is too bad since they seem to be the most expensive thing available in perhaps all of Almaty.
The walk back provided mostly uninterrupted views of the mountains. Even after my years sandwiched between the Cascades and the Olympics, these mountains are something else. Whatever the cityscape lacks in beauty is more than made up for in backdrop.
I don’t think I’ll get tired of the view.
In Foreign Places 