khot-dogs and gamburgers

ignoring the sofa in the room

i don't understand why every article about whether obama will stick with the withdrawal timetable for iraq ignores the fact that it's not only his call. obama's predecessor entered into an agreement (pdf) that included a strict timetable for withdrawal. under the agreement the u.s. can extend the timetable's deadlines (like the august 2010 deadline for withdrawal of combat troops mentioned in the NYT article) only with the consent of the iraqi government.

and yet the article and all of the people quoted therein act as if this is the unilateral decision of the american president. there is no mention of the SOFA and the reporters didn't even bother to ask a single iraqi what he or she thought about the issue.

of course obama could unilaterally decide to break the agreement, but that would cause all kinds of additional problems. for example, it would completely undermine any pretense that the current iraqi government is a sovereign entity, or that the u.s. is actually there to support the new democratic government of iraq. none of those potential pitfalls that would come with breaking the agreement are mentioned in the article either. the underlying assumption is that the american president can do whatever he wants and the rest of the world would just go along with it.

useless things i learned in kazakhstan 8

when traffic lights (at least some of them that i've seen here in taraz) are red, they blink about two second before they turn green.

there seems to be no purpose for this about-to-turn green blink except to encourage cars waiting for green to jump the light and speed into the intersection when their light is still red and the light in the other direction is just turning to yellow.

useless things i learned in kazakhstan... uh... i'm pretty sure 7

there are two different useless things i learned in kazakhstan number 4.

kazakhstan is funny that way.

тюльпан

tulips are originally from kazakhstan. everyone seems to think they are from holland, but that's just because the dutch tried to cash in on them in the 16th century. wild tulips still grow in the steppes of central asia, and the great wild tulip bloom is, err… was last week.

okay, so we missed the peak. but today's excusion was still pretty great. and the red tulips still dotted the hills. check them out:


can't see them? don't you see those red blobs on the ground!?!?!?

okay, fine. how about this:


what are you, blind? jesus christ:

wandering into a musical

i was walking on tole bi street this morning when i heard martial-sounding music coming from the central square. i walked over to investigate and found the square filled with soldiers marching in formation.

then the music changed and the soldiers each grabbed a partner and started to waltz. i'm crapping you negative. really waltzing. luckily i had my camera.

the music changed again and so did the dancing.




i felt like i had wandered into an art-house film. clearly the marching soldiers breaking into dance was symbolic of something. or maybe it was just a rehearsal for victory day.

LID + 3 (الصيني )

ما زال ننتظر

i'm guessing we will get up to at least +6

useless things i learned in kazakhstan 6

the way that "kazakhstan" is spelled in arabic is like how the country's name is spelled in russian, but not as it is spelled in kazakh.

that is:
Казахстан=كازاخستان

but:
Қазақстан would be spelled like قازاقستان

which is odd, because the only reason it is spelled differently in russian is because they don't have the "q" (i.e. ق or қ) sound that is present in kazakh. but that sound does exist in arabic, so there's no reason to resort to the russian version of the name.

useless things i learned in kazakhstan 5

if you send letter from mosul, iraq to taraz, kazakhstan, it takes 31 days (4 weeks, 3 days) to arrive using APO/US mail, or 52 days (7 weeks, 3 days) to arrive using the iraqi postal service.

on the other hand, the stamps on the iraqi postal service letter are a lot cooler.

lenin dump

kazakhstani cities love their statues. every square and park has at least one. mostly they're statues of kazakh heroes--either real kazakhs like zhambyl zhabaev and baidibek (aka that guy on his horse in the taraz central square), or historical figures who have retroactively been made kazakh, like abu nasr al-farabi. prior to independence those podiums probably all had statues of lenin or marx. so what happened to all the communist-era statues?

earlier this week we went on a walk and may have found some of them. in a park behind the aulie-ata mosque, we found this statue of lenin.



unlike the more prominently displayed statues of kazakh heroes this statue was unlabeled. and yes, that's another lenin statue in the background. i'm guessing the park is a kind of lenin dumping ground. i wonder if there are any others.

bakiyev in taraz with a candle stick

this morning i was talking to an american business traveler who told me she heard that ousted kyrgyz president kurmanbek bakiyev had fled not just to kazakhstan (as was reported yesterday), but to taraz--the tiny city i have called home for the past few months. it sounded like another stupid rumor. the day before yesterday a road was closed unexpectedly by the police, something they might do for a VIP. but it's also something they might do for a bunch of other reasons.

but holy shit, i guess it's true. his plane landed here on thursday. but i've already missed him. this morning he moved on to minsk.

cursed

just to prove we don't have the worst luck in this process, two couples will probably not be able to appear at their court hearing because of that volcano. i can only imagine what it feels like to wait for months and months for their day in court and then have to miss it for something as random as a volcanic eruption in iceland.

outta there

i'd like to welcome former president bakiyev to kazakhstan.

it looks like all his "drown in blood" talk was just a negotiating tactic to get his family immunity from prosecution. and it looks like it didn't work, as kyrgyz security forces went after his brother as soon as the former president left the country. i guess after the new kyrgyz government stuck to their guns and insisted that the immunity-in-exchange for resignation offer was only for personal immunity of kurmanbek bakiyev, bakiyev blinked and just decided to save his own ass.

which means that the crisis just over the mountain may be over. i wonder if the border will reopen now.

a fondness for opera

at least in kazakhstan.

actually this is bad news for my own web activities. i don't usually use opera turbo to post here, but my own tricks work on a similar principle. now that reuters is reporting the little secret about opera's popularity, they'll probably find a way to extend their block to people using the browser, which might also screw up my own efforts to get around the blogger block. (when it exists. the block really does seem to wink on and off at random).

good at posturing, not at governing

the fact that the republican party's stated number one priority is a practical impossibility, pretty much says it all about its current sad state.

always look on the bright side of life

well no matter how crappy things are going here, at least i can look forward to a brand new authorized jonathan sharkey documyntary.

the trailer is here [i tried to embed it but my efforts to evade the youtube block failed. i will try again later]

LATER: okay, here's the embed:


(via)

not that i wanted it to happen

it seems a litte crass to mention it, but it has occurred to me that this tragedy might actually help us a little bit by getting the russian media to obsess about something else.

timing

let's see, just before we filed our adoption petition with the court, casey johnson died and the resulting news stories screwed everything up in our process here. then two days before we finally got our first meeting with the judge, a pennsylvania couple was arrested for the death of the boy they adopted from russia, causing an anti-adoption firestorm in the russian media (which also dominates in kazakhstan) and further jeopardizing our process.

but now we've finally weathered these delays, staying here more than twice as long as we were originally supposed to and put up with the fact that noz jr. was condemned to months of additional time being cared for by an institution instead of a family. it's only natural that this story would come out just two days before our long awaited court date.

threelip revolution

wow, things have really developed in kyrgyzstan since my last post. reports seem to be all over the place, with some people saying the kyrgyz government was overthrown and president bakiyev fled the country while others urge caution and note that no one knows what is really going on there.

despite my proximity to talas, taraz seems completely normal today. no one i know seems concerned about what is happening just down the road, nor am i sure if they're even aware that it's going on. as usual when stuff happens in central asia, i recommend registan.net for info and commentary. until the refugees start showing up in the central square, all i know is what anyone can find online.

in other news, i guess it's a good thing that we don't have to use that plan in which mrs. noz runs to bishkek next week. with the border closed it probably wouldn't have worked anyway.

UPDATE: well no sooner had i hit the "publish" button that i heard a story indicating that some of the locals are concern about what is going on over the border. there was a rumor yesterday that the violence caused a dam in kyrgyzstan to burst and so yesterday some people fled taraz to avoid the expected flood. we're so out of the loop, we apparently missed our chance to panic.

it's strange because this rumor looks to me like a replay of the story about the charvak dam bursting that circulated during the march 2004 terrorist attacks in uzbekistan. i guess that's what down-river cities always worry about.

UPDATE 2: okay, so as the day progressed it has become increasingly clear that everyone heard the flood rumor but us. (and yes, they all know about the coup/revolution/riots/whatever over in kyrgyzstan) apparently, the entire town (minus a pair of oblivious americans who no one thought to call) tried to leave taraz at once last night for higher ground. i hear it was utter pandamonium and we pretty much slept through it.

not a riot here

apparently there were riots just over those mountains that i can see if i step outside. of course, no one is talking about it here. talas is in a totally different country, and the clashes are more about internal kyrgyz politics than anything that would apply over here.

it's just that talas is really close. so close, in fact, that some people claim that ancient talas is taraz and not talas. but that just could be kazakhstan trying to muscle in on kyrgyzstan's claim that it is the site of the famous battle of talas.

useless things i learned in kazakhstan 4

voicemail doesn't seem to exist in kaz. or if it does, it's much rarer than it is in the u.s. mobile phones don't generally come with voicemail accounts and if anyone around here has a voice mailbox on their phone no one seems to use it.

caller ID and the missed call alert act as a substitute for voicemail. you get a missed call, you call them back when you next have the chance. if they have a more complicated message for you, they can tell you when you call back. kaz is essentially mithras heaven (at least in terms of voicemail).

i wouldn't pay for that hotel in advance

he may be putting his trust in god, but that won't get him an israeli visa.

do they forget that we have the ability to record stuff?

lots of people are writing about senator mccain's sudden disavowal of the maverick label. what i find weird about it is not that the senator would try to change his earlier image, or that his present statements might not be consistent with what he has said before (both of those things are pretty common for any politician). what i find so weird is that he seems completely unaware that other people would notice that his "I never considered myself a maverick" statement is completely at odds with literally hundreds of public pronouncements he has made in the past, many of which are on tape.

that makes so sense at all to me. and yet, a politician doing just this sort of thing is not all that rare either. it's so common it's what practically keeps jon stewart in business.

nobody's business but the turks

i'm fascinated by the pan-turkism i've witnessed in my time here in kazakhstan. turkish influence a lot stronger than i expected, and it seems stronger than i remember from my time in uzbekistan in 2003. as i've mentioned before, turkish cafes dominate the local market here and turkish made clothes is a code-word for better quality. there are also turkish secondary schools and univerities, kazakhs study the turkish language, turkish companies are active throughout kazakhstan, the normal stigma against kazakhs marrying members of other ethnic groups doesn't seem to apply to kazakhs marrying turks, kazakhs can visit most turkic countries visa-free, i have met a handful of turks who live here in taraz and turkish money funds a lot of the local building projects.

the only country that holds a stronger cultural sway over kazakhstan than turkey is russia. but turkey is the clear second. this place is the point of intersection between the russian and turkish cultural sphere. i wonder if it's the same in the other turkic-speaking former soviet republics.

the road ahead

i think there has been a little bit of confusion about our progress here. while it is true that our process is finally moving again after 2.5 months of limbo, that doesn't mean we will come home in just two weeks. the misunderstanding is based on the assumption that when our progress stalled we were on the last step. in fact, it stalled several steps before the last step. in a little over a week, we will finally reach the step that we have been waiting for since the middle of january. but there's still a month's worth of stuff to do after that, assuming everything goes right from this point onward.

put another way, there are roughly seven steps to this process (depending on how you count them). we stalled out at step 3, and as a result not much happened between mid-january and this week. we still have steps 4, 5, 6, and 7 to go. and, for that matter, our limbo period at step 3 came after previous delays at step 1 and a delay that should have happened at step 2, if not for the creativity of our coordinator. which puts the "assuming everything goes right from this point onward" in the prior paragraph in a little bit of context.

i'm not trying to worry anyone. life here isn't bad, but the process is slow and difficult. i just want everyone waiting for us to return to have realistic expectations. things are back on track, but we are not out of the woods yet and have at least one month to go.

(also, i'm sorry to be so vague. i can explain a little more by email if the above doesn't make enough sense)

traffic caps

kazaktelecom, the monopoly ISP in kazakhstan, sells its internet service with a monthly cap in traffic. one person, for example, told me that the maximum they could get per DSL line was 20 GB per month. internet cafes get around the problem by subscribing to multiple lines and switching from one to the other as each line reaches its monthly max.

but because people pay for what they expect to use and sometimes they expect wrong, that means that sometimes internet access gets a little harder at the end of the month. the business center at the place where we are staying hit their monthly max at around march 29th. the internet cafe we usually go to had to close early on the 31st because they exhausted their monthly traffic allowance in the late afternoon. on wednesday night we wandered around the center of taraz, trying in vain to find a place that we could successfully use skype.

which kind of puts comcast's 2008 decision to impose a cap in perspective. despite fears at the time, i don't think a cap has become a trend among ISPs in the u.s. yet. but if it does, the last few days in those 31 day months could get to be pretty annoying.