Astana is for Lovers

Romeo had his poetry and pointy sword.  That guy from Hi Fidelity had his ridiculously oversized radio.  The prince had Rapunzel's long hair to climb up.  Here in Astana, they do things a little differently.  I've been living in this apartment building for almost nine months (for the amazing story of how I ended up here, see A Room of One's Own, parts 1, 2, and 3), so this is a behavior I've been studying for a while.  At first I was quite baffled by all the commotion, but I believe I've figured it out.

In Astana, as they say, men are men, and women are women.  And there's nothing women like more than being wooed from their 8-story windows on a brisk, -20-degree evening.  From the parking lot.  I say from the parking lot, but really once the sun goes down any reasonably horizontal space becomes fair game as parking in this city.  But the parking is essential to this form of courtship.  Like the brightly colored birds in the Amazon forests who dance around and build elaborate summer homes for their prospective brides, the men here in Astana use their overly elaborate car alarms to attract the attention of their lady-loves.

After all, who has not experienced strong, nay overwhelming, feelings when wakened from a deep sleep by the strident beeps, whoops, sirens, and even computer-generated verbal warnings of a car alarm.  I have to say, I feel especially strongly about the ones that repeat, endlessly, until someone physically comes to the car to turn them off.  The amorous men of this district can't help but attract some attention with these ingenious little devices.  And I have to say, the women in this apartment complex are rather spoiled for choice.  Come evening-time the lot is full of cars, to the point that no more can even drive through, much less actually park.  On any given night you can hear the amorous warbling of not less than five lovers a-wooing and a-waiting.  I can only guess that this complex houses some of the most beautiful women in Astana.

Cars in Astana, like in most cities, are a bit of a status symbol.  And the price of gasoline is exorbitantly low, so cars can reach enormous proportions here.  The bigger the status, the bigger the symbol, so to speak.  And these valuable pieces of pretension are always kept running, warmed up, one would imagine, to provide an inviting egress for the newly-wooed.  Also, as I understand, an already-running car provides a much faster getaway for that playful pastime they refer to here as bride-napping.  Personally I prefer the local term—alyp qashu—so quaint, so un-indicative of its actual meaning in English.  But the women know what they're getting into, I suppose.  One would imagine it's quite easy to judge a man's worth by the size of the car he drives.

And now that the weather is getting warmer, I can only imagine the courting will increase in intensity.  The days are much longer, so the men have more time for driving around and deciding on their targets come nightfall.  Not to mention it's much easier to stand outside and wait for your call to have its desired effect when the temperature is above freezing.  And bride-nappings are much more likely to succeed when one doesn't have to contend with completely iced-over roads and giant piles of snow preventing escape from already impossible-to-escape parking lots.

The Rhythm of Life

Ahh, the rhythm of life.  Every morning, rain or shine, I know it's time to rise and face the day, for the simple reason that no one, even the soundest sleeper among us, could possibly maintain a placid slumber when the city starts growing again.  Like the proverbial rose, Astana by any other name would still resemble a playground for giant toddlers playing with human-sized erector sets.  Toddlers with a twelve-hour attention span who start their work when this city is still under cover of dark, and end long after the nine-to-five crowd has made its way homeward.

Like the worn-out refrigerator in my rented apartment kitchen, years older than the building itself, there is a rhythm, a predictability to the sounds here.  I can always count on my refrigerator motor coming on, like clockwork, at about the time I'm drifting off to sleep, in the middle of the night when I'm in the middle of a particularly pleasant dream, about twenty minutes before my alarm goes off in the morning, and pretty much any time I'm sitting in the kitchen trying to Skype with someone back home over a particularly choppy internet connection.

Just so, the city wakes and slumbers to the time-keeping of the industrial-sized triphammer, more regular than any pendulum, that somehow still manages to pound holes in the ground even in the dead of winter.  So regular is the construction here, the rampant growth of everything, that they measure time, not in hours, days, weeks, months, years, but in height—at this rate, I estimate, we'll see spring again when one more story has been added to the building sprouting above the roof of the apartment complex immediately out my bedroom window.  Just so, I imagine venerable old grandmothers telling tales of the city in their girlhood, when all the buildings stood less than three stories in height, and no one ever had to buy an elevator card.  And do you see that plump-cheeked boy toddling about the snow-covered playground?  He only learned to walk when the ice layer was just beginning to grow on the sidewalks and every other paved surface, and now look: it's a mere four inches thick and he's running like he was born to it!

In December, when the snow and ice just began to take hold, I caught a glimpse of these ant-like workers adding another story to that far-off building.

And now they are preparing to begin another story.  I wonder, do they even know when they'll stop?

A Room of One's Own, part 3: Success?

How do you measure success when finding an apartment?  Location?  Amenities?  Low utility bills?  Great neighbors?  In Astana, Kazakhstan they measure by number of months you can stay in one place without being driven out by a lessor with delusions of empire.

If you'll recall, in my first post in this series, A Room of One's Own, part 1, I described my apartment hunting experience.  During that time I looked at a number of apartments before settling on the palatial prison.  Turns out we should've taken the place that looked less nice.

There are some rules for interior decorating I've noticed in my months here that it seems property owners should follow:

1. All rooms must have at least 2 different wallpapers (except bathrooms)
• with the corollary that all rooms must have wallpaper (bathrooms optional yet not excepted)
2. All rooms must have a chandelier-like light fixture as the primary source of light
3. All apartments must be decorated according to a pre-1990 style or contain at least 2 fully non-functional items with resemble functional items
4. All apartments must contain at least one anachronistically-placed appliance or piece of furniture

Our new (also current [5 months and counting!  cross your fingers!]) apartment (we went back to the less-pretty apartment) breaks some, though not all, of these rules.  And it's my hypothesis that the less an apartment follows these rules, the less likely it will be that the property-owner will conform to the crazy landlady paradigm.  Our new landlady takes a hands-off approach to the lessor-lessee relationship, only dropping by after calling in advance to pick up the rent money or coming over to fix a problem.  

She's also wonderfully patient with the fact that I only understand about half of what she says (she only speaks about 5 words of English), and that I generally only reply with "yes" or "no" to her questions.  And she also handles the utility bills for us, paying them when they come in and letting us pay her back afterwards, instead of us having to stand in line at a post office and then getting yelled at by a disgruntled postal worker in a language we barely understand.

So, were we finally successful in finding a good apartment?  I'll get back to you in a few months.

A Room of One's Own, part 2: Reveille

“Come, wake yourself, rouse yourself…”

Never, not since I lived in my childhood home, nor with roommates during and after university, have I been made so aware of my enormous lack of cleanliness.  The floor was never clean enough, the dishes never washed soon enough, the toilets never scrubbed often enough.  Did I have an overly picky roommate you ask?  No, that’s not it at all.  It wasn’t the people I lived with who were the trouble, but the people with whom I didn’t.  Inspection could come at any time from without, and we (or so we came to believe) must be prepared to receive it.  Even my mother, after a time, stopped demanding entry to my room.  Kazakh mothers, I suppose, are not given to granting such leeway.

The most hard-bitten drill-sergeant I ever encountered had nothing on this landlady of ours, who seemed determined to insure that ours was not a life of great rest and luxury.  Oh, we paid for the pretty rooms and the pleasure of being in them, but we were not to make use of them, to be sure. 

Like many things we weren’t made aware of before such a momentous emigration, the nature of the lesser-lessee relationship was not mentioned, nor was it brought up when we were in the process of finding a place to live.  Post-soviet they may be, but these women can browbeat a poor foreigner better than any sergeant ever drove a poor private to distraction with demands to clean the same speck of (non-existent) dirt fifteen times without even batting an eyelash.  I knew better than to make eye contact with my superior officer; had the lesson stayed with me I’d have been much better served this time round.

I’m also convinced that the United States CIA should seriously look into adopting the spy networks employed by these Kazakh landladies.  With such a system we’d surely have found Osama bin Laden years earlier, and maybe some weapons of mass destruction thrown in just for kicks.  Somehow ours seemed to be daily apprised of the comings and goings of both us and any guests we might have had.  She had an uncanny knack for appearing at our door in the middle of a movie we happened to be watching with friends, or the morning after a dinner party when we hadn’t yet cleaned up.   Or even woken up.

I remember I could lock my locker to the prying eyes of superiors and comrades, but the door to the barracks was never barred to a sergeant.  Quite so, there are no locks on doors in this country, it would seem, as well (at least the kind that are supposed to keep out landladies).   And after all, who wouldn’t object to a strange lady strolling into your home any time of day she pleases, and just to inspect your toilet at that.  Call ahead, you inquire?  Why, isn’t the doorbell enough notice?

And so, we were evicted.  Obviously there was somewhat more to it, though it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it all began to turn sour. Mostly because it began almost as soon as we moved in.  And, like all reasonable people, politely asked our landlady to come back at a more convenient hour, and to call ahead of time. It was a bit of a rude awakening for us all, in the end, but we all got what we wanted, I suppose, in the end: we our freedom, and freedom from surprise inspections; she the daughters she really wanted and thought she’d found in us, only to be cruelly disillusioned. And our new place?  Well, stay tuned.

A Room of One's Own, part 1

It less than one month, I was evicted from my first apartment in Astana.  I often wonder if that has in any way colored my perception of the place.  Only time will tell, I suppose.

It was a wild ride, as these things go, finding a new place to live twice in a month.  Possibly the most fun I’ve had in my time here.  I almost feel sorry, really, for the other expats who come over here with guaranteed housing packages, moving expenses and all.  Finding your own place, dealing with real estate agents and property owners, one gets to see how the other half lives, as it were.  And the language barrier—well that just adds to the experience.

Both times, we ended up working with a nice young woman with two cell-phones on her person at all times, at least three-inch heals, and about four words of English, total.  And of course a local co-worker who came as translator.  And guide.  And negotiator.  We worked with agents—even though we had to pay a fee of ten percent of the first month’s rent—because we wished to see as many places as we could in a short time and agents, as we understand them, are good at that.  It is their job, after all.  So we ran after our good Olga (literally ran at times, even up stairs, her in her heels and we half-convinced that this was some kind of local past-time—see how many flights of stairs you can get the foreign clients to climb before they give in and take whatever ridiculously-priced apartment they stumble into if only you’ll promise they can sit down for a minute).  In one afternoon we visited one slum, one palace, and two places comparably priced, but with slightly different amenities (just how different, we would only realize after the fateful eviction notice).

Luckily, many apartments are available already furnished, and owners may even be good enough to add pieces we foreign clients find lacking (rule 1: a pull-out sofa is not a bed).  As I said, after our first day of hunting we were left with a choice between two places (the slum and palace being out of the running for obvious reasons).  Between those two, really, the choice was simple—we picked the one that looked nicer.  It looked newer (how old the building actually was we couldn’t say; I got the impression from various translations that the place had been recently remodeled), was slightly bigger, and utilities were included in the rent price.  This was important because we’d been forewarned about the difficulty of understanding utility bills in this country—even the locals had trouble, it seemed.

The view from the front door

Kitchen, no expense spared.

Except, as we found later, an oven.

The living room (first half)

Living room, second half

My bedroom.  With access to balcony.

I took it as a positive sign, also, that our new landlady—during the signing of the lease and finalizing all those details that weren’t really translated to us—seemed to intimate to me (and my co-worker and new roommate) that she had two sons, both of whom were not married.  Any advantage we can get, I thought to myself, we should take, smiling along with her and deciding that if she liked us that much already, we should have a very pleasant year here.