My Day So Far

If you accept that a day starts at midnight, mine began at a cafe out with two girlfriends celebrating International Women's day. We danced, they filled me in on all the gossip surrounding our fellow cafe-goers, and I got in a debate about Barak Obama's presidential hopes with a complete stranger. In other words, the usual.

We left before everyone else in the place -- it's a pretty serious holiday, especially when it falls on a Saturday. I walked home through slushy snow, got together my things for a trip to the city, and fell asleep. But wouldn't you just know it, something at the cafe got my guts hard, and I woke up at 2 am to regurgitate, as it were. Not the first and certainly not the last of my food poisonings in Kazakhstan; it's a reality, however unpleasant.

I was up again at 6:30 to wait for a taxi to town. But, just my luck, I fell victim to a miscommunication. The taxi driver I'd called hadn't gotten any more passengers, and so cancelled his trip. To let me know, he had either left a message that didn't reach me or called while we were out. Needless to say, he was not happy when I called him at 7:30 to figure out what was going on... Once that was cleared up, I took a walk in the grey morning to our tiny bus station. No problems there, tickets available and bus on time and everything!

The purpose of this trip is to get train tickets for me and Jeff and to coordinate a vacation down south with the other Pavlodar volunteers. We tried once already two weeks ago to get tickets, only to be told that the schedule was changing. Today I went straight to the train station from the bus depot, but luck is just not with me, and the ticket lady said due to a change, there were no kupe tickets (which you can reserve far in advance) and platzcart (or cheaper, fuller train cars) will only go on sale 5 days in advance. Foiled again! Frustrating to have to take a 3 hour bus ride in to find that out. On the bright side, I can leave money and documents with volunteers here and hope they are more sucessful at negotiating for tickets.

Now with 7 hours to kill till the return bus, I got on a tram to get to the Internet center. Not two minutes into the ride, the trolley stopped and our conductor said that traffic was stopped for trams on the next street, we were all going to have to get off. Half of the passengers stepped meekly off, the other half was up in arms, insisting on a return of their 30 tenge fare (roughly 25 cents). I cut my losses and braved the messy melting streets to walk here.

Whew. And now heading back onto the streets to track down another visiting volunteer.

The moral of the story is: travel is difficult in Kazakhstan.

Love,
Nora