More Disconnected Observations, Followed by Pictures of Otis

Women Drinking Beer. Women drink beer here. It is definitely not considered unladylike. That said, the places that cater to Kazakhs expect women to order .25L of beer at a time. If you try to order .5L, they ask, "Big beer?!" several times, increasingly loudly and incredulously, before giving in. (I do not give in.) If on the other hand, you don't really feel like beer (it happens, really) or it's so hot that it seems like ordering .5L would be a bad idea (would get warm before you finished), and you are at a place that caters to foreigners, when you order the .25L, they ask, "Small beer?!" several times, increasingly loudly and incredulously before...... You can't win. And regardless of what sort of place you are in, women are brought beer with a straw. Kazakh women actually drink beer through a straw. I refuse to.

Buying Locally..... is not easy to do here. Keith Rosten, who was a Fulbright Scholar here in the early '90's, and wrote a book called Once in Kazakhstan, which is out-of-date and rather slight, but still worth picking up for getting an idea of basic cultural concepts, explains that in the Soviet economy, every region had its role to play. Period. Kazakhstan's role was to mine and refine minerals. Manufacturing occurred elsewhere. (This, of course, is also the definition of colonialism.) As far as we can tell, very little manufacturing capacity has developed since, and there are plenty of signs of the disparity in wealth that seems to characterize mineral-rich, non-diversified economies. From our short-sighted viewpoint, the only things to buy locally are foodstuffs (including juice and beer, but not wine or vodka) and handicrafts. Otherwise, cars are Japanese and Russian, diapers are American and Polish, clothes are Chinese, formula is Dutch and English, housewares are Czech and German, etc.

Vodka. We are never going to be able to try all the vodkas at the grocery store. We have yet to be in a grocery store where vodka did not take up at least one whole side of an aisle. Last night, however, we went to the restaurant on the corner that makes awful French food to sample their homemade vodkas. These proved (surprise, surprise) to be much more successful than the food. I had the sampler, which was a small shot of each of:

• Horseradish Honey - Good, tasted mostly of horseradish.
• Lemon Lime - Ghastly. Tasted like Lemon Pledge mixed with really cheap bar mix.
• Black and Pink Pepper with Garlic and Parsley - A little weird, but after the initial bizarreness, good. Very floral of pink pepper.
• Mixed Berry - Supposedly a blend of strawberry, cranberry and cloudberry. But tasted like all cloudberry. Very light and smooth. You accidentally could drink a lot of this and then be very sorry.
• Pine Nut - My favorite. A little sweet. Sort of like if Frangelica were good.
  

The Quality of Information. Lionel sent me a really nice e-mail the other day that made me realize we should probably write a paragraph like this one. You can't trust the accuracy of any information on this blog that isn't an observation of ours. After a fair amount of research, we have concluded that (1) very little has been written about Kazakhstan, and (2) almost none of it is written in English. So all information is suspect. Two examples:

• A few days ago we blogged about the 225-year-old master plan for Almaty. (Info according to an intelligent, seemingly well-informed, lifelong Kazakhstani.) Which would mean the plan was undertaken during the reign of Catherine the Great, which is theoretically possible given her oversight of the initial serious Russian expansion into Kazakhstan. The city clearly was planned, and by someone with an appreciation for the classical esthetic. But 1780 seems a bit long ago for the Russians to have been this far south and east. Meanwhile the aforementioned Rosten says the city was founded during the Great Game era - in 1854 - but really functioned only as a fort known as Vernyi until the mid-1860's, at which point the Russians had gained firm control of what is now Kazakhstan, and Almaty began to grow. The Lonely Planet guide more or less agrees with Rosten.
• Before we left, we were told that the capital was moved from Almaty to Astana in the early '90's as a crude economic development move - Astana was the President's home village. Since this is entirely consistent with the behavior of Presidents for Forever in other parts of the world, we figured that was right. Rosten, however, says it is a great mystery as to why the President ordered the move, but that the speculation is that Almaty is too close to the Chinese border and in the event of Chinese aggression....… Another writer, and now I can't remember which, says the move to Astana, which is much closer to the Russian border, was part "We're not scared of you," to Russia, part a move to forestall possible secession by the more ethnically Russian northern part of the country.

Who knows? In entirely similar vein - in no way, in my mind, a non sequitur - today we found out that Sagat and Galina are married.