It’s about 9 o’clock and the glow of my laptop illuminates the inside of our sleeper compartment as the alt-country darling Rilo Kiley plays in my headphones, Allyson sleeps and the night train races across the steppes of Northern Kazakhstan from Astana to Arkalyk. If you’d asked me in January to predict all of the words I might use in a sentence this year, I can assure you that “Kazakhstan” had a very low probability of being used, and the combination of that word with “our,” “train,” and “Arkalyk” would have required a slide rule, a white board and the transitive property to calculate its probability (I think that adding in any combination of the words “my,” “headphones” and any permutation of “country” also requires the application of the Coriolis Effect, but I’ll let the committee decide that).
All that being said, being on this train, 14 hours away from meeting our new child in the middle of these vast plains just after sunset seems somehow the most natural thing for us to be doing. It doesn’t even feel far away, although I’m sure that will change quickly as the days away from Aidan increase, but the getting here was a pretty smooth affair.
Our trip was easy, Lufthansa from JFK to Frankfurt overnight, which we both slept through after our essentially sleepless Tuesday night, after a four hour layover our second Lufthansa flight to Astana arrived on time at 10:40 pm. We were through passport control in about 5 minutes, barely glanced at by the customs agents and our Astana coordinator Victoria was waiting to meet us. Twenty minutes later we were in our hotel (I’ll post the name when I dig the receipt out of my bag but it wasn’t part of a US chain) which was pretty new, and very clean, within walking distance of banks, pubs and shops in the old part of town (including the Chelsea English Pub, which did garner a few swearwords under my breath in the name of Spurs supporters everywhere).
After breakfast we spent the day around Astana. Victoria took us to the bank to exchange some money and we hired a taxi to take us to the monuments in the new part of the city. Astana has only been the capital since 1997, and the amount of construction is remarkable. I don’t want to take battery power describing the buildings now but Wallpaper’s take on the architecture in April 2007 struck me as right on the money.
This is the first place we’ve been to where literally no one we’ve met (save for Victoria and our Arkalyk coordinator Habiba, who arrived in Astana today and who we will connect with back in Arkalyk on Monday) spoke English. Victoria and Habiba are lovely, and the people who we’ve asked for help in broken Russian/sign language are more than happy to oblige, but most of the people we’ve come across keep their cards very close to their chest. I am interested how the next six week shape our impressions of the people and culture here, particularly without the subtle nuances and shadings within conversations to guide us. I don’t think it will matter in the end, but let’s see.
I’m going to turn in and try to get some sleep. It’s pitch black outside, other than the occasional arc lights at roadway crossings and eerie glows on the horizon from what I assume are oil and gas works there’s nothing to obscure my view of the stars, which are brighter and more numerous than I ever remember seeing. I think we get robbed by the light in our cities twice. First, when it hides all but the brightest stars from view, and second, when it lightens the deep black background of those stars.
Tomorrow is a big day, we meet with the director of the orphanage and in all likelihood, the child we will bring home. Wish us luck. T
