Almaty - Part 1

The US State Department, which is substantially financing this exercise and providing admin support, has arranged for a car to pick me up from the airport. It’s nice to be travelling in class – last time I was here it was quite difficult to get away from the airport, because very few people here spoke a word of English. The signs in the airport made me feel as though I’d entered a new, strange place, simply by having Kazakh and Russian on them before deigning to mention English.
In a further step down the road which makes me feel more world-wise (which I appreciate) while reducing the number of new and exciting things to be found through travel (which I regret), this time I arrive in an airport I remember well, and being whisked away to my hotel less than an hour after landing fits in with this.

Almaty is a strange town, looking like an old soviet town (large, square, brutish buildings, rectangular layout, large blocks between large streets) dropped into a background more properly reminiscent of the Northern Far East. Which, of course, is pretty much what it is historically, and therefore in some way representative for much of what we now call Central Asia.

It’s not the cleanest or most well-maintained city I’ve been in, but it’s also a far cry from the worst. And the weather is absolutely gorgeous. But I sleep badly, give up on it at six in the morning and go to the gym. We start at 10 on the first day, as per my request.

And I find that nothing is the way I expected and, at least to some degree, was led to expect. I have colleagues who are very good at preparing for such a thing and who might have been less surprised. However, with the counterparts on the other side of the globe (which means that they write the answer to my email in my next night, drawing a brief exchange of emails out over a week), the amount of proper preparation one can undertake is limited.

What I am good at is adjusting and improvising. And at making people feel like we’re part of a team. To make them feel that this is their baby, and I’m not here to take it away or tell them how to do their jobs, but to bring in some outside experience that they can take advantage of. By the end of the second day we’re in my comfort zone, where it’s mostly they asking me questions and I giving them answers (or, when I don’t know the answer, my opinion). And it is they who are doing the drafting. That’s good, because it saves on translation, because it gives them ownership of the product which means they’ll be using it because it is their own brainchild, rather than dropped on them from an outsider. And it’s good because it means when they do the drafting, I don’t have to. ;)

Within short order we’ve agreed to expand the scope of our work to something rather more ambitious. And then proceed to attack it. We work 9(ish) to 1, with a long lunch break, and then go until 5. At that point I leave them to do ‘homework’ (some drafting on their own, trying to put on paper the concepts we’ve discussed over the day), and head to the hotel. It is usually there that I realize that while overall my working hours seem very friendly indeed, not taking any breaks in between and being on the frontline all day really is quite demanding. Yet I enjoy the work so much that I’m surprised every day by how drained I feel the moment I get to relax.
But I hate spending a week in a foreign country without seeing anything of it. The trap is easy to fall into – we never get sent to faraway places for work that is easy or done quickly, so usually spend significant amounts of time and energy on the job before returning to the hotel (and the return takes time as well). So by the time we’ve changed into something comfortable, night is falling and it’s going on late, so for some of us ‘adventure’ means finding dinner outside of the hotel. Been there, done that. Don’t like it.

Monday the US peeps and I head to a bar they recommend, we meet up with some of our counterparts and have a pleasant evening. We share a lot of dishes, so I get to try some horse steak again. As I suspected (remember), horse steak isn’t the way to eat horse. It’s a bit on the tough side. I’m looking forward to trying horse shashlyk again …

Tuesday, while we’re taking a digestion walk during the lunch break, conversation turns to sport. Turns out one of my counterparts is the past KyuKuShinKai champion of Almaty. He also says that sure, he’ll see whether he can find a club – doing some (any, really) kind of Martial Art – where I could come in for a session. But of course I’ve learnt to try to have eggs in more than one basket, so I also confer with hotel staff for leads on where to find a place. It takes a while to get across what I actually want (neither ‘KaraTe’ nor ‘TaeKwonDo’ or even ‘Systema’ ring a bell, it’s only when I mention ‘Sambo’ that the coin drops) but in the end I do get a lead. And it’s Tuesday already, so I prioritize my evening accordingly – I throw my sports clothes into my backpack and head out to investigate.

The directions aren’t entirely correct, and the first person I manage to find who both speaks English and has an idea of where this place is, tells me to head down ‘Kosmonaut street’. Only there is no ‘Kosmonaut street’, because all the streets were renamed a couple of years ago (getting rid of Soviet baggage), but some locals still refer to them by their old names. It is issues like that which can make striking out on one’s own so much more difficult than simply taking a taxi. But also more adventurous. And it’s cheaper.

Having found the ‘Academy of Sports and Tourism’, it takes a lot of nonverbal communication interspersed with various ‘Nyet’, ‘Da’ and ‘Spasiba’ until I finally find, near the end of a dimly lit subterranean corridor with a very classic locker room smell, a small side gym (there are several large ones in this building) which – key discovery here – has padded mats on the floor and a boxing bag hanging from the ceiling. Clearly this is what I was looking for. And there’s someone here, and yes, they are about to start a training session, and yes, I can join. So I inhale the two snickers bars I keep in my pack for a reason (haven’t had dinner yet), washing them down with as much water as I can and we go.

They do Mixed Martial Arts training here, and tonight focus on boxing. Before that, there’s warm-up. Warm-up in a strange gym is always interesting – it tells you something about what they do and what they value well before you’ve started the actual training. And it’s generally something they do very regularly, so they tend to be good at the particular exercises they do every time, while new people invariably struggle with unfamiliar exercises. I admit to a bit of vanity (or is it pride) in being fit enough overall to usually be able to work along. And of course I’m aware that everybody checks out what the weird new guy is doing. All of this is fine, until the head instructor (‘Maxim’), kneels, posts his head on the mat in front of him, flips over to land on his feet in a sort of bridge, then walks around to one side while turning over to end up in his starting position. And then explains that I should do that eight times for each side … it takes me a while to realize that he is in fact entirely serious. Maybe nobody else likes that particular exercise either, or maybe they were just all waiting to see how I take it, because it’s not like everybody acts as though they are familiar with the exercise. But I try. It’s damned hard, I’m not good at it, but I can see how it should be an enormously useful core exercise for grappling purposes.

We don’t do any sparring tonight, just a variety of drills – like running in place for two minutes while throwing punches (hard!), then dropping to the floor (easy) and doing twenty push-ups on our knuckles (not, quite, possible after that). I am drenched in sweat when we’re done, have apparently had just enough sugar to last me through the session, and am told that they’d be happy to see me again on Thursday at seven (I think). So, yay!

I inhale a Doner Kebab on my way back to the hotel, hit the shower and am hungry again. So I do have a small meal in the hotel bar, but feel quite good about it. And it’s really late now, so being ten hours ahead of DC time means I catch my wife online in her morning and we chat for a little before I go to sleep. Brilliant day.