Kazakh Hospitality

The next day starts with my counterparts riddling me with all the questions that occurred to them while trying to put yesterday’s results on paper. Which of course is the point of the whole transfer exercise, and it works beautifully. They ruefully admit that the moment they set pen to paper, what had seemed clear after our discussion created a deluge of questions.

Well, that’s how the brain works. Following someone else’s train of thoughts until it appears clear (or at least free of concepts you don’t understand and of internal inconsistencies) is a different thing entirely from having internalized a conceptual model of thinking. Which is why they say that if you want to be sure you’ve understood something, teach it to someone else.

Or, alternatively, write it down in your own words (or even better, language). I remember that I was much better at recalling what we’d covered in high school in NJ than I had ever been in Germany, and figured out later that the reason was that I had already performed an intellectual transfer by translating it.

But for them the transfer is in the writing, not the listening, because of course we’re working in Russian. Or maybe the ‘of course’ isn’t quite clear, as it wasn’t to me. Kazakh and Russian sound close enough to me that I had to ask what language the interpreter was using with them (showing that I don’t have much of an ear for this sort of thing, Kazakh being a Turkic language).
Turns out Kazakhstan was (forcibly, at least initially) settled by a lot of Russians in the Stalin and post-Stalin area, resulting in nearly a quarter of the current population being of Russian origin, most of which do not speak Kazakh, while everyone here speaks Russian. So while Kazakh is the ‘national language’, Russian is also permissible and with 80% of the population speaking Kazakh and 100% of the population speaking Russian, that’s what they use.

Interesting side note: They also had a sizable German minority from the time of the Czar, but most of them have left for Germany, when a past administration welcomed anyone of such origin in a (broadly successful) attempt to import votes. I prosecuted several of them during my short stint as an assistant prosecutor in Germany, mostly young people with German names and (legally) nationality who were born in Kazakhstan, spoke no German, were amply supported by a welfare system to which they had never contributed and evidenced serious difficulties adjusting to our society. I swerve off that topic as soon as I can. Shouldn’t have mentioned it at all.

I’ve got a lot of muscular aches from training on Tuesday, so Wednesday don’t do much except decide to head out and find the ‘Line Brew’ restaurant/bar again that I’ve had a most excellent horse shashlyk in the last time I was here. I don’t find it right away (even though the directions I were given were spot on, it’s a bit hidden from the side from which I originally approached it, blindingly obvious from the other direction as I retrace my steps half an hour later). So I spend nearly an hour walking around Almaty after dark, working up quite an appetite (and getting really, really tired in the process).

The horse shashlyk is just as good as I remembered. This was so worth spending an hour looking for the place. Not sure that avoiding an estimated taxi fare of three dollars was worth treading asphalt for an hour in my current state, but there’s a principle involved here, you see. I’m the guy who generally stays on the frugal side (the line to ‘cheap’ being sometimes blurry), thereby gaining a more immediate impression of the surroundings, and saving some of my per diem in the process. And I’ve got plans for the per diem in Singapore…

Thursday I’m invited for dinner – initially for Friday evening. My plan was to have the exit meeting in the late morning on Friday so that in the afternoon I’d be able to head out into the mountains which I can see spread out tantalizingly in all their snow-clad glory right before me, along the outskirts of the city, whenever I look outside. I’ve brought a full overnight backpacking kit, which should easily keep me comfortable down to -10 C / 15 F if I wear all my clothes to sleep, and would like to make use of it – the last (first) time I was here and saw this scenery, I’d resolved that if I come here again, I’d time my trip so I could do some hiking.

So, sheepishly, I mention that my preference would be for tonight vs. Friday. No problem, I’m told.

We’re almost completely done by Thursday evening. Several of the documents have a very clear skeleton now with a good bit of meat on them – enough so that we’re all confident that they can finish those documents without any further handholding from my side. So, we’re all pretty happy with what we’ve got so far and I’m really happy with how the timing is working out.
So Thursday evening at eight I’m at the restaurant I’ve been told to attend, and brought into the Chinese room. They wanted the Kazakh room (the whole point of choosing this venue, I’m told, is to make sure that I can have some traditional Kazakh food), but I assume this was booked out before they realized that they liked me enough to trouble themselves over my experience here. The restaurant is called ‘7 Cuisines’, and Kazakh, Uzbek and Chinese are among these (opinions appear to differ on what the others are, if my bead on the rapid bit of Russian conversation is accurate).

We have a number of local delicacies – I particularly like the bread (deep-fried dough) and Plov (a cousin of Pilaf, rice with some other veggies and, in this case at least, meat mixed in). We drink Shubat (Camel’s milk – Kumyss, fermented mare’s milk, is a seasonal item as mares have foals in spring and give milk only for a short time thereafter) and wine. I’m told that they would usually have vodka as well, but that they settled for wine because I don’t drink vodka.

I would realize much later that this was a watershed moment for my trip.

I guess my surprise at this statement is obvious, and leads to further inquiry (haltingly translated by one junior member of our project group recruited for this purpose into this otherwise fairly senior group of Kazakh officials, my official interpreter being paid by the day, not the night). And so the realization slowly percolates into everyone’s understanding that I kept saying ‘thanks, but no, thanks’ to offers of vodka after lunch because I was concerned alcohol would make me too sleepy after lunch and detract from my utility – not because I am opposed to vodka on some more fundamental level. I then witness a moment like when Tom Cruise’s character in Legend declares that he did it for love … because apparently This Changes Everything.

Vodka is brought. And apparently now we are able to follow proper protocol, which demands that after the host has offered a toast (and everyone except my young colleague who came in his own car has downed their glasses), it is time for everyone else, as the evening progresses, to offer a toast of their own. I offer mine out of turn (against protocol!), but apparently this is remedied by having a second round of toasts afterwards in proper order…

The evening is very enjoyable otherwise, my hosts are not just clearly striving to be hospitable, but genuinely pleased with the assistance I’ve been lending and quite impressed with my expertise (blushing as they said and again as I write this). This is evident mostly from the toasts, which are clearly a serious matter, while our conversation is otherwise fairly free ranging. And I employ every technique at my disposal (including what I learned from Coyote Ugly) to keep it enjoyable.

It turns out that I offer the most serious toast of all, as I try to explain what I think of when I offer a toast to ‘absent friends’ – apparently when you offer a toast to the dead, you do not clink glasses. You do get up, and you down the glass even if you’re the designated driver.

We exit the restaurant well after midnight. I’m still relatively solid on my feet (though clearly the last shots aren’t being metabolized yet), have given what seems like a very good impression, and am happy about the evening as I get into the car that I expect to take me to the hotel.
While the changing surroundings become more and more obvious as the ride progresses, I guess so does the amount of alcohol that transitions from my digestive tract into my bloodstream, and so it takes me quite a while to realize that they are looking less and less like the areas my hotel is in, rather than more and more so. And I’ve barely realized that we are now in the area of town populated by large, purpose-built apartment housing that we come to a stop. And I am told that this is where one of my counterparts lives, who has woken up his wife and sister to welcome me (and a small remainder of the dinner group) into his home…

There is Borscht, and, of course, more vodka. There is conversation of which I remember only a deeply felt (and, I believe, shared) sense of camaraderie. I doubt much more could be communicated at this point even though we’re all fluent in Drunkenese and I am amazed by the wealth of meaning I seem able to convey in Simple English liberally sprinkled with ‘Da’, ‘Nyet’, ‘Spasiba’ and of course ‘Dasvidanye’, though that latter only at four in the morning (or thereabouts).

I very dimly remember a brief (I think) chat online with my wife after I am returned to the hotel in a state that’s barely functional, drinking a lot of water and taking headache medication (and setting three separate alarms) before stumbling into bed.