Sept 1 - day 1 of trip 2...

Sept 1 - Monday 7:15 am Almaty time - no idea the temperature but it seems nice out so far, sunny but not too hot yet ........... Hi everyone we're here again! Welcome to the newest episode of 'SavLaC in Kazakhstan'!!

To refresh your memory, Almaty time is 11 hours ahead of Winnipeg, so if it's 7:15 am Monday here, that means it's 8:15 pm Sunday at home..... the trick for knowing whether it's the same day or the next day is - until Noon in Winnipeg we're on the same calendar day, but after 1 pm in Wpg, it's the next day here.

We'll again mostly post in the early morning hours, so that's early evening at home. If anyone wants to reach us by phone here, the best ‘Winnipeg’ times to find us would be 8-midnight, or 8-noon. We won't be making many phone calls from here, but Paul always has his cell phone on (text messages only please, no calls).

Our travels were smooth, our stopovers (Toronto then Frankfurt) were long but uneventful, we both managed to sleep a bit on the planes, and all our bags landed with us - what more can we ask for?!?

We had a lovely sendoff Saturday morning at Wpg airport by 4 parents, 2 sisters, 1 niece and 2 nephews - thanks so much for coming you guys and thanks Mom and Dad S for driving us to the airport!
We were met in Almaty by Natasha (coordinator) and our new translator Anel, who just graduated from university studying languages - her English is excellent and she is now learning French and Spanish, on top of her Russian and some Kazakh.
We had a short delay in Almaty (10 minutes) as our plane landed before midnight and we had to wait until after midnight to go through security (our travel visas only allowed us to enter the country on Sept 1, not on Aug 31) - the border guard thought it was quite humourous, saying 'you have to wait 3 more minutes before we can stamp you in'....

We did the (this time) expected stop at a grocery store for morning provisions, and found out our new apartment is in the downtown area, not in the Samal neighbourhood where we were before. We're not sure yet where exactly we are, but we'll get our address and phone # later today when we see Anel or Natasha, and we'll walk around a bit to get our bearings.

The apartment is quite nice and very clean. It's smaller than our last one but has a good-size living room (sectional sofa and chair, plus coffee tables and TV), the kitchen is off the living room and has a small table, the bathroom has sink, toilet, standup corner shower and laundry machine, and the bedroom has lots of closet/storage space. The bed is again just a boxspring but we piled on the comforters they left for us and put our sheets over those, so it'll be fine. There's a small balcony off the living room which looks north (we think), and we're on the 3rd floor. No hot water at the moment, but that should apparently come back later today or tomorrow. And 2 great things: # 1 air conditioning!!! And # 2: the TV gods have smiled on us again, with satellite channels...!! So when we got here at 2 am we set up a little bit then actually slept for a few hours, which is great.

And the very best part - we can go see Angelique right away - this morning! We'll be picked up at 9:30 - can't wait to see her! We've brought all the same toys and snacks that we had when we were here before, to hopefully help her remember us. We won't get this entry posted until this afternoon, so we'll let you know how our first visit went.

Update 2:30 pm – our visit this morning was wonderful, and Angelique looks beautiful! She was shy with us at first but within a few minutes we felt as if we’ve picked up where we left off – such a relief!!

The rest of today we'll try to figure out where we are using our map, get the internet up and running, and rest – it's hard to believe we’ve only been here 14 hours!!

Thanks for following along and for your comments - we really appreciate it!

take care,
Nic and Paul