September 1 to 4, from Santa Fe to Karanganda

The trip from Santa Fe to Karaganda went pretty well, if for days. Neighbor Francine drove us to a local hotel with our seven pieces of baggage – two pieces of checked, each, and one carry-on for Mitch and a carry-on plus “personal item” for me. A shuttle took us on to ABQ where the driver pulled up the curb-cutout at the departures station to get us out of the pouring rain. It’s rained a lot this summer in ABQ, unusual to say the least.

The TSA folks were nice, and the people at the second airport restaurant we tried took our order. We dosed up on food before entering airline-food land, and we dosed up on green chiles. The flight to Chicago was ordinary. Mitch tried to watch “Over the Hedge” but had stuttering video and intermittent audio; I watched “Poseidon” from a seat with perfect video and audio and a pretty poor movie.

The flight leaving Chicago was delayed two hours for something that involved a) finding the problem piece and b) finding a replacement piece. The up side was that we didn’t have a connection to miss on the other end, in Frankfurt, and the pilot made up most of the time so that most of the people who did have connections did not miss them, and that the drinks were then given out complimentarily. We had some red wine with our Food From A Box.

From ORD to FRA I tried to sleep. However, I got sucked into the “X-Men” movie, and having always had a soft spot for Wolverine and having identified with Rogue, was stuck in it. I would have watched it a second time, but made myself try to sleep.

We collected our bags and went through passport control and customs in FRA at 11 Saturday morning. Hotel Airport Stiegenberger had a room waiting, we put down our belongings and got out. Our plan was to stay busy and awake and try to start readjusting for jet lag. We had a great plan – to go see theSenckenberg Natural History Museum. Natural History Museums read pretty much the same way no matter what language they are in. We asked the desk clerk about the subway/trains to get to Senckenberg, and had our maps and knew what to do after we took the hotel shuttle back to airport and its train station.

You could buy at least a hundred variations of tickets from the vending machines there. Mitch was pretty sure at least one of them would get us to Beconcon and we knew we didn’t want to go there by accident a second time. It took some time for us to find the travel center and ask a clerk, who had no idea what Senckenberg was, but did know how to sell us a day-pass for the city trains. 13e for up to five people for one day. Good deal.

The trains were easy to deal with after that. Our destination was the Senckenberg train station, which on one side of the street was very traditional looking.















On the other side, however, it was a modern cartoon.













The Museum was only a few blocks down, we paid 6e each and got an English language guide that I don’t think we used. The museum building itself is exquisite red streaked sandstone. It was easy to find, thanks to the big dinos up front.




































We didn’t need the guidebook much, as we were not trying to do a research outing. About a dozen kinds of ostriches and ostrich-like things met us. Among them: "Take my picture with the dodo".






























They had amazing things. And familiar things. Mitch checks to see how this one compares to its cousin we saw earlier this summer at the visitor’s center at Garden of the Gods:













The real reason we didn’t need the guide book is that Mitch knows all these dinos by heart. He once wanted to be a paleontologist. He named them all and we oohed and awed. Someday I am going to learn them too. I only knew the basic set – tyrannosaurus, triceratops and brontosaurus – from my youth, and even then one of those has been changed now. New Mexico has a state dinosaur and once I helped with a hunt for dino shell eggs in an area that was once ancient seashore.














Earlier this year, we visited Nebraska and Morrill Hall. The story there was that little horses and rhinos were from the New World – I think that was the story.













So does this match or am I remembering all wrong? Like there is an Ashfall site in Nebraska, a watering hole with population suffocated in place and en masse as ash fell from a prehistoric Yellowstone volcano, there is a site of little horses here in Germany as well - Messell. Do look it up!



The building itself was very nice. I loved the curves and lines and decorations.




The stairs were even used by some clever curator – as you rose on them, first a head came into view, then next from the case on the other side. Then more next.












Then the whole ostrich!













It was a delightful museum. Our time passed pretty quickly and while our bodies still thought it was the middle of the night, it was a good way to pass the time.

We purchased some oj and wasp-approved pastries for breakfast the next morning (giving a pass to the Steinberger’s 21E apiece breakfast). For dinner, we sat outside at a café and had pizza and salad and German beer (though Corona was offered, I believe) .

















We returned via underground to the aiport station and then by shuttle bus back to the hotel. After Mitch cleaned up, I took a long hot bath – luscious hot water and lots of it. Little did I know. Or maybe I did know…










The flight to ALA was my first view of Kazkahs. There was a man in Buddhist monk robes, the man ahead of us looked Mongolian with wide shoulders and face, and Russian flew everywhere. A tour group of Americans was waddling into place, complete with the harried and determined tour guide with name badge.

The FRA-ALA flight was operated by Lufthansa and the food and service were magnificent.

Wow. This flight was only slightly shorter than the ORD-FRA 8 hour flight, at 6 hours. The seats had foot rests and head wings. We saw the Russians drinking something and asked for the same thing and enjoyed our complimentary cognac. Forms were passed out and we guessed what to put on them. [So far they have worked, and apparently my Russian is either readable and the content makes sense – I just coped stuff from my visa – or it is unreadable and that doesn’t matter.]


VIP customs in ALA was a hoot. Bright green leather chairs and bigscreen tv. Someone took our baggage claim tickets to fetch the bags. We looked up at the camera behind the passport control booth and smiled for our photos. I paid $80 apiece for VIP customs entry, and then took up the offer to pay for the return as well. The “discount” turned out to be zero percent of $80*2 I think, and it is possible that my credit card was run more than once, surmised from the consternation of the three women buzzing about it and pointing to different keys on the credit card machine. My receipt however says I paid just once. But it is not the credit card receipt. [Update: yes, I did get a discount by paying for VIP customs roundtrip, instead of paying for entry and exit separately. No, I did not get to use VIP customs on exit because our driver dropped us off at the regular airport entrance, from which ,with baggage, it is impossible to reach the VIP entrance. A man helped me try to get a refund, and while I didn't get a refund for the unused portion, I did get to see the excited crowd waiting for Steven Segal to deplane September 25]

Olga and driver Slava met us at the airport, poor them waiting as we were the last ones out (not our fault – we came out as soon as our luggage was delivered to us.) and took us to a money exchange and a hotel.

The hotel in ALA was old and once grand. Wide stairways with carpets, sofas in the hallways. We arrived at 1 am and I slept not one wink in my twin bed. The bed itself was comfortable, with a nice woolen blanket and coverlet (the top sheet was folded up and stored underneath the pillow, we found later, I’m not sure why). Morning could not come soon enough. I could not sleep at all. I tried to figure out a hot shower but ended up rinsing off whatever parts of me I could bear to put under cold water, which was many of them but by no means all of them. Considering my outfit was coming back after three flights and three continents, I figured I was clean enough. I hadn’t reckoned on there being a problem with drying off. The metal towel bar crashed to the tile floor – good hotel neighborliness at 5:45 in the morning.

Mitch fixed the towel bar and we dragged our luggage back down to the lobby. The sleepy lobby boy unlocked the front door and Slava took us to the airport. We bumbled our way through one line after another, using our vast Russian “Pajualsta” (Please) and “Karaganda”(Karaganda) and “Spasiba” (Thank you) to get to the right lines to get to Karaganda. The Air Astana clerk who weighed our luggage noted we were 6 kg over, but said she would not charge us. That was nice of her.

We got a view of ALA in daylight then, on the bus to the airplane and from the airplane. It was very cloudy but huge jagged mountains shot straight up from the ground it seemed. Snow.








































The flight from ALA to KGF lasted one hour, during which time we were fed a dandy meal and drank coffee from the sympathetic attendants. The terrain went from farm land, to Lake Balkash, to San Juan valley vegetated arroyos to Cochito dry arroyos beneath us. Big black streaks appeared on the surface of the earth. We guessed that they were coal.

The KGF airport is a big flat thing in the middle of big flatness. It had some MIGs to break the skyline.









Olga and Driver Victor picked us up and Victor went to retrieve the bags. Off to the vehicle, after a stop for photographing Soviet art:













And whatever this says [Update: it is SaryArka, a traditional name for the area and the name of the airport.]













It is about 20 km from the airport to the city. We knew Karaganda is a working town, a coal town, and scene of some pretty harsh lives in the past. We passed a horseman and a herd of cows with some goats. We passed long stretches of tiny concrete buildings, maybe the trailers of their day, overgrown along with their little neighboring patches. Nicer farm houses came into view, after we passed a blue-domed cemetery on the left. These farmhouses had fences and windows and privies out back.

The city itself is a forest of dim high rises. Mr. Nazarbayev’s picture adorns billboards showing him accompanied variously by industry, agriculture and an eagle. We passed more blue-domed mosques and gold-domed churches. A tall statue of four horses and an obelisk caught my eye.

The cab twisted and turned and declared dominance at every turn. Victor pulled off the road, into a back alley of a set of inner-city high rises. Brightly colored metal basketball hoops and play equipment stood in some parks to the inside. To the street side, a mismatched pile of rubble and wires and trash and leftovers stood stacked five stories tall. The car stopped beside another car. Larissa waited for us in the other car. She greeted us and took us to the building. A metal door clunked unlocked and we stepped into an unlighted thing that looked like a very short railroad car. Then into a concrete stairwell, once painted Kazakhstani baby boy blue. Plumbing pipes stretched across the walls and up the stairs and through floors in oblivious retrofit. Things hung on hooks. The mailboxes hung on nothing. The marble stairs had short rises and normal runs, and up we went taking two half stories between each tall story. At the half story landings, large windows looked out on the cars and the park. Up we went. We were in Karaganda.