It is hard to believe it has been 5 years since we set foot in Almaty Kazakhstan. It is even more hard to believe that we had not met Emerson yet, or had our lives forever changed. Here is what I wrote them:
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Hello From Almaty Kazakhstan
Well we have made it safely to Kazakhstan and all went well in our travels. The flights to Germany all went very well and were quite uneventful. In Germany we had to get boarding passes for our flight on Lufthansa. This took about 1.5 hours but hey what else did we have to do there but hang out in line. I did buy one thing there which was a $4 bottle of water. oh yea. After that everything seemed much less appealing. People in Germany were super friendly and it amazes me that many people we met spoke English well. I still find it a bit embarrassing that Americans don't typically know another language.
The flight from Chicago to Germany was a bit rough we spent a lot of time generating static electricity and not so much time sleeping. We then had another night of flying into Kazakhstan on a brand new Lufthansa plane. great service!
When we got off of the plane in Almaty I saw a family with these adorable children that appeared to be from Ireland. I thought about it a while and realized that this family looked a lot like my Aunt Stephie's friend Kate. I went on a hunch and the bravery that 14 hours of jet lag can create and asked her husband (as she had taken off by this point) if his wife's name was Kate, and did her mom live in the San Fransisco area. Sure enough we now have friends and contacts in Almaty:) We are planning on meeting up with them on our way back through.
We are staying in an apartment. Mom and Sharron I will e-mail you with the phone number. We have been searching for the grocery store for quite some time, but we stumbled upon the Internet cafe so I have not managed to get a calling card yet. At the cafe I began to become very thankful that I sacrificed my NPR for the last year to learn Russian. We managed to buy breakfast, tea, get on the Internet and hopefully get good directions to the grocery store. All directions seem to say walk straight for three blocks. I would feel better about this if this was not the third time we were told to walk three blocks. Who knows we might end up back at our apartment without any groceries and many calories burned.
Also to traveling families, make sure if you are arriving in the middle of the night that you get a bottle of water on the plane. We arrived in the middle of the night and the stores were closed. We have been boiling water for 10 minutes hoping that we will not regret this in a few days. Also the city does not have hot water so I had John to wash my hair like Robert Redford washed Meryl Street's hair in Out of Africa. Ah all of my dreams are coming true.
Speaking of, we will head to Uralsk very early tomorrow and hopefully we will have met our child by tomorrow night.
Much love to our faithful fan club:)
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