The ride into town...

The ride into city... is an adventure.

When I go into the city I first go to the taxi stop. Where I catch a taxi or a van and if I am truly desperate a bus. (A taxi in this country is not a yellow vehicle with a light on its hood but rather anyone who owns a car and wants to have the profession of a driver. Meaning taxi drivers run the gambit of very good to just plain reckless.) I have begun to count the near death moments Ive had on a single trip into the city and right now the high number is 3 for a taxi, for a van its 2. Though I now have a very good driver friend who has taken me a couple times on the trek.

After I get to the taxi cab stop and go into my taxi I wait for 3 other passengers to come. This process can take anywhere from 15minutes to 1 hour. Usually while I am waiting for people to come I will have to talk to many of the other drivers who want to chat in Kazakh with an American. They go through the standard 15 questions. (Where are you from, Do you speak kaz, do you like our village, What year were you born, Did you know Im related to so and so teacher at your school, Are you married, how much money do you make)

So once we get 4 passengers we start moving over a road that consists of so many potholes that cars need to drive down the middle of it to go full speed. So when another car comes from the other direction drivers usually ( I say usually because some don't which adds a big 1 to the near death count) slow down to half speed and go over the potholes. This proceeds for 3 and a half hours / 4 in the winter till I get to the city.

What is the scenery like?
KANSAS.... a lot of grassland nothing and lots of goats, horses, mules, and the occasional camel. With the scattered village and skeleton concrete soviet built building. Though for the first time I saw a few yurts. Portable living huts that are moved 3-4 times per year dependent on the weather. (Yurts are the traditional living homes of the Kaz. people but during the forced settlement period in USSR history. The nomadic kazakh people were pretty much wiped out and forced to live in settlement during the 1920's. Look at the next entry. Now though their are some people who have returned to that life cycle in the steppe though the numbers are very few.)

But the point of this entry is that there is this one place on the road that reminds me of Dante's Inferno. A place where in the winter is closed due to the extreme cold winds that come off the mountains and funnel into the Kansas size nothing plain below it. The first I went on this road my counterpart teacher told me this part of the road is often closed 3-4 times per year. I asked her why but I didn't understand her at the time.

Later the first time I went on the road to the city in the winter I understood why. Many of the trees most of them 10-15 year olds were often snapped like they were yearlings used by a giant to fish. In the place of the trees were objects that were shaped like trees but were covered with ice and had oddly angled ice branches that grew according the blowing of the wind. And not just the trees ice entirely covered every plant and due to the wind the ice increased its quantity going sideways. For example the grass covered with ice had icicles which went in the direction the wind blew.

What a place straight out of Dante...