Arriving in Strange Places

Part 1: Salem Kazakhstan

We landed in the smallest of hours, after a grueling multi-day stone-skipping span of travel. Sidestepping time for a while, in favor of place: Austin for the eclipse, Houston for the direct flight, Istanbul for a kaleidoscopic layover, and finally Almaty, Kazakhstan, for the purpose of this visit.

Which might as well have been a StarWars spaceport for all we could decipher.

It’s one thing to travel in a foreign language that shares your alphabet more or less. But the feeling hits much deeper and more alien, when even the letters are just shapes on important-looking surfaces. Cyrillic all around.

Thank the maker for Google Translate—which everyone around here whips out readily, in this land of Kazakh and Russian and European travelers all mingling. We’ve reached the dawn of the Universal Translator, for those of you paying attention to how life mimics Star Trek.

(More on that in the next episode…)

Don’t forget to breathe

Not yet ready to face the frenzied taxi scrum, we sat in the airport’s all-night cafe for a while and rebaptized our travel-stricken souls with some sea-buckthorn tea. A cultural comfort classic, centering us here and now in Kazakhstan. Visiting my serial expatriate friend and his family, now numbering five (up 66.6% from last time I saw them).

Taking a moment to catch our breath and get our bearings in this strange land 12 timezones away. Then following the matriarch’s clear teacherly instructions via WhatsApp toward their apartment in Almaty, where she and my friend both teach in the Kazakhstan International School.

Long-lost isn’t the right word. Neither is prodigal. Orbital gets a little closer. Electron-entangled might be a stretch…but anyway we go way back and deep, him and me. With more than anyone’s fair share of entwined roots and far-reaching branches. Soaking up the suns of time and tribulation together, in a textbook terrible twosome of a bard’s song you wouldn’t believe if I told you even a modest pie-slice of it.

A friend whose presence I’ve not breathed in almost 3 years—and then when I last saw him, I was in a shattered shipwreck state and drifting dazed toward my next new shore.

A place called home

The taxi pulled up at the alley gate as foretold by our talented instructioness, and we got out into the chill pre-morning dark—and then there he was. In the flesh and beard. His smile extending beyond his face like a beaming halo, a sainted sight for road-weary eyes.

In smooth if not quite fluent Russian, he convinced the taxi driver to spare us a little of the American squeeze (since we neglected to negotiate our fare in advance, though specifically instructed to do so and how) and then there we were. Reunited after nearly 3 years of digital friendship.

“Let me look at you,” he said, scribing the next stanza of the poem that is our life, writ in windblown sand of many hues. We bearhugged and laughed and blinked away the mists of joyful eyes, and headed up the alley to his soviet bloc apartment.

Where the frenchpress was ready and we sat around the table chatting and sipping gratefully, just in time for sunrise and the stirrings of his little family—whose latest additions I’d only met through video, toddling into the kitchen each in turn, staring at us with disney-wide eyes assessing these alien newcomers just beamed aboard amidst their morning routine.

Then the first-grader and the two-year-old shipped off to school with their faculty parents, and the baby went to play with the nanny—while we collapsed in the guestroom to sleep off the travel lag and later awaken in Almaty, Kazakhstan…ready to see what this little slice of the world is all about.

See you in Part 2… Brazen Babushkas and the Soviet Steppe.

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