Sam and I have lived in Almaty, Kazakhstan for almost two years—Memorial Day weekend officially marks our two-year anniversary. If at one time I thought my move from Central Illinois to Washington, DC made me harder-faster-stronger, my move to a remote, isolated, post-Soviet, Russian-speaking country laughs at this former self.

In two years time, Kazakhstan has given me many things. Most of them, I think, will be useful this summer when we’re back in America:

More red blood cells. Which we’ll need for…um, uh. Well, we’ll be sure to get rid of ALL OF THEM while lying on the beach, or licking hamburger grease off of our fingers on the 4th of July.

Resignation to bureaucracy. Living under Chief of Mission Authority requires sacrificing some degree of freedom, autonomy, and privacy. And Kazakhstan certainly has its own brand of bureaucracy. But Sam and I believe the compromises are worth it—life in the Foreign Service ultimately gives us the type of life we want.

Tolerance for the unexpected. But simultaneously a lack of tolerance for bullshit.

Toad face. This is the default, public face of most people in Kazakhstan—unlike Americans, Kazakhs save their smiling for people they care about. I plan to employ Toad Face while in the delivery room so I get my way.

The reassuring knowledge that yes, you can survive without an iphone. I would be lying to say that my Nokia has been completely sufficient—I mean, I can CALL people with it—but I do wonder how the last two years of my life would have been different with a map function, or a translator app…

A fantastic pooch. Alright, so Mishka won’t exactly be useful this summer, but it will be nice to have her along. Yup—our little Kazakh street mutt is coming to America.

A rock-solid marriage. Sam and I celebrated our three-year anniversary on Tuesday. We’ve spent more of our marriage in Kazakhstan than not in Kazakhstan. What doesn’t kill you…right?

{Above: Glacier station above Chymbulak, at approximately 12,000 feet above sea level. After five months in America, it’ll be some time before I’m back in fighting form—and back in this neck of the woods.}

When I was little, my dad was always bringing small animals into the house. Most of them he found while mowing the yard. I remember spending hours crouched above baby bunnies delicately placed on newsprint. Or tightly clasping giant toads found at dusk while watering flowers—and praying silently not to get peed on.

We never kept these animals; they lived outside. But there was nothing wrong with spending a little time with them, appreciating them for their cuteness or bumpy toad-ness, then returning them to the backyard where they belonged.

This instilled in me a fascination for all creatures (great and small) that continues today—whether it’s pseudo-adopting a box of puppies abandoned in the lot behind out apartment building, or carefully stepping around the dopey garden snails who try each morning to cross the damp sidewalk.

I’ve never been a so-called girlie-girl, but yeah, I’m still a girl. And while the prospect of parenting is daunting regardless of the sex of your child, I’ve had it in my head that parenting a girl would somehow be a tiny bit easier, because yeah, I’m a girl.

But that didn’t matter to my dad. What he saw in me was a little kid who was enchanted by animals. And lucky for me, they didn’t have to be cute animals. We were equal-opportunity animal observers—garter snakes, garden spiders (which we called ‘banana spiders’ for their bright yellow and black markings), toads, baby bunnies, wrens, bats. All of them in our backyard.

Our son won’t grow up in a small town with a big backyard. He won’t live out his entire childhood in the same house—or even the same country. But he will grow up with animals. Hopefully, Sam and I can cultivate the same sense of wonder in our son that my dad did in me, and that eventually, he will know that a giant outdoor world exists, and that he can access it simply by being patient and kind.

{Above: I brought seven garden snails into our kitchen this afternoon for a photo shoot. The one pictured above showed a great deal of personality.}

Once, in a blog post long ago, I compared life in the Foreign Service to life after the zombie apocalypse: you’re thrown headlong into an entirely new way of living, you’re expected to place extreme trust in—and reveal a great deal of vulnerability to—complete strangers, and you become intimately familiar with the basics of (and sometimes lack of) humanity’s achievements—clean water, electricity, modern medicine, etc.

But at least there aren’t zombies in the Foreign Service, right?

Something else that feels like life after the zombie apocalypse is camping in Kazakhstan. But I mean this in the toughest, proudest, most gloriously self-sufficient way possible. Camping in Kazakhstan is an exercise in survival.

No kidding.

Camping in Kazakhstan means teamwork, organization, preparation. It is understanding the necessity of the just-in-case item. It means bringing everything with you, including water and wood, garbage bags, headlamps and rain gear, rope (which can be a clothesline, a wood-draggin’ rope, or used to create a sun-shelter, among other things), aluminum foil, toilet paper, dish soap, gauze and ace bandages…I could go on. And on.

But Sam and I didn’t learn all of this overnight. In fact, it’s taken nearly our entire two years in Kazakhstan (and a well-loved REI membership) to learn to be truly self-sufficient. True survivalists. Which means we can confidently share our love for the outdoors with others. We can be the pack-leaders, the providers, the fire-builders. We can lay down the framework for a camping adventure that is perfectly embellished with country music, cornhole, whiskey, guitar-harmonica-sing-alongs—and forgetting for whole hours at a time that we’re not in America

{Above: I’ve broken my own rule to publish just one photo per blog post. There were just too many pretty spring photos of our Ili River camping trip to pick just one.}

For all of us wondering how long it would take me to shirk my responsibilities to post a blog entry once weekly during 2015, we now have an answer: 13 weeks. I’m blaming the cumulative effect of various events—also known as life—for this week’s tardiness.

So far, week 13 (in keeping true to 13’s promise of bad luck) has dealt us this hand:

1. Faulty luggage conveyer belts at Heathrow means that we still haven’t gotten our luggage from London. The latest report is that it has arrived in Almaty—good news for us, as our luggage consists mostly of my computer charger (I’m at 22% and still going strong!), and dirty laundry wrapped around sweet potatoes and avocados. Luckily we had enough time in the luggage drop-off line to remove the 20 lbs. of British cheese and sausages we’d packed…

2. London shared some of its spring weather with us on our way out of England (which felt every bit like someone spitting in your face), giving us an opportunity to look forward to Almaty’s spring weather—um, 12 inches of snow on the day that we landed.

3. Ugh, SICK. No sooner than we landed, I began sneezing my fool head off. I’m on my second day home from work now (but definitely on the mend).

All this said, faithful readers, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that this week’s blog post is nothing but a bitch-session. Let me share some of the good luck that we’ve had lately:

1. Our airbnb experience (our first) was exceptional. Simply by chance, Brazilian-born artist Tete De Alencar, www.tetedealencar.com, was our bright and open-hearted hostess who very generously invited us into her home, her studio, and her art practice. She is an inspiration.

2. Hank and Mishka slipped easily into their old life and routines after our return.

3. And the best bit of good luck? Our baby boy, due in late July, has all of his parts in all the right places, and is growing along just the way he should be. Bonus: Sam and I have already agreed on a name.

Take that, 13!

{Above: brooding, obligatory photo from Stonehenge…which has very little to do with the content of this post}

Dear London, I still want to live here.

Sam and I arrived in London on Friday afternoon for a 10-day escape. We arrived with no plans—other than an appointment for each of us to get a haircut. We’ve woken up each morning with only a faint idea of what we hoped to do that day, and with no pressure to complete a single thing. Bliss.

We’ve slipped easily into life here. The familiarity is eery—like something from a dream, or a previous life. It is so all-encompassing that we’ve both forgotten at moments that we actually live in a place that is so, so different. It’s like slipping on a forgotten old sweater. It’s like a habit. It’s like home.

We tell ourselves that we could live here. We imagine Mishka chasing squirrels in Regent’s Park, or jogging along delightful, historical streets. Eating sushi, or Indian, or Thai, or Ethiopian whenever we want. And trusting that we’ll be able to find broccoli at the grocery store, no matter the day, or the time of year.

Places like London make our life in the Foreign Service possible. Not because they give the developing world something to aspire to (which they likely do…), but because I couldn’t truly appreciate London (or Chicago, or DC, or Sydney) if they didn’t offer some sort of refuge. I can live in Almaty, Kazakhstan because I know that these other places exist. 

So maybe I don’t want to live in London—I want it to be available to flirt with, though. I want to fantasize about our happy life together, send it cute little love notes, and say “I loove London!” in an overly-exaggerated, girly way. I’m crushing on London, and I like it that way.

{Above: Photo taken at London Transport’s Lost Property Office}

The photo above was supposed to be an epic portrayal of soaring, bare peaks and bright blue Kazakh skies—the kind you find 10,000 feet above sea level on the way to Tuyuk-Su glacier.

But, um, yeah. Instead? It’s a snowman.

At least he has a mustache…right?

Our last hike of the season was an exercise in persistence, and a fairly perfect example of Murphy’s Law—as in “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

This is our story:

On the way to our trail head, a surprise storm in the mountains made us turn back, as last spring’s fated Charyn Canyon camping trip—yes, the one where we had to leave our car in a canyon in the Kazakh desert for several days—has helped us understand our car’s limitations, but didn’t save us today from a hairy five minutes of burning rubber on an icy incline while Mishka barked her head off at a stray outside her window.

Luckily, our caravan made it the rest of the way down the mountain road and into Butakovka without issue…almost. We had to park about a half-mile from the trail head here because again: icy incline. Spirits still high, our group set off into Butakovka’s (slippery) winter-wonderland—as desperate as we all are for spring, it’s still easy to be transfixed by snow gently falling in the mountains. But it’s less charming when it starts pelting you in the face. Our sights were set on a lovely frozen waterfall, but our wise little band decided that the mountains were trying to communicate with us. They were saying, “GO THE FUCK HOME.”

So we headed back. We shared chocolate-flavored walnuts (a Central Asian specialty) and peanut-butter krispies while shivering on a platform that looked half-bed, half-table. The rest of the way down was quick and chilly. Sam and I brought beers for the group—a toast to the one-hundred-ish miles we’ve hiked together this season. But it was too cold for beer…

It would be an exaggeration to say that everything went wrong today. Luckily, the dashing snowman pictured above caught our eye right when our frozen fingers needed him most—so we headed into his cozy hut and shared cups of hot tea and a rich, lovely Austrian torte (courtesy of two of our fellow hikers). No one sprained an ankle, or broke a wrist. None of our cars got stuck in the mountains.

So on that happy note, Sam and I have proclaimed our hiking club a success. We’ve hung up our gaiters, packed away our yaktrax, and proclaimed, “Hey, winter? That thing that we had? It’s OVER.”

Well…until next year.

Living in Kazakhstan makes it possible to turn a two-week-long craving for Korean food into an adventure:

Step one: Make plans to have dinner with friends on a Sunday evening. The Korean restaurant of choice is located in a storefront about a block-and-a-half from our apartment and has seen an almost constant stream of facelifts—modern cafe becomes sushi joint & pizzaria becomes unmarked Korean restaurant. It’s dark inside and smells like we just stepped into Southeast Asia. It’s closed.

Step two: Find another Korean restaurant. Believe it or not, there are many in Almaty—a consequence of the forceful move of nearly 100,000 Koreans from Russia to the Kazakh SSR in 1937. Locating our second Korean restaurant of choice requires making several laps around a mall before spotting a tiny sign in Korean that directs us up three flights of stairs to a restaurant that feels eerily like the community center in the small Midwestern town where I grew up. It’s open. There is a pregnant woman sitting at every occupied table. And tonight, it’s serving ONLY Chinese food.

Step 3: Make plans with the same friends to eat at yet another Korean restaurant one week later. Arrive at the restaurant in time to catch young families eating early dinners—each one with a child in a high-seat. We eat Korean food. We have a lengthy, hilarious conversation about breastfeeding. And when we collect our coats from the coatcheck, we are given a hyacinth just days shy of blooming—because it’s women’s day.

{Above: Sam snapped this photo as we drove down the hill from Shymbulak on Sunday—this bighorn sheep is ready for women’s day, too.}

There is undoubtedly a madness that comes with spring. What begins as the first stubborn (though frozen) walk to work without snowboots and mittens, erupts into a frenzy of rug-shaking, shorts-wearing, car-stereo-blasting with the windows rolled down when it’s still absurdly cold outside, and making plans to go camping EVERY WEEKEND THIS SUMMER.

“Needless to say,” writes Mikhail Ivanov in his book, Survival Russian, “spring is associated [in the former Soviet Union] with love and good moods. When men fall prey to this mood, they are как кот мартовский (like a March cat).”

An almost-equivalent in English—the March hare—is a similarly unpredictable creature whose bizarre behavior can be observed at the beginning of the breeding season (in March, duh). An early written record of this metaphor can be seen in the poem Blowbol’s Test (c. 1500) in which the original poet wrote:

Thanne þey begyn to swere and to stare, And be as braynles as a Marshe hare
{Then they begin to swerve and to stare, And be as brainless as a March hare}

And then there’s this: the March hair.
Every year, beginning on January 1, and lasting through March 17, Sam grows this furry beast with the goal of shaving it into a donegal—the beard of choice among both leprechauns and Abraham Lincoln.

Spring at last, spring at last…hallelujah, it’s spring at last.

The article you’ll find attached to this post is from June of this past summer, and is a condemning portrayal of what may soon become Kazakhstan’s biggest environmental mistake.

Kok Zhailau is a (so-called) protected National park just a short drive from Almaty—and one of my and Sam’s favorite local hiking destinations. As the accompanying article describes, the park may soon make a dramatic transformation from natural reserve to luxury ski resort.

The government has gone head-to-head with local environmental advocates over the impending development. Luckily (perhaps due in some part to the efforts of these environmental defenders), the project hasn’t progressed beyond a large hole in the ground, a corrugated steel shed, and one man with a shovel.

The photo above was taken in Oct. 2013, and captures one of the disputed slopes; the excerpt below has been taken directly from the article:

“The planned Kok Zhailau ski resort near Almaty recently received the Rusty Nail: an anti-award for the worst example of unsustainable tourism at the International Tourism Fair ITB 2014 in Berlin. In a region where open resistance to the government is dangerous and rare, this issue has caused enough public resistance to become the first Central-Asian environmental conflict [recorded in ejolt’s] atlas of environmental justice.”

{Thanks to David Hoffman for sharing this article via Facebook.}