Borat country here I come!
 

Yep, first training trip of 2008, and it's a no-holds-barred whopper of a journey to Almaty in Kazakhstan where I will be training around 50 or so oil industry people from the new and old Soviet block in the wonders of tanker shipping and operations plus (a new one for me) oil storage and pipelines (hey, you at the back, did I see you nodding off already? - well hold on a bit, when I travel things have a habit of going more than slightly askew!)

Leave lunchtime armed, as usual, with laptop and digital camera. So be ready for a blow-by-blow account of all things wonderful and otherwise about my journey and short-ish stay there (fly back on Friday - that's Good Friday as well - such dedication to the cause!)

I think it's going to be interesting......

Excellent. Keep us posted.

Are you going to get a bike ride in while you're there?

Kazakhstan is a beautiful country, like Canada in many ways. Looking forward to your experience there.

Ah, Borat's family scenes were actually filmed in Glod (literally "mud") Romania. Please tell me you are going to see Mud, Romania--a town without a sewer system. Please, please!

If they named the city I live in as acurately as that of Glod, my town would be called WTF, Ohio. Or, possibly, Racial Tension Shoot-Out, Ohio.

It's amazing the things you know, Brianna.

What? You don't get Wikipedia? :D

Actually, after I saw the movie I was so intrigued by that town that I researched (ha--looked it up on the Web!) the area. It's a pretty sad town, to tell the truth. Backed up against those menacing Carpathian mountains--all shadow, forest, big bad wolves and vampires. My kinda town.

My kid is doing a mission trip to Romania, any of you ever been there?

What's a mission trip? It sounds like fun.

nope - sorry.

Now this isn't going at all to form.

Flight left on time, even landed on time, uneventful(ish) taxi ride to hotel (the guy knew all the back streets and missed all the jams), hotel is top quality 5-star jobbie, class are hanging on every word, food is excellent, room comfortable.... not me at all...

So what can I tell you....

Well there was that moment waiting in the departure lounge when the announcement came across the PA system: 'bing-bong, would Mr Daniel Craig in the Diamnond Lounge please contact the BMI flight attendant as we are now about to board....' Hey, 007 on my flight, must be filming a scene for the new Bondie 'Quantum of Solace' (god, there's a gripper of a title if ever there was one...!!) - wonder if he's smaller in real life....? . So, camera at the ready, but.... no sign, dammit! - turns out Daniel Craig is a petroleum engineer on his way to a meeting in Almaty. And that's about the way it's been going, so far.

Not a patch on my colleague who was presenting before me. He decided to fly from Norwich (where he lives) to Amsterdam where he would catch the KLM direct flight to Almaty. Only when he arrived in Amsterdam, for the first time ver since its inauguration, the KLM flight was cancelled. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing they found him an alternative - fly from Amsterdam to Heathrow (3 hours wait for that), then a five hour wait in Heathrow, before he could catch the Aeroflot overnighter to Moscow, then wait another 3 hours in Moscow before he got a connecting flight to Almaty. Door to door, 26 hours. Now that sound more like the usual me than him! Good job he left a day earlier than he needed to.

My flight did have to call at Ekaterinberg to drop off and pick up, but even that went ahead quicker than normal (-12 C which must be around 8 F, I reckon - not that I ventured outsidethe plane to conmfirm that, mind you!)

So what have i got for you, then....

..well a few piccies to post and some info - not as much as I'd like but a couple of days to go yet - will post them tomorrow as need my shut-eye now (nearly 2.00 am)

Have a video from my son to keep you amused until then.... one for the brits and one for the more global audience

A mission trip is a trip to learn more about religion.

It is a group of like minded religious or non-religious individuals get together on their own dime and go somewhere to do good things for the less fortunate. The only common theme is those who go, do it out of goodness of the heart and not to spread religion to those who don't have it or sell bibles. In this case they are going to a orphanage and help rebuild some buildings and a recreation area. Many of my compatriots go on medical missions that are partially sponsored or affiliated with different religious groups or non-profits and all they do is free surgery.

A friend goes with a Christian group to China, to work at several orphanages, giving medical care and improving the physical facilities. Kind of hard for her to teach religion to babies, that don't understand English. ;)

Sorry for the delay in posting - the Internet connection in Kazakhstan left a lot to be desired so I decided to wait until I arrived back home - then the last-night meal at a mountainside restaurant left its toll on my digestive tract - still suffering, but can at least get on with the posting.

First the map of the route to Almaty - one of our airlines, BMI, now flies direct,, but has to make a fuellinhg stopover at Ekaterinaberg until it gets long-distance aircraft on the route from May - so the flight was an hour longer than needs be. As Ekaterinaberg was recording sub-zero temperatures itwas encouraging to know we didn't have to get off the plane - managed a couple of photos on the way back when it was a daylight stop there:

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Second picture of Ekaterinaberg below:

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Arrived Almaty around 7.30 am - weather was lousy - with temperature just above freezing. Seemed to have hit the low point at this changeable time of year - the previous Sunday had seen 65F and it would rise to 60F before I left on Good Friday - but for nw it was snow, sleet and rain!

A couple of pics on the way in, taken from inside the taxi - I think the white painted on the lower halves of the tree trunks is there for som kind of frost protection...:

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Get off the main thoroughfares, and the town looks pretty poor, with ramshackle housing and pot-holed roads with no sidewalks/pavements, but the centre of town is showing the trappings of oil wealth already. The hotel where I was staying and where the course was being held probably the most prolific of the new buildings:

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And this was also borne out by the qua;lity of cars in the car park there - the abundance of 20-year-old Passats I'd seen coming in (my old 200,000 mile Passat might just have a second-hand value here!) giving way to Porshe Cayennes, Lexus 4x4s, Mercedes of all types, and the occasional car of my dreams (as some of you will already know) below:

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The course was aimed at the oil market, with my two days covering freight, storage and pipelines. Kazakhstan has one of the largest oilfields in the Soviet ex-block at Tengiz, and this is now piped to the Black Sea port of Novorossijsk through an entrenched 800 mile pipeline. The crude oil that comes from the field is very high in sulphur and undergoes an innovative de-sulphurisation process developped by Chevron. For those that like facts and figures, the pipeline currently handles 800,000 bbls/day and export is generally via 100,000 ton vessels of which 315 were loaded last year.

Anyway, this is the sort of stuff the class had to endure - day 1, I had about 42 in the class, but day 2 reduced to 22 because of the subject matter - in the second picture you can see my translator standing to the left of the screen - usually we have simultaneous translation, but this time it was subsequent - so I spoke a sentence and the translator then repeated my words in Russian - OK, but it tends to slow down the teaching, and time management can become an issue as a result:

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I didn't get a chance to get out and about until the last day but then managed to get a few more photos of the place - the bank is an inspiring piece of architecture, and the view from the hotel entrance took in the radio mast and the distant snow-capped mountains

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We were to be taken to the shuttle bus station that would provide the transport to our mountain-side restaurant - a few intesting buildings en route:

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AS you can see, the weather had improved daramtically since my arrival - so a short ride by shuttle bus to the mountain-side:

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Although the view to the mountains was superb, not so the view back down to Almaty - pollution was rife - the petrol and diesel used is of low quanity and so the smog builds up daily.

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Seems to be a problem throughout the Soviet countries and throughout Asia. When you see pollution on this scale with such alarming regularity you begin to appreciate the scale of the problem to achieve reductions in emissions globally.

On a lighter note, it is possble to take the cable car up to the mountainside - although it looks to be a bit of a cramped journey...:

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And who would have expected to see the Beatles (albeit in bronze) on the Almaty mountainside...?

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The restaurant and food was nothing to write home about (current state of health confirms this!) but it did have an entertaining parakeet that insisted on being the centre of attraction ('awww' time for animal lovers), achieving this mainly by being in the upside-down position and flapping his wings!:

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A dawn taxi ride the following morning to take me back to Almaty airport. Overall impressions were of a place going through dramatic financial change with a noticeable difference between rich and poor amongst its inhabitaints. The style and attractions show a very relaxed approach to life, but that seems to be about to change as oil wealth brings construction and development of the place.

It will be interesting to see what the place is like in, say, 5 years time...:

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Excellent job, as usual, cf. Thank you.

Great pics. Thanks for sharing.

Watch out for those shape-shifting Jews while you're there.

Oops, didn't realize you were already back. Interesting photos.

Did you get to see the running of the Jew?

thanks, cf, those are great pics and I LOVE seeing pics of other lands. It's amazing how much the weather there is like the weather here in Ohio!

I only got to see the invisible jew - sorry a bit slow on the responses - so far as running goes, my gift from Kazakhstan is taking quite a while to run its course (and in fact I've had a few shifting shapes myself the past few days!)

All is well that ends well.
Perhaps you should try and get a wondering jew instead of an invisible one..

Sorry to hear you drank the water, cf. :greenface
We appreciate you suffering to bring us your wonderful pictures. Suffering for your art, so to speak.

Thanks Bruce, but 'suffering for my art'? - was that a mistype (even though the 's' is a little distance from the 't')?

Ha ha, no mistype. We vicariously enjoy your adventures and photos are always interesting.

Thanks CF - a place I'm pretty sure I'll never go and was fascinated to see.
Lordy lord, those Beatles get around don't they?

The legend travels, as they say, SG - BTW, same people ran this course as did the one in London last year when we met up.

Just had the results of my tests today - nasty campilobacter - same little bugger that I caught in Lanzarote last year - now on antibiotics (thank God!). Not at all pleased with my doctor's practice - they knew last Thursday it turns out, yet in spite of my phoning them Friday morning AND seeing a doctor Friday afternoon, I was told at the time that the results were not in, and so I suffered another weekend of problems when I didn't need to - what on earth has happend to the good old days when it was the patient that was at the top of the agenda - now it seems it is too much about cost of drugs and avoiding prescribing them whenever they can get away with it on the one hand, and over-the-top salaries on the other which are totally out of sync with the level of service and hours that GPs now put in - pathetic!

That sucks CF. Makes a bit of a joke of the huge pay rise GP's were demanding.

UNfortunately everywhere we look the public services are in chaos - too many misguided targets skewing the services, money that is assigned used for the wrong purposes and generally bad managment practices. We can debate it all day long, but this govt isn't going to take anything on board - maybe the next one will otherwise we will end up being more third world than the thrd world countries themselves.

Squeaky wheels distracting the powers that be, from the silent majority?

More like we were targetted to reduce costs on wheels by 25%, so we removed one and then found that it didn't go so well with 3 wheels, but what the hell, we met our wheel target!

Old Morgans sound cool but really aren't practical.

... but they did think the problem through.

Love those Morgans - reminds me of the Citroen 2CV conversion done by Lomax in the UK - the Lomax 223