Travel and First Day

The flight from DC to London was packed. Slept a little, but mostly watched TV, listened to music and read. I also prayed for our trip a lot too. London was quick and boring… The only cool thing was seeing a Tesla Roadster in one of those euro car auctions. From London we flew to Almaty, KZ. We landed and went through customs. God was definitely looking over us because we had no problems getting through and non of our bags were lost!

We met up with Andy Allen, who I could see smiling at us every time the door opened where he was waiting past customs.. made me laugh. Andy was great to see and really refreshed our team’s spirit. We loaded all of our luggage into a taxi van and piled ourselves in around it. There wasn’t quite enough room in the taxi, so Mark and I had to stand. The van took us to a family’s house in Almaty. They had enough room to host us all for the night. When we got there we were in a bumpy gravel alley, it was pitch black, and all you could hear were dogs barking everywhere. Quite a welcoming. We all hopped out and took our stuff inside and fell asleep. We got to bed by about 3am.

The next morning the guys who were sleeping in the living room woke up around 6:30am because the family was up and about getting ready for school. That was fine with us though because it felt like it was 8:30 pm to us. We all sat in the kitchen when everyone was awake and had pancakes, waffles, juice and coffee. It was a great breakfast and I ate way too much. Afterward a couple of us went to the local mall to buy some groceries for the train ride that was coming up later that day. In the mall we say a mall cop walking around with an AK-47 which was pretty shocking haha. After the mall we all loaded back into the taxi and took off to the train.

We got to the train station and unloaded all of our stuff and headed onto the platform. There we waited for Andy to bring us our tickets. It was weird because a lot of people were around and most of them were staring at us, which Andy told us is not considered rude here. Here there is not a concept of your own personal bubble. It seems like the people are happy to see Americans and are just interested in what you’re doing.

Anyways, on the train we had four to a cabin. In each cabin there were four beds, two on each side bunked. There was also a table in the middle where we could eat and play cards. The train ride was 16 hours long, which seemed like a lot, but wasn’t too bad. I actually loved the train ride. There were always beautiful mountains to look at in the background (they looked like the rockies!!) and good friends to enjoy them with. We played poker and hearts a lot. Later on we walked to the café train car and ordered some tea and played poker. After a while a young Kazakh man asked us where we were from in the US. We said Pennsylvania and he said he was from Penn State! It was crazy! His name is Amir and he was an energy engineering major. He was very nice and helped us with our English. We talked about Penn State for a while and he told us that he lived just north of Karaganda, so we will try to meet up with him sometime during our stay here.

Also while we were on the train earlier in the day, we stopped at a little village. The village had tons of vendors selling random stuff. Josh decided to buy a dried fish that was hanging on a rope. I tried it and it was pretty nasty haha, but worth it.

After that we all went to sleep. I fell asleep pretty quickly because I was really tired, but woke up around 4:30am when the sun started to come up. I was in the top bunk and laid there watching the sun come up over the mountains out of our window. I also prayed for our trip while I was laying there and knew God was going to use us in amazing ways. After the rest of the team was awake, we all got our stuff ready to unload off of the train and waited for it to stop. The train pulled into Karaganda and we all unloaded on the middle platform and had to walk across several tracks to get to the road. There we were met by several other people in our company. We all got into some taxis and headed to our apartments.

We got to our apartments and it looked like the projects.. but worse haha. It smelled like mildew and poop in the stair well. We got up to our floor on the sixth floor and went into our place. Surprisingly it was really nice inside. There are 3 bedrooms and 1 bath. We all unpacked and got settled in. After that it was like 8am and we were not doing anything until 12am so we decided to go exploring. The five guys in our apartment headed out of our place and entered the streets. There we were, 5 English speakers walking the streets of Kaz with Russian phrase books. It was a funny sight. We wondered into a hardware store and spoke with two older ladies there and fumbled through our books to tell them we were just looking. Eventually they understood.

Soon we left there and tracked on to look to a supermarket. We found one around the block and went in. Immediately we attracted attention. Many of the security guards followed us around there. There were literally 5 guards walking two steps behind us while we shopped. It was weird, but we kept on shopping and actually broke up into smaller groups just to see what they would do haha. Eventually when we were checking out we saw the master guard standing at the end of the counter with a sub machine gun staring at us. That was interesting and a little scary. We went back to our place and shared the meal that we had bought.