Thursday, August 31 (Day One)
Yuri
Yuri, pleasant but sometimes disturbing Aussi was sitting next to me and gave some useful information on Kazakhstan such as you can avoid anything with 20 USD squeezed into your passport. He even showed me his documents for his visa together with two ten dollar bills. The flight to Kazakhstan was upgraded scaremonger to me.
At the airport, the immigration process was much smoother than I expected. The immigration officer, Russian looking handsome Youngman did not say any thing, even look at me and stamp on my passport. When we got out of the gate of arrival I saw my name, wrongly spelled as usual, on A4 sized paper hung by the hand of very much Korean looking 50 year old guy. JEHA, Korean Uzbeki who graduated aero school in Moscow and fled to Kazakhstan for a job, ended up with driving a car not navigating a plane gave me a big smile when I pointed out my misspelled name.
We got on the Korean made Ssangyong Mousso with another guy, who turned out a banker doing feasibility studies for the possibility of the establishment of Shinhan Bank, Korea. We felt really close on the way to Hostel since Shinhan Bank has a branch in Fukuoka. Oh how wonderful the journey is that you can easily get friends with anybody for any possible reason.
Hanuri
Hanuri, the hostel run by ex-construction businessmen, was fantastic except one thing, no electricity. The government office with the same electricity supply line with this hostel did not pay electricity bill to the newly privatised power company and the power company boldly cut the power off of that government officer. The victim was not the government office but the travellers staying at Hanuri. The civil servants tried to use it as an opportunity for instant holidays and to increase the budget allocation from the central government and the travellers of Hanuri had to struggle to find out the toilet paper in the small toiler with the completely consumed candle in the middle of the night.
Except some hassles due to the power cut, the Hanuri was a perfect resting place for long-term business travellers staying at Almaty. I met people with various career and backgrounds. The most interesting one I met there was the guy in the business of trading herbs called Gamcho. He travelled to Uralsk which is farther than Aralsk, our research target area and buy and send that herb to Korea. He send them from Uralsk to the nearest train station by bus through the more than 200 km unpaved road and to Almaty by train, to Bladivostok by train and to Busan by the ship. Wow.. I felt very lucky that I have a job taking care of those moving themselves.
