It’s all Russian to me!

For the first time in my life I feel like a foreigner. Hardly anybody speaks English and only a few signs are written in English. It is like I am 3 years old and beginning to experience reading for the first time. Most signs are written in both Russian and Kazakh and it takes me ages to work out what they say (if I am able to at all) and I have very little idea what the signs mean. So far I’ve worked out the sign for Café’s, Pharmacies and Butchers.
On my first attempt to do some shopping on my own I bought butter milk instead of milk (it tastes like natural yoghurt and not at all like milk). I only made that mistake once. The kids hated it and I have been the only one willing to drink it. As the week has unfolded I have grown in confidence and I’m getting better with shopping. Usually I point to the product and nod my head when they pick it up. I have absolutely no idea about the numbers yet so the shop keepers show me the price of my shopping on a calculator. The shops closest to us are general stores and there are a number of people who sell their goods on the footpath. You can get a loaf of Kazakh bread for about 30c and a BBQ chicken (which they cook in their oven on the footpath) is about $8. My favourite is called Shashlik and we’ve eaten it once. It’s like Lamb kebab sticks and they cook it on the footpath on their makeshift BBQ’s. Definitely worth a try if you’re ever in Kazakhstan.
The road system here is crazy and cars are forever merging and beeping their horns at other vehicles. We have been catching buses everywhere we need to go and usually that is ok. We’ve only had one bad bus trip and it was bad enough to do us for the rest of our time here. We had a stack of trouble getting the pram on the bus, we got knocked off our feet when the driver suddenly stopped and the bus started to take off while we were half off. It costs 35c per adult for a bus trip and the kids ride free, so it’s pretty convenient and inexpensive.