Expat Pets

I spent the day at the vets today – trying to arrange for our new puppy to get her vaccinations.  I started thinking about our expat pets and how they cope with life abroad.  I know many people who put off getting a pet until they get back to their home country – easier for all concerned and kinder on the animal is the usual rationale.  Our pets have always travelled with us, however and I recall only a short period of my  life when we had no pets.  Sadly we had to put down an otherwise healthy dog because of some severe mental health problems that caused him to threaten my baby sister and it was a few years before we could face taking another one in.  During that time, however, we pet sat for almost every friend and friend of a friend so we had an endless stream of loving pets  staying in our home.  

Pets also have to learn to adapt to the challenges of expat life.

There is no getting past the fact that some animals tug at your heart strings and become part of your life –  this is even more true as an expat when you see animals surviving in sometimes desperate situations and you feel you need to help them. The dynamic of life with pets as an expat is slightly different to when you live in your home country.  Rules on vaccination and ownership may be different and the quality of vet services can vary. Pets also have to adapt to new ways of life and new rules for behaviour.  In some countries dogs are welcomed - in others they are seen as unclean and a dog has to learn not to expect fuss from everyone it meets.  Language is another barrier - our dogs have always had to learn a smattering of command words in the local language so house keepers, security staff etc could give them commands.  One of our dogs learned commands in four languages (English, Dutch, Turkish and Spanish - pretty good for a mere animal!).

We have had cats in the past  notably a stray (Tom Kitten) who deigned to spend a few months with us in Norway before deserting to the next door neighbour who served a superior brand of tuna and Kipper – our Nigerian cat who protected us from snakes and brought us gifts of gecko and lizard tails instead of mice.  We had a Parrot once as well – also in Nigeria.  Pip the African Grey came to us as a bedraggled nestling caught by some people out in the bush when his mother was killed – to turn him away would have meant certain death so we fed him on mashed up fruit and built him a cage on the patio.  Sadly he had the most awful temper and could not stand to be handled but he more than compensated for this with his fantastically broad vocabulary – he was great fun to talk to and I swear he knew exactly what he was saying, his favourite trick being to call the cat and dog in my mother’s voice and then enjoy watching the ensuing fight.  Sadly Kipper did not want to stay with us (he found a wife a few doors down) and we could not get an export licence for Pip. Other pets have included goats, turkeys and sheep, usually presented to my parents as gifts, these farm animals lived with us in our gardens for a while before being raffled off for Christmas or Eid dinner for a lucky colleague (I remember my sister and I cried each time).  The most unusual pet was the turkey who faced his raffle with equanimity but was reprieved when the winner decided to start a turkey farm instead.

Much as I have loved our other pets I am, resolutely, a dog person.  We have had dogs in almost every country we have ever lived in and, unlike cats dogs never choose to leave their owners.  Jimmy, our Nigerian dog was a large blond Andalusian Shepherd Cross – he worked at our house every night as our guard dog and when we found out that the company who owned him were abusing him very badly we refused to let him go back and bought his contract.  The poor thing had been so badly beaten that he had been left with no single rib or tooth intact and he was so grateful for his deliverance from hell that he became the most faithful, protective dog I have ever met. I only ever heard him bark twice - both times it was to provide a much needed warning.  

He stayed with us through two postings in the Netherlands and one in Turkey before finally dying in Venezuela.  We were all distraught when he had to be put to sleep knowing that his life had been shortened by the beatings he had taken as a young dog but also knowing that we had given him an extra 8 years of life through taking him in.  Before Jimmy died we adopted a Venezuelan Street Dog – a Kakri that we called Eliza – we found her as a tiny puppy just able to walk that had been discarded on the rubbish heap and could not leave her.  She gave my parents many happy years in Venezuela, The Netherlands and England before dying  last year – the oldest Kakri ever to have lived at 13 years.  She is survived by an English rescue dog who, sadly, has never had the opportunity to travel anywhere.

Eliza - rescued from the streets of Maracaibo at little more than a
month old lived out her days in comfort as a Venezuelan Expatriate
in the Netherlands and UK.  

When we married my husband and I were gifted a tiny black puppy (with our full knowledge and consent).  Abbess came to live with us the day we returned from honeymoon and has been an integral part of our family ever since.  When we found out that we were going to Kazakhstan we had to decide whether to take our 10 year old dog with us or ask a family member to take her in.  We were concerned not only with  how she would handle the cold and snow but, more importantly how a dog who had always lived in the country with free access to woodland whenever she wanted  and never needed a lead would cope in an apartment in a city.  We had no shortage of volunteers to have her but when push came to shove we could not imagine life without her.

Bessie grew up in the English countryside.
A far cry from the city of Astana where she now
takes her daily walks.  

Bessie, more than any other member of the family, has found it difficult to adapt to life in Astana.  The harsh winters have aged her much more quickly than we expected.  We brought a middle aged dog to Astana and now have an elderly grande dame to take care of.  We would not be without her, however, and every evening, when she curls up next to us on the sofa or when she comes to ‘help’ put the children to bed we know that we made the right decision.

Bessie finds expat life in Astana somewhat of a challenge,
particularly the heavy snow and extreme cold. 

Luckily fate has given us the chance to give her a new lease of life – a few months ago a tiny black pup was found wandering the campus of the local university.  The pictures of the puppy showed that she looked very like Abbess and we decided to adopt her.  Bessie has taken to her role as surrogate mother and is enjoying her chance to teach a pup its manners.  Perdita has wormed her way into our hearts and, as with every dog before, we now cannot imagine life without her.

Bessie and Perdita are more mother and daughter than friends.
Bess helps to train Perdita and is assiduous in looking after her.

The dogs will come with us when we leave Kazakhstan – so once Perdita is vaccinated I will have the pleasure of learning how to get a pet passport from the relevant Kazakh ministry.  Each country has its own requirements for pet immigration – some easy some (like the UK) fiendishly difficult.  I am not yet sure when or where we are going when we leave Kazakhstan but, barring some unforeseen tragedy, the pets will be coming with us.

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Shopping in Kazakh Supermarkets

Earlier this week I was speaking with a new arrival here in Astana.  He was telling me how confusing he found the supermarkets and how long it had taken him to get everything he wanted.  This started me thinking about how I get around things like shopping when I come to a new posting.

I find that I get used to whatever is available in my last home and fall into a way of shopping and eating that works well with what is available in the shops there.  My basic shop in the UK is subtly different to one I would do in the Netherlands for example.  Moving to a new country presents a challenge – not everything I want will be available and I have not yet got my head around the cost of living.  Add to that not speaking the language and even naming something can be interesting. 

Kazakhstan threw up a new challenge for me – it is the first time I have lived somewhere with a different alphabet.  For various reasons I did not have time to learn much Russian before I came out so the Cyrillic alphabet was very strange to me.  Adding to the confusion is the fact that there are two languages spoken here – Russian and Kazakh.  Kazakh is written in modified Cyrillic so until you can tell the difference you are not even sure which language you are reading. 

My usual trick when I go somewhere new is to prepare a basic shopping list with translations so I can get at least the staples into the house.  This time we were taken to the supermarket straight after waking up on our first day.  It was a very kind and well meant offer but unfortunately it also meant that I had no time to prepare a list or even to grab a dictionary from the suitcase.  

Supermarkets here are well stocked with everything we could need so  I was just about ok - meat is meat, juice is juice wherever you are in the world.  I was a little apprehensive about buying horsemeat by mistake but it turns out that it is quite distinctive and most meat is labeled with pictures of the relevant animal.

The real confusion started when I came to the dairy section of the supermarket.  Kazakh supermarkets have a bewildering dairy offering.  Most comes in a range of fat percentages - you don't buy semi skimmed milk you buy 2.5% milk.  The milk that comes in cartons tends to be longlife and fairly unpleasant, you can buy it fresh but it comes in bags to decant into a jug rather than in a carton.  In the UK you can buy one type of sour cream - here the supermarkets stock at least 3 different types.  

Sour cream - it comes in more variants than you could possibly imagine.

Milk in comes in bags rather than cartons

I spent a good 5 minutes trying to make head or tail of this confusion but I was not very successful.  My first error was to mistake Kumiss (Кумыс) for Milk (Молоко) just because it comes in milk cartons. Kumiss is a sort of fermented milk/yogurt perfect for making yogurt based doughs but it is an acquired taste and the children were not at all pleased to find it on their cereal. It was a stupid mistake because  Молоко looks so like milk but I was tired and on autopilot.  I have since heard from a number of people that they made the same mistake.    Still this is part of a long tradition of family mistakes - when we moved to Norway my mother misread a label and bought whale meat instead of beef. 

Kefir is not milk - and it is not a pleasant mistake to make

Strangely enough for a long time it was almost impossible to buy natural yogurt.  All the yogurt available came pre-flavoured, fine if you want to eat it, not so good for cooking.  Kumiss is a good substitute but in recent months live culture natural yogurt has been in all the shops.

There are some other strange differences to get used to.  Tomato ketchup and mayonnaise are very popular but it took me some time to find them.  I was looking for jars but here in Kazakhstan it is sold in squeezy pouches, they are actually much easier to use and store and it will be quite a change to go back to using jars when we move.

Mayonnaise

Butter was also a difficult staple to locate - I looked in all the chiller cabinets but finally had to give in and ask for help.  It is stored in the freezer section rather than in the refrigerators.  Another slight annoyance is that it tends to come in 200g blocks instead of 250g.  I never weigh butter - I measure it by eye and it took me a little while to adjust.  Eggs are  found in packs of 10 rather than 12 and are kept in the refrigerators, my housekeeper thinks I am very strange for keeping my eggs out on the counter rather than in the fridge.

It can be difficult to explain how to find items, a few months ago I was back in Europe and my husband called me from the supermaket asking me what the washing liquid looked like.  We had run out but he could not tell what bottles held the washing liquid and what bottles held the fabric softener.  I had managed to work this out when we arrived because I recognised a brand name otherwise it would have been a process of trial and error.  In the end he plumped for a washing powder instead just to be certain he was getting the right  product.

Before I worked out the brand names and labels I made a number of mistakes buying tomato puree instead of passata.  The puree is sold in jars here instead of tubes. This has another long pedigree in our family.  Years ago we bought what we thought was tomato puree from a Nigerian supermarket.  The name 'Tomapep' should have given it away - it was a hot sauce rather than a puree - we all had a bit of a shock when we ate our food that evening.

In the winter it can be difficult to get fresh vegetables, our local supermarket has a particularly limited selection but the bazaar is pretty good even in the depths of the cold.  Herbs are like gold dust and very expensive during the colder months so I freeze them in the autumn and then use them as necessary.  I also keep a pot of windowsill herbs for basil and rocket because I like them very fresh.

My favorite aspect of shopping in Kazakhstan is the wide range of juice available.  In most places we have lived (other than Turkey) the range of juice tends to be limited but here we can enjoy Sea Buckthorn, Rasberry, Cherry, Rosehip, Peach, Apricot and many many others.

Juice comes in lots of flavours

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Coping with Snow and Cold in Astana

Coping with snow is big business in Astana as the city lives at temperatures below freezing from November through to March.  Of course the cold brings some advantages because other than the very start and end of winter when the temperature can get warm enough to bring some melt water to the streets we do not have problems with freeze-thaw.  Astana is typically very dry so we do not get too much snow, this year we have had much more than usual making the job of clearing much more difficult but the city has kept functioning. 

Astana is beautiful in the winter

All that said the snow, even heavy snow, really does not affect daily life at all.  When we were living in the UK a single fall of was usually enough to keep everybody indoors.  Having grown up in Norway it tends not to faze me but our neighbours would marvel that I was ‘brave’ enough to drive to town following a 5cm snowfall.  Here life goes on, even in the extreme cold or after a very heavy, sudden snowfall. 

The reason life is able to go on so well here is that  Astana has a huge team responsible for clearing the roads and some wonderful pieces of machinery to help them along (794 specialist units and 227 units for courtyard clearance and snow removal according to the city authorities).  The snowploughs go out in convoys of about 7 or 8 staggered one behind the other to make sure that a whole road of multiple lanes can be cleared in one go.  They drive around the city on a continuous cycle.  The snow that has been pushed to the side of the road is then collected either by a combination of an excavator and snow truck or with one of the amazing snow elevators that shovels the snow up onto a conveyor belt and into a snow truck.  

Snow Conveyors waiting for the snow trucks to start loading

Keeping the Park Paths Clear of Snow

It is a very well run operation and quite a pleasure to watch, particularly the conveyors which have moving 'mandibles' at the front to push the snow onto the conveyor belt.  The car park for the park opposite our house is used as a rest stop for the ploughs and snow trucks over the winter so we can watch them come and go.

Snow builds up on the sides of the roads

Which is then collected by specialist equipment and sent to landfill

All the roads are kept open although to what extent depends on the part of the city – our children’s school is out in a newly developing area.  It is serviced by broad avenues but as there is still very little accommodation out there the ploughs clear only 2 of the 4 lanes of the road, enough to keep the roads open.  We did have one morning, following a very heavy snowfall, where we drove in before the ploughs had been through but they came through about two hours later.   Even the airport is kept clear.  I have flown out of Astana despite heavy snowfall and low visibility that would shut many others.  It is not unknown for people to be grounded in Europe while the airport in Astana continues working safely in much worse conditions.  The biggest problem for the aircraft is the lack of hangar facilities.  Flights that land and then return don’t suffer because they spend very little time on the ground but flights that originate in Astana can be delayed in very cold weather because it takes so long to warm them. 

Road out to school just before the ploughs clear the open lanes.
The lamp posts on the right show the right edge of the road

As well as having snow to deal with over the winter Astana suffers from very low temperatures - it is the second coldest capital in the world..  We have had a very warm winter - mostly above -20 but just before Christmas we had temperatures below -40 for some days. Last winter we had much colder weather for a much longer period of time.  The quid-pro-quo being that we had less snow.

When we first arrived in Astana it was the middle of summer and beautifully warm at +30.  I struggled to imagine how the city would cope over the winter.  From about October the fountains are drained and covered and the flower beds dug up.  The malls which have wide open doors in the warmer months start to change their entrances.  Most seem to have an 'airlock' system of sequential doors.  You go in one side, say the left and enter an outer hall, walk to the right and go in to the next hall, there can be up to 3 or 4 zigzags in some buildings depending on how cold it is. Once inside it is very warm and every mall, attraction and restaurant will have a fully staffed and efficient garderobe for outdoor clothes.

Underground parking is very popular in the winter because of the strain the cold places on the car battery and engine block.  Most cars have automatic starters which people activate before they start getting their outdoor clothes on so that the car warms up for them. If a car is not in a garage this has to be done every few hours to make sure that it stays healthy.  Our starter is broken so we try to park indoors as much as possible.  Entering and leaving the underground parking is done through a series of garage doors to retain the heat and I have noticed that hospital ambulance bays have a similar system.  

The last week or so the temperatures have been creeping up and there is an unmistakable feeling of spring in the air.  The snow is starting to look rotten and the other day I noticed the tiniest of buds on the trees, despite a temperature of -22.  The following day the thermometer was reading +1 and we had rain for the first time in months. Unfortunately this means that the pavements and roads have become very treacherous because the temperatures soon plummet again giving sheet ice with no traction at all. 

The Akimat – the city authorities have been making a concerted effort to clear away as much of the snow as possible before the melt sets in proper in order to minimise the effects of flooding.  Although snow is cleared from the parks and pavements and sent to landfill throughout the winter the process really steps up in March.  I read on the city website that over 4 million cubic meters has been removed from the city to landfill this winter.  We can now see hedgerows and benches in the parks that were hidden for the past months, another sign that winter is drawing to a close and Astana has started its annual metamorphosis from a snow city to a garden city.

The thaw creates problems on the roads

As much snow and ice as possible is removed before the melt

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Astana's Ishim Embankment, Perfect for a Traditional Sunday Stroll

We have always enjoyed a Sunday afternoon stroll after lunch.  From treks through the Bush in Nigeria to strolling along the River Tigris in Turkey or the dunes in the Netherlands our Sunday Stroll has been a family tradition.  

Traditional Family Sunday Stroll

When I was a child in Norway we would walk for hours through the mountains even in the coldest winters but Norwegian winters look positively toasty when compared with the temperatures we experience in Astana.   We were very worried when we moved to Astana, that we might have to sacrifice this tradition in the winter.  Sadly we were right in one respect – it is not so easy to get out to the countryside to stroll by a lake or in the woods during the winter but there are plenty of alternatives in the City.  As long as the wind keeps down it is possible to enjoy a walk in temperatures down to about -20 with kids and -25-28 for adults.   Our dog does not always join us in the winter.  She has a coat and winter boots but does not like to go outside below about -15 and even then asks to go back inside after only a few minutes.  She dreams of the warmer weather when she enjoys spending the days outside. 

Our dog wears a thick coat and booties but still feels the cold very badly.

The Ishim’s course through Astana is very heavily managed and in the Winter it is frozen from November through to about mid March.  The river is lined with embankments which  are kept clear of snow making them  a lovely place to walk.  They are a wonderful place to people watch - older couples and effortlessly elegant Kazakh women with their husbands and babies wrapped up warm in their prams come here to enjoy the winter sunshine.  

People Watching on the Ishim Embankments

You can also go down onto the River itself, many people ski or snowmobile along here,  there are ice rinks where children play hockey or just skate for fun and every now and then you come across little tents covering holes kept open for ice fishing. There is something disconcerting about walking on the river, it feels as though it should be dangerous but it is frozen solid to quite some depth and is very safe.

Ice Fishing on the Ishim

Snowmobiles power along the river and perform flips on the banks.

The city constructs ice slides from the top of the embankment down to the river at set places every year.  These are fairly vertiginous and very fast.  With a good fast sledge (wax it for optimum performance) you can get about halfway across the river.  The builders, in their wisdom have built walls on either side of the slide. Steering the sledges is almost impossible because the slides are made from ice rather than snow and I speak from experience when I say that it hurts to bang against these.    We have seen little children as young as 2 or 3 send themselves down these slides on their sledges without fear but a couple of near misses, one of which resulted in broken glasses, mean that we now send our kids down the snow by the side of the slides instead.

Children enjoying the Ice Slides 

As you walk along the embankment you get to the statue of Kenessary Khan, a national hero who led the fight against the Russian occupation until his death in 1847.  In the summer we would cross the river and go into the Astana Park – a fairground and pleasure park near the Circus, before walking home, but in the Winter we stop off at Rafe, a Café near the Kenessary Statue that does a very tasty and warming hot chocolate.

Kenessary Khan

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