Our neck of the woods...

Kazakhstan is a roughly diamond-shaped country that runs about 1800 miles from east to west—about the distance from Washington, DC to Salt Lake City—and about 1000 miles from north to south—or about the distance from New Orleans to Detroit. We are situated about 60 km northwest of Baikonur city, about as far north of the equator as Quebec or Seattle.

The terrain runs from fairly mountainous, over on the east side of the country, to flat desert around these parts. The closest major river is the Syr Darya, although the adjective is relative, as it discharges around 40 cubic kilometers of water per year into the Aral Sea. Around the turn of the 20th cenury, I'm told the area was lush in vegetation and rich in wildlife, and that even tigers roamed the area. That was before things changed politically and the progressive element proceeded to promote policies throughout most of the 20th century that very nearly wiped out the Aral Sea and created a man-made desert in its place so as to support agricultural and industrial planning goals.

The land around where we live is pretty much flat. If you were to draw a landscape, you'd draw a horizontal line on your paper and color everything above the line blue, with generally very few clouds, and everything below the line a light brown with darker mottles of brown and green, the latter representing scrub that somehow has figured out a way to survive in this environment.

The animal life consists of various arachnids and insects, animals that look like prairie dogs, and various birds, including some (I would imagine very confused) seagulls who have managed to survive by adaptation. Folks raise all sorts of familiar livestock around here, including camels, ducks, sheep, and goats.

I don't believe I've ever seen it rain around here for more than a minute or two. When it does "rain" the shower typically lasts for less than a minute. Last night, however, the weather came together to drop a puddle-leaving quantity of water on the hotel area before finally stopping. The interpreters were over visiting Mike T. at the Kometa at the time, and when it became clear the rain was going to be significant enough to have to move indoors, I paused on the way inside and snapped the picture below.


The trees and other vegetation in the shot is typical of what you see near almost any building in the hotel area, and there are trees and bushes have around work buildings, too (such as the one that houses our team's operations).

Cheers...

Chalking it up to experience...

I think one of the saddest things in the world is a good idea that's left unimplemented. I'm not talking world peace, here, or the end to poverty. I'm talking about interpretation for bilateral meetings.

The first night of the campaign saw the first of a series of daily "coordination" meetings, and I was tagged to work it. During that meeting, a member of the French team started introducing people and turned to face the people he was introducing as he said their names. As said individual has a certain natural tendency to mumble, I was basically left with no choice but to either go through the painstaking process of having this individual turn and repeat all of the names or simply summarizing the respective job titles of those being introduced.

The next time I worked a coordination meeting was the day after the arrival of a charter carrying more campaigners, so it occurred to me to ask the major participants of the meeting whether they would be introducing any new faces. It was a good move on my part, as several folks were introduced.

Here and there since then, I've given thought about visiting each major participant just prior to the meeting to see if there was any information they could provide to help things go smoother during the meeting itsef (and, naturally, make my performance look more polished).

I should have listened to myself, as during this morning's meeting, the U.S. Program Manager delivered what one might call a short eulogy about a member of the Russian team, and while I managed the flowery words without much difficulty, I felt acutely embarrassed that there was no way I could reconstruct the name of the deceased from the pronunced name, and so the whole thing came off rather badly, in my opinion.

Gotta go get ready for dinner. I've been tagged to interpret for tomorrow's trip to the Gagarin Museum.

Be still, my throbbing heart!