Like nomads, but with more stuff

Anyone who knows Astana geography knows there is no beach for a good 3 hours' drive. And I certainly did not drive 3 hours each...

Well, not anytime soon, but it is for real now. I have orders and I have plane tickets. At this point it's just me and the kids, we don...

Our date night plans were pretty sedate, then a friend called who also had a babysitter that night and we changed our plans to meet up with...

This week the market was particularly exciting. Since October, fruit has been pretty predictable. Apples, pears, oranges, mandarin (cleme...

As we stare at our last few months, we realized there are many things in Astana we'd been holding off on checking out. But now there...

Astana does boast a few decent restaurants.  We hadn't found anything to write home about, though, until now.  I am so grateful for fri...

... there is such a thing as too polluted.  We have days here where the pollution may not be China-bad (although we'd never know, the...

Early in the week we booked the babysitter. 7:00 pm on Friday evening we're still bantering back and forth "where do you want to g...

Well, picnics and fireworks and red, white and blue weren't in tonight's plan here in Astana but I did manage to get a little of ...

The New Diplomat's Wife is hosting a pro/con list of everyone's posts here . I figured I'd jump in. Highlights 1. Winter act...

Today we went outside. No gloves. No hats. No scarves. No snowpants. No heavy jackets. No long underwear. No boots. Sneakers, and fleeces o...

On March 22, otherwise known as Nauryz in Kazakhstan and a few other countries, we went to see how they celebrate.  We had gotten some advi...

This is what we were doing last night This is what Alex was doing last night.  

Astana is the world's second coldest capital city, with the coldest recorded temperature of any capital (-52, not sure if it was Fahre...

The problem with being married to someone with artistic and design experience is that it is difficult to argue convincingly with them ab...

I know so many people around the world were excited and nervous at whatever time corresponded to midnight in D.C. on Monday, which was wh...

Astana is a relatively new city created in the middle of nowhere, with a lot of great open steppe around it and not much else. For the mos...

The other night we went for dinner with friends. They speak better Russian than we do, so when the hostess asked something as we were handi...

A friend kindly picked up tickets for us when she got tickets for herself this week, so on Friday we went to our first Kazakhstani hockey g...

We didn't have any more pockets of free time until Saturday morning so that is when we went to make our second attempt at getting tires...