Day 5

No school run!

I have to say I didn’t particularly miss the Monday morning dash... alarm clocks, school uniforms, packed lunches and dragging 3 children with pushchair and scooters to their schools! 

We had a much more sedate start although I am probably being kind to them while they continue to get used to local time and recover from the changes of the last week.  We waved Ray off to work (he did need an alarm clock!) and then relaxed for a while before attempting our first proper morning of school.  We are somewhat limited as we are awaiting our boxes which have a few more resources and only have the basics at the moment.  So thankful for the internet... I certainly didn’t have that 12 or 13 years ago when I was trying to teach children at sea for days at a time!  Anyway we all survived and had a fun day together.

On a very mundane note we managed two loads of washing which was miraculously dry by the end of the day... since we are used to constantly trying to prevent damp in the UK, it’s a novelty to be in such a dry climate that we’ve been advised to buy ourselves a humidifier!

Ali



Do we pluck up the courage to buy local poultry or
chicken out? Rather inexpensive though, £3 for
several chicken breasts or one whole chicken.

What’s cheap and what’s not. Perhaps it is sad, but we’re trying to keep tabs on what everything costs and compare to what’s back home. Ali and I really liked the noodles we found in the supermarket the other day, but then spent quite a few minutes trying to translate the Russian on the receipt in order to find the price. Possibly would have been easier to walk back to the supermarket to see, given that it was well hidden on the receipt. Like most places, we find that Astana has many cheaper products and anything imported is usually more expensive, but not ridiculously so. There is a bio-market in the same building that we live in and going round there was painful; so many nice things at three times the cost of what you could get in the local supermarket.
 

Anyway, on the cheap side we found beef, chicken, noodles, bread, coca cola, quite a lot of chocolate. On the more expensive side fruit and vegetables. So who needs to eat really healthily anyway?

Ray