The last adventure of K and K, for a while anyway...

Early one morning at Atyrau international airport! The bags are sent (all 4 of them) and time has come to go home. Goodbye Kazakhstan! For this time! You never know where life takes you, maybe I will come back one day! Plenty of oil in the Caspian! So never say never! So I will say goodbye for now, på gjensyn!

We had a great night

out yesterday and early today... Thank you so much my great friends, for giving me a super goodbye! Who needs to sleep when you have such good friends!...
Kristin and I are back on the same rotation, so we are going to do what girls always do at Schipol: lounge, cava and shopping!

 

The very last day has come!

The very last day has come! Time to clean out the desk and also the apartment. Went home during lunch, and packed the last stuff, and moved everything over to a crew-change apartment. So now my two suitcases, two bags and an in-flight are in the hall, waiting to come home with me tomorrow morning at 5! Erik Anton and I have got presents and cakes, and lots of nice words. Sad and nice at the same time!

Tonight we are doing some wine and beer up on the 17th floor, then we will go over to Champion's and eat and have some fun! I can not waste my last hours in KZ sleeping can I…!

Post party note...: The story ended a little differently! We went to Champion's first (as I was so hungry and could not wait any longer...), and then at midnight or so we made it over to the Ardager and up on the 17th floor. With chilled wine and bubbles, music and good friends, we made every minute count! It was a night to remember!!

The last days have come...

Today is my second to last day working in Kazakhstan this time around. Atyrau is showing itself from its muddy and cooler side. We had rain yesterday and during the night, so there is a good deal of flooding on the roads (as the drains do not work very well, way too flat here...). So now we have the usual cold wind from the north, slippery mud and grey horizon, with temperatures this morning of 6 degrees, and at lunch 9 degrees. Guess summer is definitely over for this time!
It is time to clean out my desk, finish up the most important work tasks, and get ready to leave. Kristin, Linn, Mike, Rob and I had a great big lunch at our favorite lunch restaurant, Sanshack, a Turkish Restaurant with quick and tasty food! And tonight is the last pizza and wine at Renco! Looking forward to a great night out!

370-летие города Атырау

Congratulations Atyrau with the 370-th Anniversary of the City! And this has been celebrated for days, with different events on the main square, ending with a pop concert with "stars of Kazakhstan", fireworks and disco! As we walked past last night on our way home we arrived in the middle of the pop concert. And to our great surprise and enjoyments, the pop star started singing Aleksander Rybak's "Fairytale", so we sang along and dansed a little! The square was crowded with people off all ages, and there were several big Yurtas, and even stands had been put up, so people could sit and enjoy the show!

Music Night at Hotel KZ

Last night Ken and Clair had arranged a music night at the pub in the Hotel Kazakhstan with a donation to the Children's Charity Fund.
We had live music, Ken played guitar, Clair sang, Gaukhar played the Kazakh national instruments the Dumbra (a two stringed "guitar"). The pub was pretty packed with people from the office, both expats and locals. It was a fun night of entertainment and good friends, and in total over 130 000 Tenge, that is about 6000 nok, was collected for charity.

New pavement!

It is a big day in the life of the hard working expats of Atyrau! We now have a sidewalk to walk on all the way from home to the office and back! It is no longer an endless collection of uneven mud and clay! Over the summer the city have slowly but gracefully been upgraded with sidewalks laid with grey and red pavement stones, and all the curb stones have been repainted white. The last stretch to be finished to complete our path was just outside the office, between our office building and the Ideal Grocery store. And we even got a traffic light up last week! Pretty amazing! So now we can cross the road without being used as human targets by white Ladas driving at high speed!
And to add to this loooong list of amazing infrastructure-news, I must inform that the crazy big round fountain and rose-patch over the bridge in Asia is now a official roundabout. They have dug up the rose-bed and asphalted in stead, but left the fountain. The roundabout rules are still not fully in place, the signs are up, but lot of cars still stop inside the roundabout, giving way to the other cars driving into the roundabout. Pretty chaotic the whole thing, but amazingly it works in its own impossible way!

Beautiful morning in Atyrau

Just had to add this beautiful sunrise!
It is taken at 07:30 out the window on the 16th floor.
I will miss the sunrises and sunsets of Atyrau! The colors are so strong and the sky is on fire!

Going away party!

Many of the great people I work with are on a rotation that overlaps with mine for 3 weeks. So in order to gather most of my super coworkers, we had my going away house party last night! Sturla offered his apartment as the venue, so we had a great pent-house party on the 17th floor!













We had used our lunch break to go to the supermarked, and we ended up with sparking pink wine, watermelon (with vodka..), some more cheese and crachers, and snacks. Kristin baked her great foccacia bread! Perfect! We had a great night and early morning among great friends!

Houses of Atyrau, part 2!

A picture of the office is also needed in this presentation! Our office is pretty new and nice! The Isker Building behind us to the left is our office. The white lower one to the right is a government building.

Our huge lump of an apartment building is next to the hyper modern glass Renaissance Hotel, which is next to the traditional white and blue Mosque.

Houses of Atyrau

We have some nice looking houses, some shabby falling down houses/cottages, some brand new shiny houses, some religious houses and some creative houses! These creative looking houses are on our way to work. So we see these creative looking houses every day! Must say, they look better than the normal USSR concrete lumps, these at least have some colour and decorations!!







The Russian Orthodox church does also makes a good feature in the "sky line", here seen from both our office building and from the square.



The last picture here is the silver and shiny River Palace Hotel, aka Renco building. This is where we eat the great Italian pizza and drink wine at the roof top bar. It has a glass "fence" around the top, so it protects from the wind, but also lets you see the sunset, the low houses of Atyrau and the river right on the other side of the building!