The First Week

Welcome to My Pizza,

Well, at long last I can send you at a quick update I’ve been saving for almost a week now. Carrie and I finally have wireless access at the school and I’m grabbing a minute here to send you this between school planning. Thanks to you all for one of the best days of my life as you surely made it a most special day! The picture will be coming soon!

You’ll be pleased to know that Carrie and I have landed safe and sound in Atyrau on time and with a few days to unwind, unpack and frolic within the shadows of cement that have come to be our shelter from the intense heat of this semi-desert town. There are more old cement and cinder-block buildings and structures here than I remember in China and it’s convenient to remind myself as to why that’s the case from time to time here. Buried beneath the sleek, new steel and glass developments that have come to define this oil boomtown in the last decade or so, is the Ozymandian reminder that once here in the Caspian Depression lay one of the last redoubts of the Soviet Empire. Kazakhstan was the last of the former Soviet republics to declare independence in 1991 and it seems around every corner a dim reminder of this connection rears its Soviet realist head with some bronze bust or another here, a great square there, etc. For example, the parade ground for The Heroes of the Great Patriotic War reveals a large plaza filled with Soviet-era tanks and artillery that seem taken right from the pages of Stalingrad itself! To walk on these solemn grounds nestled between two busy thoroughfares bustling with snarls of SUV traffic is to realize the great chasm that exists today between past and present. This war memorial, punctuated on its east end with a great archway adorned with the sun-beaten seal of the Soviet Empire, “CCCP”. I’m almost ashamed to say it, but I kind of get a lump in my throat when thinking about it in the same fashion as getting nostalgic about your childhood after seeing a clip of a Laurel and Hardy feature. I guess the fact that everything is still in Cyrillic and everyone is speaking Russian should not conflate the CCCP with present-day Kazakhstan anymore than American English should remind one of the Boston Tea Party or the Green Mountain Boys. For me though, simply landing at the sparse Atyrau airport, watching the Kazakh police boarding the plane upon arrival dressed in Soviet Era military garb was occasion enough to play hide and seek in the shadows of the Soviet Empire. When Carrie and I finally decamped to our new digs, the school director politely escorted us up 12 stories to a grand 2-bedroom apartment with approx. 500 square feet of floor space fully furnished including a grand balcony overlooking the Ural River and the western end of Atyrau. We really felt like royalty as Carrie and I have never experienced such luxuriant and spacious living. We have at our disposal a private car service on any given day for transport in and around town and housekeeping service 3 times per week. We returned home today from a cross-town shopping trip to find that our apartment had been and arranged from top to bottom. All of our dirty clothes had been washed arrayed on the drying rack. I even get my clothes ironed. I’m not sure yet if Carrie and I have made some Faustian pact as we are both well aware now that these services are being provided by the Italian Oil giant Argit. Tonight, as I write this letter, I’m standing on our 12th floor balcony overlooking the great dark ribbon of the Ural river that snakes through the bright chandelier of lights marking Atyrau’s western skyline. The sunset tonight was a brilliant shield of orange made brighter from the haze of the desert steppe and as it fell through the concrete shells of the old world, it’s rays lit their insides like a votive in a moldering squash. The days are bright and clear and with mid-day temps. in the 105 F range. Long walks through the city have been exhausting, shopping for necessities, speaking pigeon Russian, and using the Kazakh currency or Tenge, have been a challenge. Some bigger department stores sport a few English translations such as the following reference to household cleaning supplies: “Domestic Chemistry”. We love trying the local fare and I am currently in hot pursuit of store-bought camel milk and horse sausage. Considered by westerners to be merely a food of necessity for defeated, starving armies, the horse, apparently, is much sought after in traditional circles. Camel milk is less salty in palate than that of a horse and is thus the natural choice for the uninitiated. To my slight disappointment, though, our boss seems to prefer the comfort-food of home and has twice hosted us for pizza, preferring the faux-Euro-American shops that plaster their walls with Elvis, Madonna and play gangster rap as mood music. But pizza, if you think about it, is to the recent free market explosion here, what those cement monoliths were to the Soviet Bloc; comfort, a little reassurance perhaps in an otherwise, hot, dusty, chaotic crossroads of language, identity, belonging….

So, if I’m a little weepy for the old Soviet days, so too, should I pine for the ceaseless cycle of pizza that seems to ebb and flow from our global culture like the great wheel of re-incarnation endlessly turning command economies into free markets enriching those who are ruthless enough to pry open the guts of the earth and those eager enough to play to its opportunities. Ultimately, I ask myself; “would Marx be furious or jealous?” Well, Marx never had a 12-inch thin crust pepperoni with mushrooms in an air-conditioned apartment. Well, the sun has set, the river is dark, and everyone has come out to ride their bikes, drink beer, and eat western food. Welcome to my pizza.

Love Corryn