Better Than Fiction 2 by Lonely Planet Page B

steppe.
    Air Astana, the Kazakh national airline, allows – in addition to the normal carry-on baggage – ‘an umbrella, an overcoat, a cane, and a bunch of flowers.’ They also, according to their webpage, had a dress code. I was charmed before I’d even arrived.
    When I got to Germany and sat in the Air Astana waiting lounge, I looked around to see what that dress code might be. No one seemed to adhere to one. Most of the men were already seated and had soft paunches that they weren’t trying to hide. These people were definitely not poseurs. Their black leather jackets and boots seemed to indicate a highly practical uniform: maybe they would have to ride their horses home from the airport. Some had soft, open, wondering expressions and were murmuring a gentle Russian. They all looked, to me, delightfully disheveled. I had half expected warriors, ancestors of Attila the Hun. But maybe the Kazakhs were just really cool, nerdy intellectuals from the ’70s, the science types. Maybe I was about to enter my dream country.
    When we flew over Uralsk, the autumn sun was settinggolden over the fields. A horse wandered across the runway. The place felt windswept and forgotten. The brown, frostbitten grass and the Soviet-era red and white striped airport hut gave the whole area a dune town feeling. All this vast space, where the imagination could soar, away from the flurry and urgency of consumer society, both excited and calmed me. When we descended from the plane, an airport worker ushered us through an old gate and we found ourselves in the parking lot.
    Team Leader Franklin, long and lanky and from Wales, was waiting for me in front of an old car he had borrowed from one of the Kazakh teachers at the school where I would teach. I had been traveling for three days and frankly wanted to hug someone, but instead of saying ‘Welcome!’ he seemed to be sharing his own private joke with his assistant, a young Kazakh girl who regarded me scornfully. ‘Don’t you have a winter coat?’ she asked.
    ‘Yes, in my bag,’ I said.
    As we drove away from the airport, the horse from the runway crossed the road and a little boy ran after it. ‘Village people,’ the driver snorted.
    While we were crossing the Ural River, Team Leader Franklin said, ‘We are now leaving Asia and entering Europe.’
    I was okay with that. I imagined tree-lined streets and streetside cafes. But ‘Europe’ consisted of some boxy buildings across a vast field of thigh-deep mud. ‘That’s where we teach,’ Team Leader Franklin pointed out. Then the car ducked into a valley of old Soviet-style crumbling concrete block buildings. We stopped in front of one. ‘Here is your home,’ he said.
    I am not an especially high-maintenance person; I have slept on old trains in both India and Siberia for days until my consciousness became part of the train seat. But theseapartments looked like war-torn hovels in Kabul after a bombing. I actually had thought I was going to be living in a yurt! At my – what must have been – freaked-out face, Team Leader Franklin’s assistant said haughtily, ‘This is a very prestigious area of town.’
    I gazed at her, looking for a crack in her armor, but found none.
    Waiting for me on the kitchen table was a housewarming present. They had bought me an iron.
    The school principal was my age but the weight of her stern expression gave her a matronly look. On the first day she proceeded to lecture me about how I must make the students love me, and then she gave me a little earring box in the shape of a yurt. I didn’t know that this would be the only yurt I would see in Kazakhstan.
    And thus commenced one of the most miserable winters of my life.
    I had been expecting to find exalting nature in Uralsk, but the closest thing to a mountain in the whole region was the couch in the Information Center. The chemistry teacher, a Brit (though originally from Nigeria), and I would go there and lean our backs against the green couch