Indian summer

We had a blast of fall early in October for about a week, but it has been quite mild of late. Great for walking around Almaty to concerts and enjoying the Baraholka. But not so great when the heat has been turned on in your flat and you have no way of turning it off. It is pretty toasty in my place. I've taken to turning on the AC and/or opening balconies and windows to keep the temperature reasonable. Kind of a sad waste of energy. Welcome to command economies.

What is the Baraholka, you may ask? Click here for a live tour, courtesy of youtube. It's this ginormous half-outdoor bazaar where you can acquire anything: clothes, rugs, electronics, housewares, toys, furs, tchotchkes....it's like a flea market but with new stuff. It's so huge it's square footage is measured in square kilometers, not meters. Vendors have teeny little box-like shops squeezed into these narrow rows. And it's just row after row after row of stuff.

There are sections. The "Evropa" area has nicer stuff, including shapkas and ushankas, or your traditional Russian fur hats. Muskrat, mink, arctic fox....they didn't have sable, which is the most high-end it gets. There are cheap, Wal-Marty sections, and even a seperate IKEA-like building with boutique after boutique selling higher-end stuff. I saw advertisements for snowboards, even. Too bad it's been too warm to board! (Though it's probably cold enough up on Chimbulak.)

The prices are better than what you'd find downtown, but is it worth it? If you don't mind an hour-and-a-half ride on a bus or paying $5 for a cab to get there, and don't mind wandering about through endless mazes of stuff, then it just might be. If that sort of thing drives you nuts, don't bother. If I go back, it's going to be for fur shapkas, and I'm going to do a surgical strike: in and out for only specific items in a specific place. (My heartfelt apologies to my vegetarian/PETA/animal-loving readers. I felt like Lara in Dr. Zhivago when I put one on.)

Saturday I went to the Almaty musical conservatory for a concert. There were artists from Germany, France, South Korea, and of course, Kazakhstan. We got treated to everything from piano solos to string quartets to opera singers. The piece de resistance was a 6-piano ensemble, which we were told was a very rare event. The music was fabulous and ranges from Schubert and Rachmaninoff to a Kazakh student in the conservatory's amazing modern piano trio piece.

The head of the conservatory played this Mistress of Ceremonies role where she announced every act and talked a little bit about them. Especially if they were students. Sometimes she said things I thought a bit too personal or inappropriate (i.e., this was a student of mine, his parents were famous pianists/organists that died before their time, so I told the Moscow conservatory they had to accept him because of his parents. Or announcing to everyone after someone's piano solo that he had made a mistake.). After every piece, members of the audience walked up to the stage to give the musician(s) a bouquet of flowers. At the end of the event, there were probably 80 bouquets lying at the foot of the stage.

People also clap in unison here when they want an encore. We all clap on beat together, and the person comes out, bows some more, gets more flowers, and then goes backstage again.

FYI, whistling here is the equivalent of a boo or a hiss rather than a form of "woo hoo." I learned that the painful way when I was in Moscow at the Bolshoi many years back. One of the students in my group thought the performance so stirring that he stuck his fingers in his mouth and started whistling. We quickly realized that that was a bad thing when everyone within a 20-foot radius gasped, whipped around, and stared open-mouthed at him. How could one boo the dancers at the Bolshoi??? That was terribly embarassing. Good thing I don't know how to do those loud finger whistles, since I'm rendered incapable of making such a cultural faux-pas.