Another Day Gone

Sunday is almost over here in sunny Karaganda. The high was 22 degrees and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. It was quite dry. Actually, really dry. Still no hot water. And little cold water. The tap in our kitchen only dispenses the tiniest dribble of cold water, and even that only after we utter various incantations, usually involving the state of Florida. You know, sun on a beach.

If we want to do anything serious with water, we must head off to the bathroom and use the tap there. It has a fairly decent flow; almost as much as that of a drinking fountain. Of course, we have our bottled drinking water, but don’t want to squander it on the dishes and personal hygiene. So we bring water from the bathroom to the kitchen and heat it up on the stove. The end result is that it takes about an hour to do the dishes from lunch if you factor in all the trips back and forth, the heating up of water, and so on.

We spent this morning doing the tour of our neighbourhood, walking through the courtyards of apartment blocks. Most apartments here are built in courtyards. You enter your apartment from the courtyard, not the street. The street side is usually reserved for stores and what are optimistically called boutiques, really stalls with counters. You can buy almost anything in these stores and boutiques, ranging from pears to pairs of socks. You can find plumbing supplies, pipes, cigarettes, clothing, liquor, and copies of DVDs, CDs, and computer games. The copies must be legal, because we saw a senior police officer with a large amount of braid on his epaulettes buying one just the other day.

Hopefully the team of crack engineers will restore our hot water tomorrow.