Springtime in Kazakhstan

Darkness comes slowly onto the icy barren tundra of northern Kazakhstan.  The hazy glow of the sun is eventually enveloped by the frozen horizon.  I’ve come here for 2 years to accompany my finance with his work in the capital city of Astana.  We’ve only arrived into the country a few days ago, after about 30 hours of travel from our home in South Florida.  Several hundred miles from both the Chinese and Russian borders, which encase the mysterious lands of Mongolia and Siberia, our new home couldn’t be more different from our home in sunny Florida.

With the 11 hour time difference between Kazakhstan and the East Coast of the US, the days pass slowly, and I find myself awake throughout most of the nights: reading, surfing channels on the TV, surfing the internet.  Some days I begin to drift off into slumber only after sunrise and my return from the hotel’s breakfast buffet.

It is one of these days, jet-lagged and a blurry eyed, that my fiance and I stumble across a neon light flashing letters of an alphabet which we recognize.  The advertised establishment is a cozy English pub, appropriately called North Wind.  We dart inside quickly to escape the brutal north wind that has been bearing down on us for the duration of our wintery walk.  Happy to receive menus in a language that we can read, and also happy to read an offering of food that seems familiar to us, we order a pizza, a Russian beet salad and a couple of beers.

Slowly we begin to warm up from the frigid temperatures outside and enjoy the pub’s entertainment, while we await our meal.  A slight woman is seated behind a piano, playing a vast assortment of songs.  Latin salsa to Russian folk music: she seems to cover the spectrum.  But it is one particular song that grabs my attention.  A familiar chorus evokes memories of a simpler time; memories of my childhood home.   The singer’s heavily accented English cannot mask the unmistakable lyrics.... “almost heaven, West Virginia, take me home country roads”...  It's just about the time when our beers arrive that things suddenly start to seem a lot less exotic here.