Steve's Cycling Blog

While I had hoped to sleep late that didn’t end up being quite as late as I’d expected – by 0730 I was awake and starving, so making the seemingly ridiculously early 0800 breakfast wasn’t an issue. I guess when you’re body is used to being fed at 0500 (or there abouts) it rather expects that trend to continue.

Though breakfast was supposed to be 0800 ‘sharp’ it took rather a while to actually happen. I started with bread and butter, then moved on to fried pastry-like things stuffed with cabbage (for breakfast???), next up was milky coffee – which actually wasn’t too bad, and finished with an omelette, which had it not had devil spawn (cucumber to most of you) in it would have been ok.

I decided that I wasn’t going to go to the lake (despite being up in time) and that I was going to have a quiet time around town and the hotel. A spot of shopping, change some money t the bank (a very enjoyable experience in the air-conditioned cool – Anna it reminded me of being in the ANZ in Nukuʻalofa there was such a temperature and humidity difference between inside and out!

On the way back I took a wander past the town mosque which is quite a nice looking building (more photos below). I wasn’t well enough dressed in my (long) shorts and (collared) short-sleeved shirt to go in, but took a look from the outside.

Usharal mosque

Back at the hotel I practiced napping for a while – I seem to be getting better at it 😉

After a spot of lunch from the bakery – pizza that would have been fine had it not been microwaved before being served and what was essentially a stuffed chicken breast, which was delicious – I took care of a few work-related chores – there are still a few outstanding, but I”m getting closer!

During the time I was sitting in the lobby a young local chap who was in the hotel restaurant celebrating graduating from secondary school tried to walk through the front window of the hotel. The crash was astonishing, and unfortunately for him resulted in a couple of nasty cuts requiring an ambulance ride to the hospital and the end of his celebration!

Earlier in the afternoon Michael had mentioned that he and Rob had met a local English teacher in town and had a chat with him as he was keen to practice his ‘conversational English’ which doesn’t get much use in Usharal. Didar stopped in at the hotel and he and I spent an hour or so chatting about this and that.

For the teachers and parents amongst you, Didar would be really interested in setting up some form of communication between his students and your students/children/children’s classes – if you think you might be able to help him out then let me know and I’ll forward on his email address.

If you’re interested;

• the school he teaches in has 1,300 pupils (the largest of the six schools in the city of 25,000 people) from age 7 to 18 (forms 1 through 11)
• the school day is broken into two sessions with senior students in class from 0830 to 1300, and junior students from 1330 to 1640
• English is currently taught as a subject from kindergarten (which begins at 3 years of age, but is optional – school is compulsory for the ages above) however from 2019 will become the language of instruction in senior school for maths, IT and science subjects
• if you’re a teacher, and your Kazakh’s pretty good, you may want to consider coming to teach here as the summer holidays are three months long…! That said, as a 29 year old teacher with five years experience his annual salary is $2,300 USD (yes really, two thousand three hundred dollars) which does somewhat dampen ones enthusiasm I suspect.

Chatting with him was an enjoyable way to spend an hour or so, and he was keen to go for a walk around town but as it was 33ºC, high humidity, and sunny, I wasn’t so keen so we sat in the (relatively) cool breeze in the hotel lobby.

The coming week is looking fairly reasonable (I end up thinking of rest days as weekends, and riding days as weeks since that’s kind of how they end up feeling – I also have no idea what actual day of the week it is at any given point) with a few hills to break up the monotony of the plains, and the distances getting shorter as the week goes along.

The riding week ahead

Now it’s time to finish packing things back into my bags, head down for some more super-tasty duck kebabs, have a shower, and head to bed ready for an 0530 breakfast tomorrow.

View from my tent

The Usharal town square as seen from our hotel balcony (which makes this dive sound way flasher than it is)