I'll start with the complaints first. I went out to another village to visit some volunteers. These volunteers live in a village 130 Km from the city. I'll write more about that in a little. But I took a taxi to the city this morning.

The taxi left the village at 5:45 in the morning. 5:45!!! IN the MORNING!! All of the taxis in their village leave at about this time. In the past, this was necessary. The road was really bad. REALLY BAD. It took 3.5 - 4 hours to get to the city. Now, the road is new. it takes 1.5 hours to get to the city. See the difference here? But the taxi still leave at 6:00 or earlier. Why? When they get to the city, nothing, is open. Anyway, that's complaint number one for this email.

Complaint number 2...as I was walking in the city this morning, waiting patiently for someplace to open, I crossed paths with several people. Need I remind you that it is only 7:45 in the morning...This is important to remember. Three men asked me for cigarettes. If, IF, I had been smoking, this would seem a logical question. I mean, sure, cigarettes are dirt cheap here so why should a perfect stranger not give you the cigarettes that he has bought and intends on scorching his lungs with. Right? One I will admit was a begger. He doesn't have legs or money. He sits outside of the golden church and begs, for a living. I can understand him not having cigarettes, and asking for them. The second was a young man, perhaps 20 or 21. He's walking the other way and stops me to ask for a cigarette. He's dressed in the latest Euro-trash fashion that is oh so common here. He's not a begger. He's old enough to buy the cigarettes himself. Instead, he prefers to ask perfect strangers, who give no indication of having cigarettes, if he can have theirs. The third man was a guard at a local building. I admit, there are worse jobs to have. He was standing outside the door of the building asking every stranger that passed to give him a cigarette.

Complaint number three...this is where the time factors in...Still this morning. It's now about 7:50. I am walking down the street. I see four young Kazkah men ahead of me. They are standing and having a conversation. I don't know what they are talking about, and it's not really like I care to know. I am walking down the street not caring about what other people are doing. I like to do this, to simply absorb the city in the morning. Uralsk is a great city to do this in. It's beautiful and spring fresh from the torrential downpour that hit the city yesterday and the day before. There are few people on the street. But back to thses for men. I should use young men, for they were all younger than me. I am guessing all four were between the ages of 18 and 21. They aren't smoking. They are probably waiting to bum cigarettes from strangers walking down the road. However, all four of them are holding something in their hands.

I didn't need to walk closer to know what they were holding. It's obvious. At 7:50 in the morning, these four yoiung men were drinking beer. I'll give them some credit. At least they weren't drunk yet. I have seen that side of this country. (An older man harassed me at 8:30 in the morning, plastered out of his mind, reeking of vodka and God knows what else (but that's another entry). But these are four young men... Public intoxication is frowned upon. I have seen the results of one such incident. (Not myself, but in an earlier entry where I was trying to buy water and the police picked me up for not wearing a coat, there was a drunk man picked up by the same policemen.) However, public consumption of alcohol is no big deal. Anyone can and a lot do. During the past holiday, I saw a man on the street so drunk that he couln't, sitting on the ground, lean up against a building without falling over. That takes an extreme amount of alcohol.

Anyway, these are my complaints.

And now, the ResT of the story... will be another entry... :)

Always keep'em coming back for more, right?..