*first snow.

Winter has finally arrived in Kazakhstan, much to my dismay. It started snowing last Thursday, and since then, every night a little more snow has been accumulating. There's only about 6 inches on the ground though, because during the day it's about 3C (38ish F) and so it melts and gets all slushy. Just like at home! This won't last long, I'm sure. I bet that next week it won't get warmer than freezing, and it'll be nice and frozen like that until March. Oh joy.
Over the weekend my site mate Susie and I went to a village called Karabalyk (meaning "black fish" in Kazakh) to visit one of the other volunteers. It's a rather impossible village to get to from where I am, considering we had to first take a bus to Kostanai, the biggest city in our oblast (region), which is 100km away. Then it was onto another bus for the 140km ride to Karabalyk. Given the snow on the ground, that's a solid 5-6 hours of travel time. Not all that bad, really. Getting out of Karabalyk, however, was a whole other story. We stayed Saturday and Sunday night, and then figured we'd leave at a leisurely pace on Monday. Unfortunately, the only buses that run after lunch are buses coming from Chelyabinsk, a large Russian city just across the border. The first bus was full, so we waited inside the bus station along with all the other locals, vying for a spot on the next bus. It was like survival of the fittest, waiting for the next bus, since rather than forming a line, everyone sort of crowded around the ticket window. And, slowly but surely, one by one, people got tired and fed up of waiting. And then there were four: it was down to just me, one Russian woman, and two Kazakh women (all of whom, while on the short side, were stocky and could've taken me down in a fight for a spot on the bus). I'd like to tell you that I emerged triumphantly from this ticket stand-off/stare-down, but the next bus never came, and by then it was too late to make our connection in Kostanai, so I packed it in and stayed another night.
Our half-term break has come to an unbelievably fast close, so it's back to the daily grind for me. I'm not really dreading it though, because there's so much to look forward to in the next couple of months. In just a few weeks will be Thanksgiving, and we'll have a get-together with the other volunteers in the oblast (currently 8 in total, now that the Kaz-18 group has left the country and the Kaz-20s have arrived), and then it'll already be December.
So not bad.