Welcome to Atyrau

I've just spent the day cleaning up backed-up sewage in my laundry, threatening to spill into my kitchen....so the adventure begins in Atyrau, Kazakhstan.

Having played with the idea of writing a blog for a couple of years now, I never expected the above sentence to be my opening line.  I had initially planned to write when I moved back to Nigeria from Canada, but I never got round to it.  I promised myself I would do it this time since I was moving again, to a country that would probably never have come up on my "Top 100 Countries To Move To" list.  The experiences leading up to our departure, and during our trip over, could themselves fill a book.  But back to our little plumbing mishap for now.

We (my three children and myself) arrived in Atyrau two days ago.  My husband moved here last fall, and we came to visit for a few days over Christmas.  As soon as the school year ended for everyone, we headed here.  From the air it was a very different sight from what we'd seen in December - an expanse of brown prairie-like land, with not a land elevation in site.  My son Biodun commented that it reminded him of flying into Calgary (Canada), where we'd previously lived for several years, but without the patchwork of farmlands that are characteristic there.  The pilot announced as we were about to land that the temperature was 34 degrees C on ground - apparently it'd been 37 degrees earlier that day!  As soon as you stepped through the door of the plane it hit you like a brick wall - dry heat like being in a huge oven.  Air conditioning has never felt so good!

My husband had moved to a new townhouse complex a couple of months ago, and proudly informed us that he'd used the showers in all the bathrooms except one (there are four altogether).  So we naively didn't expect any unpleasant surprises when we started using the showers the next day.  My youngest daughter, Sayo, who's six, as usual was the first of us new arrivals to wake up after their dad had gone to work.  She came to ask me to help her with the shower.  Because the shower bases were flat and not fully enclosed, she'd been forbidden from using her previously assigned shower after making a watery mess the night before.  After taking her shower in her brother's bathroom, which had a bathtub, she wanted breakfast so I went downstairs with her...and walked into a flooded mess!  The floor of the walk-through pantry / laundry was covered with water on the laundry side, and had spilled over into the kitchen.  This did not look good.