Saturday, October 31, 2009

Update

Some of you may remember that I returned to Central Asia on a Tourist Visa with a lot of decisions that needed to me made really quickly. I spent the first couple of days in the country Capital with friends and from there was able to learn that my school was not welcoming students back to study. They were also not letting foreigners stay on campus. This meant even before getting back into town I knew I was going to have to move. Thankfully I have a good friend who had an extra bedroom. One of the benefits of where she lives is the nice police office under whose district our place falls. As foreigners we are expected to report into our local police office. At my last home the guys in the office were kind of jerks and often told me how much they "liked Canadian girls" in a leering gross voice. Other people live under the rule of demanding local police who on every visit ask for 12 copies of your passport and a hundred and one other pieces of paper work. But here our local police officer is really nice. He registered me to live at my friend's house even though I only have a Tourist Visa (I really should have to stay in a hotel). This took off the added pressure of having to find a job right away. So for right now I can live at her house without hassle for three months.

As far as the job situation goes, the company I have been talking with down south for the last year, took my paperwork in to be precessed and it got rejected. This means it will not be possible for me to move south at this time. The company does have an office here in the city where I have been living. Since the company has been promising me a job for almost a year now (paper work takes a long time out here) they are going to hire me to work here instead. This means over the next month or two I will be spending a lot of hours running from government office to government office collecting the signatures and necessary stamps of permission to work here.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

In the Dark

The province where I live is still very much under a cone of silence. We still don't have access to the Internet and international phone calls are hard to both make and receive. This blog post in fact is only able to be posted thanks to the help of many people. Two of my friends left the province for a few days on what we have come to call "Internet Vacations". They sent an email to my parents which included several blogs I had written to be cut and pasted over the next few weeks into my blog. It is weird after blogging for more than two years I now think of my life as a series of blog postable events. Even though we don't have Internet there are several time a week I say to myself "that would have made a funny blog post". In fact I was getting so many of these that I started writing them down.

As much as that is true it is nice to no longer feel like I am chained to my computer....there are no emails to answer, no pressure to post something, and now way to look up "what else that actor form the movie we're watching was in". It is quiet. But I also feel like I am in the dark on my family and friends lives. I also don't know what is going on in the world, nor can I easily let people know what is going on in mine. I might as well get use to it though, the Internet was shut down at the beginning of July and if rumors are correct might not be back until either the New Year, or maybe even as late as April. So the blogs to follow over the next few weeks are ones I sent my parents.