Welcome to another amazing expat interview. Today we have an expat living in Astana, Kazakhstan – a place I have only heard about in movies! :) After visiting KZBlogs site and reading this interview, I have gatherd that the life of a foreigner in Kazakhstan is similar in many was to life as a foreigner in Norway! One huge difference though, is that in Kazakhstan there is large demand for English teacher, and that is definitely NOT the case in Norway – where everyone speaks fluent English.

So sit back, relax and enjoy the interview!

1.Where are you from originally, where are you now and what brought you there?

I am originally from the US and I have been living in Astana, Kazakhstan for almost five years now. As for what brought me here, I first heard of Central Asia in a class on the history of Islam in university. It seemed like a fascinating place, a mix of different religions and cultures all living in relative peace. I also thought it would be interesting to visit a post-Soviet country to see how much of the propaganda I absorbed in my youth was true. Do Russians ever smile? (Yes all the time). Was rock music illegal in the USSR? (Sort of, but not exactly). Later in my masters program I met a young woman from Kazakhstan and she helped me find an internship here. I fell in love with her and to some extent with the country and so here we are now.

2.What do you like/dislike about your new home overseas?

I love the people. Kazakhs are extremely friendly and hospitable. You can’t go to anyone’s house without being fed plates of food and given oceans of tea to drink. Even poor people will set a table for guests that probably left their shelves empty. And for every holiday people give gifts, even if it’s something small like home-baked bread or flowers or wine. Even on Independence Day or Republic Day people will come to your house with gifts. It’s really amazing the generosity of people.

However, what I dislike most is that all of that kindness is reserved only for friends and family. On the street, among strangers people are extremely rude here. People cut in line, push hard on the buses, talk loudly about how ugly people are in public and customer service is non-existent. When you go into a store you are only bothering the people working there. Most salespeople have no interest in helping you at all. They just want you to leave. I wrote about my worst experience with customer service here

3.Do you have any advice for someone who wants to get a job in Kazakhstan? What was your experience with getting a visa/job? Was it difficult?

Getting a job in Kazakhstan is difficult for foreigners. There are a lot of foreign companies here and international NGOs like the World Bank and the UN. However they tend to bring foreign staff in. When they advertise jobs here, it’s mostly for locals. So the best thing to do if you want to work here is look for a company in your own country that already has an office here–and many global corporations do–then get transferred. There is some work for consultants here in economic development, business, and social development. But most of those tenders come from foreign companies or NGOs. I would monitor the UN jobs pages, the World Bank and ADB websites as well as oil company sites, as they are the largest employers of foreigners. Most locals get jobs through family and friends and it is hard to get into a network as a foreigner. One job that is always in demand is English teaching. Experience and accreditation are not important as long as you are a native speaker. But the pay level here is not very high.

“I love the people. Kazakhs are extremely friendly and hospitable. You can’t go to anyone’s house without being fed plates of food and given oceans of tea to drink. Even poor people will set a table for guests that probably left their shelves empty.”
~KZblog

Getting a business visa is not difficult if you have an invitation from a host organization. Getting a working visa is only possible if you have a job invitation and the host organization theoretically is responsible for all the paperwork. However while things have gotten better here, bureaucracy is king in Kazakhstan. To get a working visa or residence, expect to have to write an autobiography and get a medical exam and go through a lot of paperwork. Of course if you make one mistake on a form, you have to redo everything. And everything takes time.

4.What was the most challenging part of living in a foreign country when you first started out as an expat? Do you have any advice for those facing similar challenges?

Probably the hardest part of going to any country is adapting to the mentality. Every country has a different mentality in terms of how fast things get done, what gets priority, how people think about things. While Americans tend to try to solve problems for example, in Kazakhstan most people feel problems can’t be solved. So if you need to print out an important document and the printer is broken, an American would find another printer or go to the copy shop and print it out or try to fix the printer. In Kazakhstan people shrug and call the tech guy and wait for him to come. Also, Kazakhs tend to have what I call the “big man” syndrome, which means that orders or tasks set by the most important person get done first even if they aren’t really as urgent or something extremely urgent is waiting. So if a contract is up for renewal with a distributor that covers 50% of your sales, but the CEO wants a list of every person in the company with their telephone numbers, birthdays and shoe sizes, the list gets done first. It can be extremely frustrating when you can’t get something done as fast as you’d like or in the way you’d like.

On the one hand, many expats never adapt and just get increasingly more bitter and frustrated and run up against the same wall everyday. Some expats, I find, tend to go to the other extreme and become “more native than the natives”. I think the best thing to do is adopt a middle ground and fight the battles that are important or that you think you can win, but go with the flow the rest of the time.

5.If you were to do it all again (moving to and living in another country), what would you do different?

I’d probably learn the language better before I left. My Russian is pretty good now but when I first came it was awful and it made it hard to get around. It also made me extremely dependent on my wife. She had a lot of pressure to try to make me happy because I couldn’t take care of myself. I also wish I had talked to some expats who had lived here to have a better handle on how things work here.

6.Do you want to move back to where you came from? If not, what is it about the expat life that makes it all worth it to you?

Again, I have been here for five years and I would like to move back to the US at some point, at least for a little while–say five years. I miss my friends and my family and I miss a lot of American culture like live music, coffee shops, diner food, bookstores in English… I feel like even though I have adjusted to the culture here, I will never fully “get” it. Every time I have a new experience there’s always something difficult or strange and it does get tiring. But we will always come back here too. Like it or not, this is my adopted country and the country of my wife so I would never abandon Kazakhstan.

7.What are some of the good, the bad, the ugly…and the funny things you have experienced living overseas?

I have a lot of funny stories of course. One of my favorite, that I posted about on my blog involves just how tight life in Kazakhstan is, even in a big city. Basically, I had been on vacation and a week after I got back, I went in to see a company where I do some freelance work. They said that they knew I was already back because their accountant had seen me in my car the other day. I also occasionally get into a taxi here and the driver will remember me, remember where my office is and ask me how my wife is. I will also never forget eating sheep’s head for the first time. It’s a huge delicacy here that is only brought out on very special occasions and it’s an honor to be offered part of the head, so I was pretty much forced to suck it down. It’s not bad really if you blank your mind to what it is.

Another ongoing fun experience that many expats have here is the “Oh my God a foreigner, what do we do?” It takes a couple of forms. When I had been here only a few months and my Russian was horrible, I went to the movie theater. I guess my accent was horrible and I didn’t ask quite the right way, like saying, “One ticket in James Bond please” or something. The cashier panicked and started shouting to the other cashiers about how she didn’t speak English and how was she going to talk to me and what were they going to do. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept repeating “One”, “Ticket”, “James Bond movie”. We finally worked it out but she got so afraid that she couldn’t talk to me. It was very funny.

“I started realizing that I was just as strange to them as they were to me. I think culture shock really comes from the feeling that you are normal and the other culture is strange, whereas objectively you are both normal. Or both strange.”
~KZblog

A really good experience that could only happen in Kazakhstan occurred on the bus. It’s not uncommon when a woman gets on the bus with a lot of bags or a child for a woman sitting down to offer to take the bags or the kid. This would probably drive American mothers crazy, to have their kid in some stranger’s lap. I should also note that men here are good about giving their seats to women or older people! Anyway, I was on the bus during a snowstorm and I had just been to the stationary store so I had a huge, heavy bag full of paper and pens and folders and binders. There was no seat so I was standing and an old woman in the seat in front of me offered to hold my bag. I refused so she said, “Well just rest it on my knees then, take the weight off of your arms.” She kept insisting so I felt obliged to let a little weight drop on her, enough to make her feel useful without seriously burdening her. When she got up, a young woman came over to take her seat but the old woman said, “No, this seat is reserved for him,” and blocked the seat til I could sit down. It was very sweet and something you rarely see in the West.

8. Did you experience culture shock when you moved? What was that like? How did you overcome it?

I definitely did, and I probably still do suffer culture shock occasionally. Adjusting to a new mentality and a new way of life is hard. Even hearing a foreign language every day is exhausting. I definitely went through a honeymoon period when I first got there where everything was strange but wonderful and new. At first Kazakhstan was not real in some way, so it wasn’t hard to eat horse or get shoved on the bus or stand in hour-long lines at the Immigration Office. Eventually it sunk in that this was home and suddenly everything strange became “bad”. I got extremely angry if things weren’t done exactly the way we did them at home. Every cultural belief was an irrational superstition and every piece of bureaucracy was proof of stupidity. That probably lasted until I got settled in well, made some friends, found out where the best stores were, which restaurants I liked, improved my Russian a bit. Once I started getting comfortable, I felt less frustrated. I started realizing that I was just as strange to them as they were to me. I think culture shock really comes from the feeling that you are normal and the other culture is strange, whereas objectively you are both normal. Or both strange.

I also think it’s important to realize that “culture” is not some huge monolith and that individuals are different. For example, I used to get frustrated for example if a friend ordered for me at a restaurant. I would think, “Oh my God. In Kazakhstan people tell you what to do more and make decisions for you. I will never be able to order food myself again. I’ll only be eating Kazakh food for the rest of my life. I’m going to die.” In fact, while it is not uncommon in Kazakhstan for the inviter to order for everyone, the custom isn’t universal and few people are offended if you say, “Actually, that sounds good but I would love the hamburger instead.” So don’t blow things out of proportion and don’t be afraid to politely refuse if it seems appropriate. Treat people as people and not as manifestations of their culture.

9.Any practical tips for the new expats out there?

Get to know the language well. Get settled in. Walk around the town and find stores you like or cafes or parks. Get your own pace in the place where you live so that it feels like home to you and so that you aren’t always following someone else. I think I was very lucky to live here for one year while my wife was finishing her graduate degree because I got to know Astana on my own terms. I see many foreigners who work in foreign companies and depend 100% on their secretaries or colleagues because they never explored the city. They always seem a bit uneasy and helpless.

Another extremely practical and concrete piece of advice is to find out whether an organization has any kind of newsletter or list of events. I lived here for four years before I discovered that the US Embassy puts out a weekly calendar of events and a monthly newsletter with all sorts of useful information about what’s going on, recommendations on where to get your winter tires put on, and so on. At least in Kazakhstan, you find out what’s happening by phoning up all the theaters and concert halls and asking. It’s been so nice to have all the upcoming plays and concerts and exhibitions written down in one place.

10.Where do you think you’ll go next?

Probably eventually we’ll go back to the US. I would like to live in England at some point, and possibly in Scandinavia. I would also like to visit Russia more and go back to Mongolia. I’d love to see the Ukraine and China. I don’t know if we’d ever live in any of those places but I’d like to tour them at least.

11. Anything else you want to add or share about expat life or culture shock?

The only thing I would add is that as an expat you do suffer to some extent from reverse culture shock. It may happen when you return to your home country and you think, “Why are these people acting so funny? In Kazakhstan we never did that!” Or it may happen while you are abroad when someone asks you a question about your home that you can’t really answer, “Why the heck do we shake hands anyway?” I think being an expat can be a very good chance for not only adventures in a new place but also introspection about your own life.