Rainy Day in Uralsk

I'm in Uralsk today with other Volunteers - we're having a regional get-together today, and I'm very happy to see friends again.

There’s absolutely no city planning to speak of here. I wonder if Budarina slightly reflects how Kazakhs arranged yurts in latter days. The streets are incredibly wide and bad. The houses aren’t really on streets. All three stores are next to each other at the entrance to the city. It’s not lovely.

My host family members look completely unrelated. It’s really almost unbelievable that they’re from the same line. Kazakhs aren’t so easily identifiable up here, because there seems to be more variation in hair and eye color, and people look less East-Asian. For instance, their noses are sometimes sharp, and many have Western-looking eyelids. Blue eyes are not at all uncommon in the South of Kazakhstan, but they’re much more common here. And hair can be anything – there are as many people with light brown hair as with dark brown hair, no one’s hair is black, many women and girls dye their hair blonde and red (and I mean RED). Funny, I don’t see many people with gray hair. There are many people with purple hair, which I don't understand: right there on the box is a model with dark purple hair.