Max Goldsworthy

Our Home

I don’t have many activities to update on this time, because most of my time has been spent doing DIY in our new flat and babysitting various builders. Aiko owns her flat, albeit at the time of moving in she had no real furniture in it and only the wallpapering was completed, but I saw this as an opportunity to learn how to DIY things with the relatively lowered stakes of this not being our ‘forever’ home. Aiko foolishly agreed.

After plenty of false starts – including an exploded can of glue (turns out you have to open the top before applying pressure to the bottom), an underpowered drill that started smoking badly when I pushed it beyond it’s powers and a harebrained attempt to cut corners into coving and skirting boards using only a box cutter and a folded piece of paper, I am pleased to reveal the fruits of my labours:

Here is a photo of our flat from the outside:

One pleasant surprise about the urbanism here – which you can just about make out in the above picture – is that basically every single apartment block has it’s own playground, usually in the centre of a courtyard as it is for ours – and the equipment always seems nice and well-maintained. Ours also has an open topped football cage, which might prove a daft choice given all the cars that park around it…

Still, I find this produces a nice family friendly vibe and it does make me feel that the UK might actually be severely under-equipped for playgrounds (or in general, for places where teenagers can hang out without spending money – particularly near city centres!).

Uralsk City and Kazakh Culture

One interesting thing about Kazakhstan is that it is a proudly multicultural country, but practically none of it’s subcultures are familiar to me. Just look how many types of women they can put on their chocolate packaging:

In Uralsk, 71% of the population is ethnic Kazakh, 25% are ethnic Russian (but as Aiko tells it: ‘our Russians’ are different in kind from ‘those Russians’ because ‘our Russians’ lack the arrogance or the cultural chauvinism.) and of the remaining 4%, there is a notable community of ethnic Koreans who were forcibly relocated to Central Asia under Stalin – on the off chance they were ever planning on becoming Japanese spies.

In terms of religion: the majority of Ethnic Kazakhs are Muslim, although the practice of Islam is quite uniquely Kazakh – very few women here wear head coverings, for example. The majority of the Russians are Orthodox Christian, but society and the government are quite strongly secular.

Language is where things get really messy: 80% of the population speak Russian and 80% of the population speak Kazakh, which is a Turkic language unrelated to Russian, except that it is written in the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet. Except that it isn’t written in this alphabet any more, because they transitioned to the Latin alphabet in 2025, except that this didn’t really take off, so it is still written in Cyrillic most of the time. I am attempting to learn Russian, with the odd Kazakh phrases, but to give an illustration of how bewildering this language switching can be, I will talk you through my mental flowchart for how to say ‘Hello’:

Russian has two ‘Hellos’: ‘zdravstvuyte’ for formal occasions (and when greeting an older person) and ‘Privet’ for casual settings. People who work in services usually respond in whichever language you begin with – so ‘zdravstvuyte’ is my default choice for most scenarios. Kazakh also has a formal/respectful hello (Sälemetsiz be) that I am using with Aiko’s relatives, since Kazakh is their preferred language and so it feels more respectful. However, when two men greet each other socially – regardless of whether they’re Kazakh, Russian, Islamic or not – we do the Islamic greeting: a call and response between the phrases ‘As-salamu Alaykum’ and ‘Wa alaikum as-salaam’. So in summary, I have 5 different phrases for hello depending on context, and 4 of those phrases are kind of hard to pronounce!

Local Attitudes Towards Me

Probably my biggest concern before arriving (even bigger than the weather!) was how strangers would react to me. I had heard that Kazakh culture values hospitality, however it also has quite a deep-seated misogyny, and one potential effect of that is that people can be very suspicious of their women dating foreigners. Add on top of this that any westerners that do live and work out here will almost always be quite senior oil and gas people – whose wealth makes them attractive, but who don’t have the greatest reputation for ethical behaviour – and you get a potentially toxic situation. Aiko did warn me before coming that there were known cases from a more reactionary city of people literally beating up westerners seen with Kazakh women!

If this warning sounds like it should have precluded coming here – it is worth pointing out that Aiko arrived in the UK as the Southport riots were happening, and so she had a substantial fear that she would encounter a gang of racists looking for any Muslims to assault. My point is that just because there are examples of bad things like that happening, it doesn’t mean that it is very likely to happen to any given individual.

Happily, I can report that so far I haven’t experienced so much as a funny look – the most common reaction to me has been shock and excitement at the novelty of my presence. I took a taxi, and the taxi driver insisted on taking a video with me for his Instagram. We hired some plumbers, and after they learnt I was not currently working, they insisted that I should come work with them and quite earnestly explained to me how to fix the heating system. When I tried the excuse that I couldn’t work here as one of the conditions of my visa, one of them rolled their eyes and simply said ‘brother, this is Kazakhstan’. Still, they eventually settled on inviting me out drinking to show me the city any time I wanted – an offer I might genuinely have accepted if I had better language skills – and then, in the madness of their excitement, they spontaneously gave us a 25% discount on the work they did. So much for my other fear, that people might assume I’m rich and try to fleece me!

Activities
Contrary to how I started this blog, it turns out we did actually make time for quite a few different activities these past two weeks.

Firstly, we went to a sauna in one of Aiko’s Mum’s neighbour’s sheds – a very common practice here. Aiko taught me the ropes; essentially you are supposed to scrub off your dead skin with such zeal that much of your previously alive skin ends up as collateral damage.

We also rented cross country skiing equipment for the princely sum of £1.50 each and rode them through a trail in the park. This was my first time ever on skis and it was pretty great – I almost felt like I was moving in a more efficient way than I would have been if I was just walking without skis. Almost.

We’ve been to a number of nice restaurants and bars – including a Hookah bar. I got very little out of the experience of Hookah, but the bar itself was nice.

And last but by no means least, Aiko’s mum threw a big party for the following occasions:

• To introduce her family with her partner’s family
• To introduce me to the wider family
• To celebrate Aiko’s Master’s degree

Although in Kazakhstan, it feels like the party comes first, and the reasons for having the party are more just post-hoc excuses. This was, by Kazakh standards, a small gathering of about 80 people, for which she rented a nearby house with more hosting space. I think she had spent about 3 days preparing all the food, and Aiko and I came early in the morning to help set everything up. I was pretty exhausted by the time the party actually started, but – since the women in Aiko’s family possess a stamina that I genuinely cannot comprehend – Aiko’s mum, together with her aunts and Grandma, stayed up till about 5 AM doing the dishes afterwards.

The most unique thing about the party was that seemingly everything happens at once. Starters, snacks, deserts and mains are all on the table together and while we’re eating, almost every guest stands up to give a mini-speech, usually conveying gratitude and good wishes for the future (seemingly based on Quaker rules; a person stands up whenever the holy ghost seizes them). The only thing that break up these speeches is the equally spontaneous breaking into song, which I found genuinely quite moving. My role was largely to say ‘Thank You (Rakhmet)’ to the speaker whenever Aiko nudged me. One of Aiko’s uncles apparently asked her ‘ how she found someone so young and handsome?’, which is a phrasing I am unlikely to let her forget any time soon!

At one point, music was brought in and people got up to dance, and while there was some pressure for me to join in, I was surprised how quickly the pressure relented. Still, I had the impression that it would be good form to join in and, since I could not really express myself with words, I decided – for the first and probably last time in my life – that I would communicate through the language of dance. Without exception, I find dancing a fairly mortifying experience of overwhelming self-consciousness, but my major consolation here was that Aiko felt equally awkward but was equally forced to commit to the bit, which made the experience funny, if not exactly fun. I am told the dancing was well received, particularly with her Aunts, but that might be as much out of pity as it was out of admiration.