Christmas Eve, Eve.

The Delia Smith Christmas cake has been sitting in the cupboard for a few weeks now and as it's almost the big day I thought i'd better get round to making it.  It's quite easy really, you just throw everything in the bowl, give it it a mix and then pour the resulting mixture into a cake tin and pop in the over at about 140C for 4 hours.  There's more to do after that but I'm not that far yet.  Another 3 hours 3 minutes to go before i need to do anything else.

Back to work in the uk.

Well back working in the uk again now. Off to the BBC world service today to hopefully sort a few problems. Train up to London very quiet, must be because it's nearly Christmas. As usual got the bus from Victoria to Regent Street as the underground can get very busy.

First Snow

Well it's 16 December and it's the first snow flurry of the year in Bromley, UK.  They're big flakes however won't settle too much as it's too wet due to a night of excessive rain.  Working at home today sorting out expenses from my Kazakhstan trip, it's amazing how quick it adds up when there are 4 of you.

Here's the Pyramid and others.

Here's the Pyramid we trekked to in the last post.

Below is the Presidents residence.

A few golden towers looking back towards our hotel.

The View from Narnia.

Well as you can see above it's 'the view from Narnia'.  Still in Astana, Kazakhstan, we have had 2 enforced days off as the President opened the media centre yesterday despite there being an awful lot more construction to do.  The bits he must have seen looked very nice as people have been cleaning and re-cleaning all week and in their credit it has come on a great deal since we first got here 10 days ago.  Well on our day of we took a trek to a building in the shape of a pyramid which was sadly closed, so we walked back and found a supermarket where we navigated our way around Kazakh produce.

We got a Skype this afternoon with an invitation to dinner at the Khan Shatyr shopping mall.  When we arrived it was a big party I assume as a celebration that the Astana Media Centre has been officially opened.  The party was hosted by the Main Contractor and it was pretty good.  At the top of the shopping mall there is a beach club.  It has water and imported sand from the Maldives.  We were the recipients of some great Turkish hospitality and watched some try interesting dancing.  We then chanced a taxi back and that was our evening.  Two more days here then home!

Astana at night - taken on 1st December.

In Astaka, Kz now.

Well we're in Astana now.  Currently about -10C which actually isn't too bad.  Hotel is good which is handy as when we went on site today our equipment hadn't been installed so we retreated to the Hotel to do some planning.  As you can see from the picture it's a little snowy but nothing too dangerous.  One thing to mention though is that a good set of snow tyres on the car really seem to make a difference.  We were picked up from the airport in the early hours of this morning and the driver was going along what must be icy roads as it was around -20 to -22C at about 60mph no problem at all.