Author: billkralovec

We hosted the TIS Faculty and Staff Christmas Party last night at the Hammersmith Bar and Grill. It was nice to see everyone having a good time. Uzbek dancing is good for people with limited dance skills because much of it involves moving the arms rather than the feet. The food was excellent, the music a bit too loud, an evening full of comity.

I spent most of the day supporting Ocean. The ACT moved the location of the scheduled test to the Saint Andrews College. The information on the ACT website was not helpful in finding it. Thanks to Nadia asking questions to Chat GPT, we were able to call someone and get the location. It is not a school, but rather, a testing center in a suite of offices. After 30 minutes of panic, we were finally able to find it and get her started. Nadia left a pot of beans boiling and it burned, so we had to air out the house and clean lots of the fabric. The house still has a faint odor of smoke in some places. As I write this, I need to check on our smoke alarms. I don’t think they made it over to our new house.

On the way home from the ACT, we stopped for lunch at Hardees at the Seoul MUN outdoor mall along the canal. I also needed to wash our car because we will be transporting principal candidates over the next three days. I checked out a new Yoga Studio while the car was getting washed. It was nice to spend time with her and get some things done around the house (grocery shopping/prepping the guest bedroom for Oliver’s arrival tonight, etc.)

Nadia and I then attended the faculty and staff Christmas party. The local employees thoroughly enjoyed the night out, and everyone appeared to have a great time. We will miss many of our TIS colleagues next year. Finally, it was our eldest son’s birthday today. On December 13, 2002, our parent journey began! I caught up with him right after he finished a paddleball game in his village of Zacero, Costa Rica. I picked out a random photo from our family’s Flickr account. Owen is 8 years old in the photo below at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. Living the expatriate life meant at least two long air travel trips annually. I always loved those travel days with the kids! It is amazing that Nadia and I started having children at home 23 years ago! It ends this fall with Ocean leaving for university.

It was a restful long weekend in Tashkent thanks to Constitution Day. Monday, December 8, was a national holiday celebrating the publication of the constitution. I think all of us welcomed the day off. As we near the end of the calendar year at school, my colleagues (and I) at school are tired and looking forward to the longer break. We took advantage of the day off to put up Christmas decorations in our house. The girls were not in the mood, but I think I inspired them. Nadia was a tour de force, putting up the lights on the big arch in our home.

The weather was miserable with lots of rain and cold temperatures. I got a lot of work done, although my things-to-do list never ends. We are looking forward to Oliver’s arrival next week. It was great to hear from our other son, Owen. He attended a Bad Bunny concert in San Jose over the weekend. The Puerto Rican recording artist Bad Bunny is performing at this season’s Super Bowl. I started listening to his music, and a lot of it is pretty good. He was also very funny on Saturday Night Live. I am adding him to my Spotify playlists.

I finish this post with a photo my colleague Grace took of me in her mathematics class. When I have a lull in my schedule, I often walk through classrooms to see what is going on. This week I went to the secondary mathematics wing and tried some math problems. The higher level class was a bit out my league. I had more success at the standard level problems. My daughter Ocean happened to be in the third classroom I visited and we worked on some problems. A special thanks to Ananyia for her help. I wish I had graphics calculator in my early 1980s math classes!

I wanted to learn more about air pollution since Tashkent experienced a spate of high AQI ratings recently. As the head of an international school, I am especially concerned about the impact of air pollution on young people. I learned from the book that air pollution does impact health over long-term exposure. Thankfully, it does take years of exposure, and a relatively small percentage of people are burdened with a lifelong health problem. However, as Gardiner shows through hundreds of research studies, air pollution, especially particulate matter under 2.5 microns in size (PM2.5) does negatively impact health by entering the bloodstream and penetrating vital organs. Air pollution may speed up or increase the severity of diseases such as cardiovascular disease, infertility, dementia, and even depression.

The author Beth Gardiner is an environmental journalist from New Jersey currently living in London. She traveled to all over the world, interviewed hundreds of pollution experts, clean air activists, and shared the stories of people hurt by air pollution. I loved the chapter on Delhi! Like here in Tashkent, the US Embassy and the American School were some of the first organizations to identify the severity of the air pollution problem in the city. When I began tracking air quality with our school’s air monitor 7 years ago, it was only us and the embassy on the IQAir App. Today there are almost 50 stations contributing to the app.

She also visited Poland, where coal burning is still common in people’s homes today. I experienced this when I lived in Belgrade, Serbia. I’ll never forget the first cold day we experienced there. My wife Nadia was freaking out during recess when she smelled the distinctive smell of brown coal exhaust. She was shuttling the students back into the building during recess. Balkan cities like Skopje and Sarajevo struggle with air quality in the winter because of coal.

I highly recommend this book! I learned a ton, which helped me put air pollution into perspective. I will be moving to Cairo next school year, and that is another place that can have air pollution issues. I am going to look into air purifiers to assist with indoor air quality. Below are other things I learned from Gardiner’s book.

• Pollution concentrations can be up to 3x higher by a busy roadside than even 100 yards away.
• Just 5% of humanity breathes healthy air, and 1 in 9 deaths on earth is caused by air pollution.
• Wood smoke is thick with PM2.5 particles and has toxins like benzene and formaldehyde. Gardiner spent time in India with women in poor households who are constantly breathing wood smoke from cooking fires in their humble homes. Thankfully, in Latin America, reliance on biomass (wood, agricultural waste, dung, etc.) has dramatically decreased in recent decades to about 15% of households. 33 billion people worldwide live in households that cook this way.
• Coal-fired power plants are big sources of pollution; however, most of it does not end up in someone’s lungs. Exhaust from cars in densely populated areas or home cooking fires is more dangerous.
• Industrial-sized agriculture is responsible for about half of the man-made air pollution in America. Gardiner reported from California’s San Joquin Valley in her chapter titled, “Cows, Almonds, Asthma”.
• Vehicles that use diesel fuel are bad polluters. The fuel burns hotter than regular fuel, but also burns incompletely, releasing more toxins into the atmosphere. This is a problem in Europe, where diesel cars are popular than in the USA.
• London is famous for its historical “fog,” which was actually air pollution. Today, it still has air quality issues due to diesel fuel and a high number of cars.
• The invention of the catalytic converter, which has saved millions of lives, was spurred on by the passing of the 1970 Clean Air Act in US Congress. Senator Edward Muskie is an American hero for his leadership in getting stricter air quality requirements into law. This reversed years of putting the profits of companies above the health of Americans.
• The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are California’s biggest sources of air pollution. Los Angeles also has the challenge of being surrounded by mountains and abundant ozone-causing sunshine, which keeps pollution from escaping higher in the atmosphere.
• apotheosis – ah-pah-thee-OH-sis (with the emphasis on the fourth syllable) The highest point of something. It can also mean raising someone to the status of the divine.
• comity – civility, treat with mutual respect, courtesy

The highlight this week was dinner at the restaurant сырщвварня (Syrovanya) (Cheese Factory). My daughter Ocean takes after her mother, very beautiful! We were on our way to the German Embassy’s Christmas Market when police roadblocks and traffic caused us to redirect our plans for dinner. I was hoping to give Nadia some Christmas spirit, and the embassy was advertising bratwurst and mulled wine! It was not to be. We ended up enjoying a delicious and delightful late dinner.

After dinner, I took Obi for a walk. We live near the transportation university of Tashkent. Near the front gate, they light up an old steam locomotive train. It is a з-791-40 built in the 1950s. The Soviets designed these to haul heavy freight long distances. They had a maximum speed of 65 kilometers per hour. The E-Series steam locomotive was finally retired in the late 1970s. I love the Soviet Star in front of the train.

The air quality finally improved thanks to the rain. It is currently 92 AQI (Moderate) as I write this blog post. Temperatures are near freezing in the mornings with more rain in the forecast next week. Hopefully, that means snow in the mountains so we can start ski season.

As I write this blog post this morning, Tashkent finally has an AQI PM2.5 of 112, which is considered “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. It is the first time in that I woke up to an AQI under 150 in the last two weeks. In fact, two days ago, the AQI reached over 600 overnight. I captured the screenshot below of the monitor at our school, which reached a 577 AQI in the afternoon (bottom left). To the bottom right is the IQAir Earth Live Air map from this morning. I went for a hike on Sunday in the mountains and even at elevation, there was a haze in the air. It was much lighter than in the city, but as you can see in the photo above, there is a distinct zone where the haze can be seen, and blue skies start to appear.

The government seems to be taking the right steps by converting greenhouses to natural gas, inspecting construction sites, mandating 20% green areas for developers, installing fountains throughout the city to increase humidity, etc. We have not historically been one of the most polluted cities in the world. Tashkent is ranked #22 today between Phnom Penh and Skopje. Between 2017 and 2024, Tashkent was ranked the 510th most polluted city in the world.

It felt great to finally walk outside after being stuck indoors most of last week. My friend Aaron and I explored a canyon near the Kumbel Weather Station, a former Soviet facility. Next time I go there, I will drive just below the station and then continue up higher into the juniper forests and get into the snowline. Beautiful views and exercise are always rejuvenating for me.

The first thought that came to me during my 15 hours in Dubai on a Tuesday in early November is “this is the future”. I think it was the numerous huge construction projects in progress and the modern residential communities rising out of the desert. It was also that the city grew from the recent oil boom and everything is new and shiny, like much of Salt Lake City. I was there for work so didn’t get much time to explore the city. It was my third trip to this global city of expatriates.

I stayed at the Park Inn by Radisson located in Dubai Motor City. It is right next to Autodrome Racetrack that is open to the public. People can drive several different categories of cars or ride shotgun with a professional driver on a Formula One Racetrack. Only one car that day was driving around the track. The hotel was connected to a small shopping mall which led to a small business district. After my meetings, I walked to a Daiso Japan and did some grocery shopping. Nadia and Ocean like it when I bring home a bag of groceries with products they can’t get in Tashkent. After returning to the hotel, I went for a swim on the rooftop pool and then packed and headed out to the airport. Traffic congestion is a problem during peak times (6:00 AM – 10:00 AM) and (5:00 PM – 9:00 PM) during the week. Both of my Uber drivers pointed this out as we were bumper-to-bumper to and from the airport.

During the day I visited two beautiful, modern international schools packed with expatriates. Developers collaborate with school owners to anchor their residential gated communities with a high-quality international school. This attracts families to their development. One in particular caught my attention, Sustainable City. We went to lunch at a restaurant on the development and walked through a pond area with free range chickens, ducks, and gardens. The Dubai-based Diamond Developers invested $354 million dollars into a 114-acre site with 89 apartment buildings and 500 villas. The community has 2,700 residents and many of them walk or bike to the school and other amenities. I saw mostly Scandanavian families, who are probably wealthy due to the cost of the villas ($1 million+). Below is a description of the site from One Key Marketer Mike Anderson.

The Sustainable City boasts a number of genuinely impressive green features. The homes are designed to shade each other, making them easier and cheaper to cool in the desert heat. Strategically placed wind towers cool the air on the streets. A verdant park runs the length of the development, complete with 11 biodome greenhouses for urban farming that are irrigated by two lakes filled with recycled greywater. Designed primarily for pedestrians and bicyclists, vehicles are banished to a nearby car park shaded with solar panels. These, and the solar arrays on the roofs of the villas, generate the lion’s share of the community’s electricity. LED lights, solar water heaters, and low-power appliances reduce energy needs by up to 50%. Each resident is furnished with a free electric golf cart to get around the development, or a $10,000 subsidy for an electric vehicle of their choice. Onsite amenities include a gym, swimming pool, and equestrian stables, as well as a small mixed-use plaza containing a variety of retail stores, entertainment, offices, restaurants, and coffee shops.

We celebrated Thanksgiving on Saturday instead of the actual day, Thursday, this year. We didn’t have time for all the preparations since we had two days of professional development training at school. We usually have a big Thanksgiving dinner, hosting 25-35 people. This year we went much smaller (8 guests + 3 Kralovecs) due to our smaller home. It was truly a festive occasion with delicious food, bonhomie, and laughter. Everyone helped out with preparing the meal, including our domestic team of Dilia and Katia. Aaron and Lisa brought “Happy Salmon” and “Dead Certain” two card games. Players need to put in chronological order the deaths of 5 celebrities and famous people. It created a lot of conversation. I am always surprised by how much young people don’t know about celebrities from history and from my childhood. Nadia has perfected how to cook a turkey.

We called Owen and Oliver to have them included in the festivities. I can’t wait for Oliver’s visit to Tashkent in December.

The big story in Tashkent this week is air pollution. We have one of the worst air quality indexes in the world lateley due to a “temperature inversion”. In normal meteorological conditions, air gets colder as one ascends in the atmosphere. However, in an inversion, a layer of warmer air traps colder air below, acting like a lid on a pot and preventing warm air from rising and taking pollutants with it. Tashkent is vulnerable to inversions because it is located in a basin surrounded by mountains, which makes them more frequent and more severe. The air quality has worsened over the past two years. There are several sources of air pollution in Tashkent.

• 73% of gasoline sold in the city has an octane rating of 80, which is the cheapest of the three options of gasoline available at gas stations. 80-octane fuel emits more harmful byproducts than the cleaner-burning 92-octane and 95-octane fuels. The Uzbek government is acting quickly and banning the sale of 80-octane fuel as of December 1, 2025.
• The growth of cars in the city over the past 5 years has been incredible! Car ownership has increased by 32% over the last two years, and now, more than 1 million cars pass through the city streets daily. This has increased traffic but also emissions. Studies show vehicles contribute 60% of air pollutants.
• Another factor is real estate development. 15 years ago, the city was covered with 20-30% greenery, but today it has dropped to 10-18%. Developers are using green areas to build large apartment blocks. Uzbeks see apartments as investments, and developer greed means guaranteed profits. The dust from the construction and loss of trees is contributing to air pollutants.
• The average temperature in Central Asia increased by 1 degree Celsius in the last 10 years. The climate is drier and hotter. We have not had any precipitation this November, for example.
• Factories and greenhouses around the city burn cheap coal, and I’ve heard even tires are burned. There is a large coal-burning electrical plant near Angren, Uzbekistan.

The Uzbek president put together a special commission to address the problem. I hope it is successful. Local mosques are holding an istisqa or prayer for rain to help clear the pollution. It limits my exercise outdoors.

I had a busy week with finance committee, full board meeting, and a Director Parent Coffee. Thursday and Friday were professional development days at school. I did manage to take care of my health by getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist and getting an influenza vaccine for the 2026 season.

I really enjoyed reading Australian author Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional. In an interview at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Charlotte called it a “quiet” book. It is not plot-driven, and the author doesn’t attempt cliffhangers or to get the reader to turn the page. Instead, it is exquisite writing in a calm setting. I loved lying down in bed to wind down from a busy day and settle into the story. 

The main character is a middle-aged woman burnt out from a career of environmental activism and a recent divorce. She leaves Sydney to go back to her hometown in the dry plains of southern New South Wales and ends up living at a convent. The area Wood described reminded me of the sheep country south of Perth in Western Australia. Before Nadia and I had children, we lived in Perth for a couple of years. I think we even stayed a long weekend at a monastery there, so I could picture the setting easily. The woman joins a religious community, more for the rest than her beliefs. She likes the quiet lifestyle of working with her hands on the farm and going to prayers multiple times per day.

She spends time reflecting on her life. I could relate to her looking back at her parents and characters and events that happened in her small town when she was growing up. I am probably around the same age, and living into your late fifties gives you an insightful perspective. Charlotte Wood’s story has the major themes of forgiveness, retreat from the world, and grief. Experience a long life, all of us deal with the death of loved ones or people we can forgive, or acts that we seek forgiveness for.

Two plagues, one the COVID pandemic and the other a massive infestation of mice, form the backdrop of the story. The peace of the convent is broken with the arrival of an activist nun who is a former school classmate of the main character. She brings the remains of a former sister of the convent. She was unfortunately murdered in Thailand by a pastor while they were on a mission to serve the poor of that country. The nun is to bury the remains on the grounds of the farm surrounding the chapel. 

It is not the typical kind of book that I read and I can’t remember now how I found the book on my digital library, but I am glad I read it.

This is my final year in Tashkent, and I am documenting the beautiful sights and sounds of my life here. I cycle on the weekends occasionally and one of my safe routes is along the Ankhor Canal, from near the Seoul Mun mall all the way to the Victims of Repression Park. I can ride safely on sidewalks and the pedestrian/bike path along the canal. I captured the setting sunlight on the fall trees. Fall colors in Tashkent are similar to Europe, a lot of yellows and no reds. However, my friend pointed this out: the leaves stay on the trees longer here than in North America. Peak fall colors in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are amazing, but by a week or two, the leaves are all gone, leaving bare trees until the first snowfall.

On Sunday, I went for a hike with my friend Aaron. After a busy and stressful week, it is nice to get out into nature. Due to a political summit meeting of Central Asian leaders in Tashkent, many of the road leading out of the city were blocked. We found a way out that led us to Tavaksay Canyon area. We walked up the left side of the canyon as you are looking towards the falls at the end. We were rewarded with the view below. We only saw four mountain bikers and two other hikers on the other side of the canyon. We had the place to ourselves. The snow-capped mountains in the background reminded me of the state of Nevada (USA) when I lived in the high sage deserts many years ago.