Bill's Blog

There was unseasonably cool and overcast weather this week as August 2023 came to an end. Tashkent has a Mediterranean climate and August and September are usually dry, sunny, and hot. I was able to wear a tie at school and we enjoyed outdoor dinners at home the week. My wife Nadia had an atypia-classified mole removed from her neck. The Tashkent International Clinic right next door to the school is like our own personal medical clinic. Dr. Inom is our family doctor and he always calms Nadia. She is recovering and also feeling better after having a long, strong cold for the past couple of weeks.

Both Oliver and Ocean started their soccer seasons this week. I drove Oliver to school on Monday and watched a bit of his practice before classes started. Our school plays 7-man soccer due to the small sizes of the schools in Central Asia. Oliver looked good and is rapidly improving his game. They have a new coach this year but the team returns many of its key players from last year. They should have a successful season. I am soaking up any opportunity to spend time with him this year.

I love my dog Obi and he loved the cool weather this week. He does not do well in the heat. I like the narrow streets of the neighborhoods of Tashkent, a holdover from pre-Soviet times. The Russians preferred wide boulevards and they are common in our section of the city, Mirabad. Above are some photos of our walks this week.

We have a long weekend to celebrate Uzbekistan’s independence. I registered for a 10-kilometer run on Sunday. I hope my calf does not tighten. I went for a run a couple of nights ago and experienced tightness in my left calf at the 7-kilometer mark. I’ll see how it goes.

We just completed our second week of school, our first complete 5-day week. I feel better, finally getting over almost a 3-week cold. Both Nadia and I tested and it was not COVID or influenza, but a very strong cold virus. My mucous membranes produced an overabundance of phlegm for the entire 3 weeks. I unfortunately gave the cold to Nadia who is in week 2 of symptoms. She has been miserable and hopefully, she too, will be feeling more like herself sooner rather than later. She had a complete breakdown of her immune system with an ear infection and other issues. It is going around the city with many parents and employees reporting similar symptoms. As you can see in the photo below, Nadia was not feeling 100%

On a more positive note, I went shopping with Ocean, Oliver, and Nicole and we bought soccer shoes and equipment so they are ready for the season. It was fun taking them to DY Sports and helping them find the right gear. Oliver is entering his final season in grade 12 and has really developed an interest and ability in soccer. He plays a lot of FIFA Premier League Soccer e-sport and fantasy soccer. This has actually improved his physical soccer and I am really looking forward to his season. I am concerned about his feet however because he easily gets blisters. He has had this problem for several years and we’ve tried a variety of shoes. Nadia also bought some protective foot gear as well, and we’ll try that again. This will be Ocean’s first time out for the soccer team and I hope she has a good experience. I love watching my children compete in interscholastic sports. All young people should have the experience of participating in a team sport. Being a part of something bigger than yourself is good for you.

Michigan Senator Gary Peters was in Tashkent yesterday on a tour of Central Asia. He is the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The Senate committee has a broad range of responsibilities, both national and international, so I think his tour was part of his work as chair of the committee. I was invited to have lunch with him as the token Michigander! Senator Peters was down-to-earth and funny. He mentioned he had been through my hometown of Iron River on a motorcycle tour recently and we both agreed that it is a shame that so many young people leave the Upper Peninsula, like I did. Peters is a Democrat and won in 2020 by only 1.7%. Michigan is a “blue state” but only by a narrow margin. I am an independent voter and choose politicians by who they are as a person and look at their beliefs and voting record. I am pleased that Michigan recently has been more progressive than nearby states like Wisconsin and Ohio and hope that it continues in that direction. He was friendly and I was honored to meet him and get my photograph with him.

The summer weather is cooling a bit with temperatures in the morning in the high 60s and highs in the low 90s. Cool weather (high of 75) and rain are coming Sunday, so looking forward to the change.

The Tashkent International School starts earlier than most schools in the USA but is in line with many international schools. Our first day of classes was this past Tuesday, August 15. This is a special year for us as it is the last that we will have our middle son, Oliver with us. He is a senior and a member of the Class of 2024. We will be down to 1 child at home, with our oldest son Owen, leaving with the Class of 2021. We miss him dearly and will be falling apart all over again next June when Ollie graduates. I am making a point to spend as much time with him as possible.

As you can see in the photo above, I am the only morning person in the Kralovec household. Oliver is not too bad in the mornings like me, but Nadia, Ocean, and Owen don’t function too well early in the day. I had to be at school early on the first day, but on the second day, we took the traditional first day of school photo in our back garden. It is such a wonderful aspect of working in education that Nadia and I get to go to work with our children instead of seeing them go off to school and only meet them in the evenings. It is comforting and special to see them through the day. I did manage to video Oliver and Ocean coming to school on the first day. I had morning gate duty where I greet the students, employees and parents as they arrive. It is nice to see Oliver and Ocean every morning.

Rarely in life am I truly awestruck, but last Saturday night was one of those moments. Living in a city of 3 million people, light pollution blocks out most of the night sky. We see the major planets and some stars, but nothing compared to camping in the mountains outside of the city. We spent an evening stargazing while camping in the mountains overlooking the town of Tavaksay. We were looking for meteors from the Perseid meteor shower was in full view that evening. Our group did see around 14 meteors, but we also saw Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite train going through the sky.

I didn’t know what I was looking at! I thought it was an alien ship in the shape of a snake. I was amazed at this. I learned later that Space X, Musk’s space company, has over 4,500 satellites orbiting the earth right now, which is over 65% of the total number of satelites in orbit. I encourage you to listen the the New York Times The Daily podcast which I linked to above. The satellites are close together so internet signals can be beamed down to stations on earth continuously. The Ukrainians are using them the communicate in the war against Russia. What a sight and it will be a moment I will never forget. These trains have been going for a while and I am surprised I never heard of them before. My daughter Ocean caught them on films, as did the a camera in Hawaii that the BBC featured in a recent video. The ancients only had the stars to look at in the evenings. Today with electricity and digital entertainment, humans rarely look in the sky. Our camping trip reminded me of the beauty of the night sky and astronomy. I should take some more time looking at the night sky.

Sitting on a blanket with between Ocean, Oliver, and Nadia was pure heaven for me. I am savoring the precious moments we have with our children as they soon will be away to university, careers, spouses, and their own families. It was a special night and we will definitely do more camping this year. You can free-range camp almost anywhere in the mountains or deserts of Uzbekistan. Sunset is magic time here and there are few spots in the world more beautiful. I highly recommend getting out into the countryside of this beautiful country.

A final highlight of the trip was photographing this Corsac Fox on my Sunday morning walk to the waterfall.

Tavaksay is a canyon in the Ugam mountain range. The Ugams about an 1-hour to 1 and 1/2 hour drive north east of Tashkent. The Ugam range is the far western part of the Tian Shan (Mountains of Heaven) Range. As you can see in the map below, the Tien Shan range is connected to the Pamirs of Tajikistan which eventually leads to the Himalayas of India and Tibet.

The rapid growth and development of Tashkent is amazing to watch. In the four years I’ve lived in the city, the amount of new businesses and apartment blocks is astounding. It has caused strains on the infrastructure such as much more traffic, lack of electricity and heating fuel for all, etc. On the positive side, it has made life here much more pleasant with better restaurants and cafes and more things to do and see. It seems like every couple of weeks a new business is opening. When I went to pick up my bicycle from the mechanic earlier this week, Nadia and I noticed that the British Coffee chain, Costa Coffee opened a store in the mall near Eco Park. Costa Coffee was founded by an Italian guy (Mr. Costa) living in London back in the 1970s. They bought a Polish chain, CoffeeHeaven years ago and had a lot of shops in Eastern Europe. We used to go to Costa Coffee when we lived in Belgrade, Serbia. Today, it is the second-largest chain of coffee shops after Starbucks. I had an excellent nitro cold brew and Nadia enjoyed a piece of cheesecake.

On the flip side, in some ways, Tashkent has a long way to go to become a modern, capitalistic city. The former president, Islam Karimov kept the economy tightly under wraps in the post-USSR independence. I was walking Obi the other night when I came upon these two cows, tied up in front of a house located very close to the backside of our school. It reminded me of the stories my mother used to tell of her childhood when she had to go up to the cow pasture in my village of Caspian and collect the family cow to put in the yard overnight. That was probably in the 1940s. No one in my village today has a family cow and the young people growing up in Caspian probably do not refer to the hill as the “cow pasture” anymore. We called it the cow pasture thanks to our parents who remembered that time. I don’t think you would see cows in many European cities. This is one of the reasons I enjoy living here and having adventures overseas.

The start of the school year for an administrator is incredibly busy. This week we welcomed returning faculty and took the annual staff photograph. I am looking forward to school year and seeing the students!

This 2021 novel is a good airplane book as it is a fast-paced thriller, with two ex-convict fathers doing battle against a motorcycle gang of white supremacists funded by corrupt politicians. It. is different because it deals with LGBTQ characters and issues and a lot of dialogue about discrimination in the USA against African-Americans. It is set in rural Virginia, just southeast of the city of Richmond. I have only visited the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC and the towns and rivers in northern Virginia near the border with West Virginia. The southern part of Virginia is more “South” than “North” and the entire state is south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The two “heroes” of the book are a black father and a white father. Their sons were in a gay marriage and both fathers never accepted this. They have a change of heart when both of their sons are murdered. The story tracks their revenge to find the killers. Cosby in the book argues through one of the main characters that African-Americans are discriminated equally or more against than LGBTQ people. Cosby does a good job of capturing the vernacular of the rural Virgina. The book has been optioned to Paramount to be made into a movie.

I had a bad cold this weekend and was in bed. This gave me the opportunity to binge some television, which I rarely do. I watched the entire season of Apple TV’s Silo. I love science fiction and anything post-apocalypse or set in the future. The drama is about a community of 10,000 people living underground because nuclear war has turned their earth’s atmosphere poisonous. One of the most remarkable aspects of the 10-episode program, is the “silo” that must have cost the producers a fortune to build. In one of the extras for the series, the director said they built 70, detailed sets that the actors remarked brought the world alive for them. It is a visual treat and really puts the viewer in this world.

One of the big themes of the show is truth. Some of the characters think that the leaders of the community are hiding something and perhaps, the earth’s ecosystem is not poisoned. They find “relics”, objects from “before the rebellion”, and conspiracy theories run rampant. I imagine the founders of the system thought long and hard about how to maintain an enclosed, artificial life support system underground for many generations. I see why the colony has so many rules to guide its actions, especially after everyone who was there for the war has died. How do you maintain the “silo” when imperfect and selfish human beings are the occupants. I won’t spoil the series here, but the ending is excellent and worth watching until the end.

The show is based on Hugh Howey’s novel series, Wool, Shift, and Dust that were published between 2011 and 2013. I won’t read the books because there is so much else to consume.

This reminds me of a conversation I had this summer about time travel. I would definitely choose to time travel to the future instead of the past if I had a choice. I already know the past, but I would like to see what the future holds for humanity and the planet Earth. Most of my friends prefer to travel to a specific time in the past.

In summary, highly recommend Silo, and Razorblade Tears gets a middling recommendation from me.

I am back to work as we are going through the new teacher orientation this week. My family is still on holiday, with Nadia returning to work next Monday and the kids to school the following Tuesday.

I strained my lower back muscle on my right side on Saturday using the rowing machine. I did a power yoga workout on Sunday that further aggravated it, so I am taking it easy this week. I am not in pain, but am still a bit still, especially when I bend over. I’ll give it a couple more days before getting back to heavier exercise. In the meantime, I can still walk the dog, and ride my bike and I might even try to go for a run on Thursday. I learned when I feel something in my back, not to do a strenuous back workout. I need to be more careful at my age.

We are all still battling jet lag. I have a harder time going east than west. I have been doing OK working through the day and getting sleep at night, but I still am sleepy from time to time. I also have an irritating slight cold that is not helping. I have a scratchy throat, lightly runny nose and irritated eyes. Enough of my health issues this week.

I am enjoying getting back into the routines of daily life in Tashkent. Nadia and I went shopping at the Mirabad market on Sunday. Plenty of delicious fruits and veggies, and we bought some pork cuts from the Russian butchers. We went looking for a natural gas grill and only found imported grills for $700+. We are looking for a smaller grill for a much cheaper price. I am cycling again in Tashkent, and on Monday rode along one of the side canals in the city to avoid traffic. The Russians made canals through Tashkent and today they are good places for walking. I noticed the ropes hanging off the bridge (below) into the water. The current is very strong and if someone is in trouble, they could save themselves by grabbing onto the ropes. A good idea.

I love exploring the city by walking my dog Obi. We always find interesting things for me to look at and for him to sniff.

It is nice to be back in Tashkent after a restful summer holiday. I am getting used to the higher temperatures (high of 102 F today) and lower humidity (43%). Tashkent has a Mediterranean climate with hot, dry summers.

City officials improved Furqat Park in our neighborhood. I went for a run yesterday morning and notice many people walking before it heats up. We also take the cross-country team there to train to break up the monotony of running at school. If you combine several laps of the park and school, you can get a decent 5-kilometer run. Furqat was an Uzbek author, poet and activist. He was against religion and Asceticism and supported human dignity. He lived in Tashkent for a short time (1889-1893) and traveled extensively. The Russian Tsarist regime eventually forced him into exile in western China due to his criticism of their rule. There is a statue of him in the Milly Bog (National Park) in Tashkent.

It is so nice to have my dog back in my life. Our precious Obi was happy to see us after our long summer holiday. I’ve been taking him for some long walks in the evening and noticed he is a bit out of shape. He also does not do well with the heat so I am being careful with him. Last night we walked around Milly Bog. The cityscape is changing in Tashkent and the large skyscrapers in the Tashkent City project are nearing completion. You can see three of them in the background of Bunyodkor Square.

I have not been seeing much of my family. They are suffering from jet lag. I am doing pretty well to maintain my day/night balance and it helped being in the office at school Friday and Saturday. I am already in full work mode, collecting new teachers from the airport, arranging my new office and taking care of the multitude of tasks that need to be done to start the school year again.

Living internationally since 1992 means I’ve been on many flights over the years. I mostly enjoy travel days because it means a day with no phone calls, emails, etc. A little break from my life for reflection, reading, and talking with family. I love the fact that our teenage children are trapped with us.

My “day” started at 1:45 AM with the alarm going off after 3 hours of sleep. My home village of Caspian is almost a 3-hour drive to Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Green Bay is a better option to fly out of than the closer airports of Marquette and Kingsford in my opinion. Despite the longer drive, there are more flights and easier logistics when it comes to checking in luggage and making connections. The only downside today was a 6:01 AM departure from Green Bay to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

We almost missed the connecting flight. We forgot that most international flights depart out of Terminal 5 at O’Hare Airport, which is located away from the other terminals. We were sleeping and waiting around for a gate announcement in one of the domestic terminals, but it never did come on the departure information boards. Thankfully, Nadia asked some nearby passengers about the Turkish Airlines flight and they reminded us that we needed to go to Terminal 5. When we finally realized that, it was close to boarding time. We had the option of taking the train shuttle, which requires going through security again, or taking an 11:30 AM bus that literally drives between runways. We decided to take the bus which was a mistake. A summer storm temporarily halted flights and planes were backed up. We waited for 25 minutes to cross a particularly busy tarmac route. Finally, the kind pilots of Scandinavian Airlines saw the line of utility vehicles and buses full of travelers and let us pass. We made it to the gate with 5 minutes to spare before they closed boarding. The storm also delayed the departure of the flight which left around 1:30 PM Central time.

The long flight from Chicago to Istanbul was exhausting for me. There was a lot of turbulence and it was hot and stuffy in the plane. We paid to choose our seats (another money-making process for airlines) and had the emergency exit rows which gave me plenty of leg space. I watched Quentin Terantino’s Django which is a great movie. I also watched 65, a science fiction movie starring Adam Driver. It was not good, just him and a girl fighting against dinosaurs. By the time we arrived in Istanbul at 8:00 AM the next day after 9 and 1/2 hours of flight time, I was in rough shape. I get headaches during long travel, no matter how much water I drink. I was also sleepy and had nausea from the bumpy flight.

The Istanbul Airport’s “Yotel Air” is a godsend! We booked two rooms for 7 hours and it allowed me to shower, use the toilet, take a long nap in a comfortable bed, iron my clothes, and feel much better for the last leg. Worth every penny of the 150 Euros! I could have slept a bit more, but am ready to board our final flight, Turkish Airlines from Istanbul to Tashkent. The massive airport in Istanbul is beautiful. One downside of the size of the airport is the length of time it takes a plane to taxi from the runway to a terminal. It was about a 20-minute taxi to the terminal. I am always amazed at the variety of human colors and cultures one sees. It is so different from the past 3 weeks we spent in my home village of Caspian where 96% of the population is white. It made me realize again how isolated of a childhood I had. For example, I never heard a foreign language spoken in person until I went to university.

The final leg of 4 and 1/2 hour’s flight was really smooth. I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes and mostly slept. The flight left around 7:00 PM and we arrived in Tashkent around 2:00 AM on Friday, July 28 with the time change. Not much to note on the flight or our arrival to our home in Tashkent. It was interesting that Turkish Airlines as part of their flight information provided during the flight gave passengers the prayer times and the direction of Mecca. You would not find that on a non-Islamic country’s airline or if the destination was not to an Islamic country. As you can see below, there is 1 minute and 36 seconds until the prayer time and Mecca is 3,528 kilometers to the north west.

It was a special weekend to have my two brothers and their families together with mine. It was the first time since my dad’s funeral in 2012 that we are all together. We had dinner at Alice’s Supper Club in Iron River and then played cornhole and whiffle ball in our backyard. As you can see above, my brother Jimmer and I are adopted and my brother Andy was the biological son of our adopted parents. We do not look alike or act alike, but grew up together in a loving household and have the lifelong bond of family. It was great to reconnect with them and my nephews Beau and Tony this summer. Owen, Oliver, Beau, Ocean, and Tony are quickly becoming adults and starting the next generation of our family tree. I loved spending time with them! We had to capture the moment with this photo in our yard on July 23, 2023.

We had a nice final day in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Ocean, Nadia, and I traveled to Marquette for a final doctor’s visit and my eyeglasses came in, so all was good. It was a hectic packing process as the errands were unexpected. We returned from Marquette around 6:00 PM and left Caspian at 2:15 AM last night to catch a 6:01 AM flight out of Green Bay to Chicago. My brother Jimmer is such a good guy, he drove his van with our bags to help us get to the airport.

I loved driving my oldest son Owen, to and from work this summer. He is working as a groundskeeper at the George Young Golf Resort. The discipline of working Monday through Friday from 5:00 AM to 1:00 PM has been good for him. Nadia and I are proud of him that he is sticking it out. He is learning what it means to have a job, get up early, get enough sleep and the value of a paycheck. He is also learning about golf, managing a resort and taking care of the greens, bunkers and fairways. I wish those mornings of me packing a lunch and then driving a sleepy Owen the 6 miles to the resort could have lasted a bit longer. Riding in the quiet of pre dawn Northwoods with your son… Nothing better! I stopped on the final day to snap the photo below of sunrise on Chicagoan Lake, which is adjacent to the golf course. I think it captures the beauty of the inland lakes of my beloved Upper Peninsula. 

The moments us five together are fleeting as Owen starts his third year at Northern Michigan University next month. Oliver is entering his senior year at the Tashkent International School and we’ll be saying goodbye to him next summer. My daughter Ocean is now a gorgeous woman and will be in tenth grade. I wish I could slow down time so Nadia and I could enjoy being parents together a little bit longer…