I made it to Aktau this morning and I am fascinated. The city is a combination of oil development and pure old soviet aesthetic. The Caspian is pure emerald in the distance but turns into an odd boiling brown soup of algae right by the shore in the city. People fish and kids catch shrimp among the sea rocks - the whole thing is oddly serene and beautiful in a very run-down falling-apart kind of way. The people are really open and nice, nothing like those in Almaty and Astana.
There are two interesting things about Aktau. One is that because it is an oil town, there is quite a bit of money to go around so the town is considered rather wealthy despite the appearances of it being rusty and run-down (although the rumors of it being extremely expensive did not turn out to be true). This means that many people have access to the Internet, even those living in the little villages surrounding the city (or so my taxi driver from one such village claimed as he complained about the Internet being very slow). The second is that Megaline, the Kazakhstan main provider does not offer much of the Internet service here. This is left to one of the smaller providers here who is using the Azery hardware and happens to kind of forget about that whole blocking thing. So there basically is no blocking here in Aktau - LJ, Blogger and everything else is available. I was at first taken aback when my first interviewee told me that she had HEARD about blocking but never actually experienced it... now it makes sense why that is so.
The hotel where I am staying is one of the old legacy soviet hotels, which means there is no Internet there. However, there is a bar next door that offers free wifi with the purchase of a beer and I am one of the three laptop equipped customers here at the moment (the only three really). Every single one of my four cabbies so far has Internet at home, complains about its slowness and tells me how really, the Internet is very important these days. Mostly.... it's important for skype... with relatives. In fact, Skype remains the winner in just about every conversation - the all-important equivalent of the phone but free or very cheap and when free, it comes with the added benefit of being able to see the interlocutor. Even when people explain their use of SNSs, there comes a moment where they explain that the most important moment was getting everyone's phone numbers and skype id's, but now they just go see the updates and really it's a lot less important. Russia and Kazakhstan took to cellphones like wildfire as it somehow fit into the specific cultural needs of relational maintenance and live interaction. They talk about the emotions they experience when hearing each others voices.
In one story, a girl told me how one of the russian websites was running a free calling promotion where it was possible to call home phones in Russia from anywhere in the world for free during the International Women's day via the skype setup of the site. She called one of her best friends who now lives in Russia but the connection was so bad, the best friend couldn't hear her at all. She texted the best friend and said - I can hear you fine, just talk to me - and the best friend talked, telling her about everything happening in her life. She was near tears by the end with emotion and still unable to say anything in return. She still talks about this incident with a lot of passion - because hearing someone's voice and their intonation is important if you can't see them.
Generally, Aktau seems much more relaxed and genial. There are two young people sitting at a table near me, in the sports bar where I am using the Internet and incidentally eating some of the best shashlik of the trip so far. The both showed up with laptops. She has been hanging out on vkontakte from the beginning while he put on headphones and turned on skype for the first half hour, talking to a friend until his laptop died. Now he is waiting for the laptop to charge as she is typing away on her laptop across the table from him. Maybe it's time to barge in and see if they are as nice as everyone else that I had met in Aktau so far...
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