Why Kazaz... Kakaz... oh, you know? And isn't there where Borat is from?

If we had a dollar for every time...., well the adoption would've been paid for, and we could've taken a nice vacation on the tax credit. Alas, even the (extremely nice & helpful) Travel Medicine doctor yesterday, who gave Ava and I our typhus and hepatitis boosters, couldn't begin to pronounce the word Kazakhstan.

So, some fun facts about Kazakhstan:
1) Second largest of the former Soviet Republics, after Russia
2) Ninth largest nation in the world
3) Bordered by Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and the Caspian Sea
4) Russian is the predominant spoken language.
5) Racially, most people are Asian or Eurasian
6) Religion - ~ 50% Christian and 50% muslim, apparently coexisting in harmony
7) 6th largest U.S.-international adoption program for many years, approx 700-800 children annually
8) Poised to become extremely wealthy, with a developing pipeline for sending oil to China
9) Mostly desert, with some really tall mountains. Pictures I've seen remind me of Tibet

As for why? Well, it's like this: Sal and I are both on our second marriage, and had only been legally married for 6 months when we started the process. Right off the bat, this left us qualifying only for Guatemala, Vietnam and Kazakhstan. We initially chose Vietnam because we wanted Ava (adopted from China in '03) to have an Asian sibling. See my first post to learn what happened to the initial endeavor. When we decided to switch countries, we wanted to be sure as we could that we wouldn't run into the same problem with over-demand that had occurred with Vietnam. Because Kazakhstan requires two trips to the country, and a total of 5-6 weeks spent overseas, we felt like fewer people were likely to choose it, in the wake of China's changes. And most of the children are Asian or Eurasian, so Ava would still share some ethnic similarity with her new sibling. Of course, there was more to it that that, including just a "feeling" I got when reading other Kaz-adoptive-parents' blogs. But that's the one-paragraph version.

I admit it, Sal and I both loved Borat. Now let's never speak of it again...