Almaty is a very green city. Roughly translated it means ‘home of the apple trees’. Haven’t seen any apples, but there are a huge number of trees everywhere, and lots of parks. Wide boulevards, very attractive. Lots of walking and e-bike streets. They even erect bicycle repair poles, complete with a rack to hang your bike on, and spanners and allen keys to effect your repairs.
Unfortunately the city is surrounded by tall mountains in a bit of a basin, and with the number of cars choking the streets, the pollution is very bad, but its a lovely city to wander around in, so that’s what we did today – the only free day on the trip. Gotta get those legs pumping.
Headed off after breakfast on a self guided walking tour of the city highlights that we weren’t taken to yesterday. Walked along the canal to the station, and caught the metro into the centre of town. Only one metro line, but the staff were smiling and helpful. I knew that they must exist somewhere on the planet! Cost all of 25c for a trip. The problem was finding small change.
Sure enough, we emerged from the bowels of the subway, and what do you think the first thing we saw was? A Gloria Jeans coffee shop. C’mon guys. Its Kazakhstan.
The average wage here is about AU$20 per day – try surviving on that! So everything other than Starbucks and similar aspirational brands are cheap. Lunch yesterday cost us $4 each. You pay 5c to use the toilet, 25c to ride the train. By contrast, morning tea of coffee and bun at Starbucks was $8 each, but at least the toilets were clean, and the coffee drinkable.
Saw the Aeuzov National Drama Theatre, Technical University, Astana Square, the Kazakh Opera and Ballet House, Arazan Baths and Spa (specialising in Turkish, Finnish and Russian spas), the Central Mosque with gold-plated domes, and Arbat shopping mall, whilst also wandering past several of yesterday’s sights. Universally the people are friendly, giving up their train seats to us despite our protests, and enquiring where we were from. Even the security police at the train stations were helpful and polite!
Its a problem when you only spend a couple of days in a country. How much money do you need? We asked Valentina when we arrived at the airport. “All depends”, we were told, and that’s the correct answer. Just not very helpful. She said that dinners would cost between $10 and $15 per person, plus snacks and coffees. We were here 3 nights, so I changed $50. Trouble was, we were given biggish local notes, and everywhere we tried to spend them they couldn’t give us enough change. Imagine trying to buy an 80t train fare with a 1000t note. No market vendor or shop keeper had that much money in the till. So they all insisted we pay by card, even for the smallest amounts. Thats all fine, but now we were stuck with 15,000t that we couldn’t spend after tomorrow.
Time for a grand gesture. Why not take your wonderful, long suffering wife out for a night on the town. Found a highly respected Italian restaurant close to the hotel, and enjoyed a terrific meal, before coming home to pack for an early departure tomorrow.
What a great idea to have those bike repair poles! I had to send that photo on to a couple of cycling enthusiast friends!
What a stunning background to the city! Must get cold though. Pity there were no apples to be found 😆
that subway….. think I saw a similar subway in Leningrad? or photos of it….. immaculate and beautiful – interesting city – far more modern than I had thought