Almaty, Kazakhstan

Wow, what a great city Almaty is!  Like, easily my favorite city on this adventure so far.  Like Bishkek, it’s very near to mountains.  Unlike Bishkek, you can get to them without a whole lot of effort.  Almaty is very clean, has cool and various museums, and is absolutely stuffed with parks.  It’s a fantastically walkable city—the sidewalks are wide and sometimes flanked by a second sidewalk for bikes and those electric stand-up scooters, of which there are many zooming around. And people are RUNNING on those many wide sidewalks.  Women are running! Solo!  I haven’t seen that since I left the USA.  No one notices me at all.

(running/walking path along the river)

In contrast to Kyrgyzstan, which pretty much operates on a cash economy (and that cash had better be in small bills because no one ever has change!), everywhere in Almaty takes credit cards.  The bus system is in Kazakh and Russian, true, but once you get oriented to the map, moving around by bus is clean, convenient, comprehensive, and cheap (about 20 cents per ride). 

I guess that when I say that Almaty is a great city, what I mean, essentially, is that it’s easy.  I’ve been moving through some places that have resisted me, to a greater or lesser degree.  Even Kyrgyzstan, which I loved, was not without obstacles that just made moving through life normally more difficult.  Almaty could be Denver, except that the signs are in Cyrillic.  I’m grateful to have several days together to decompress here, to be thoughtless about my movements, to wallow in the ease of it all. 

(Ascension Cathedral---Russian Orthodox, where I attended a vespers service)

But again, even here, as in all these Central Asian cities, the air pollution is really something....