Tomorrow is the Big Day

Tomorrow we have an appointment with the Ministry of Education to establish our bona fides, and then we go to the orphanage or Baby House, as it's called here, to meet children.

After our tasty but costly breakfast, we set up the costly hotel internet connection on the laptop and blogged away. Then a walk into town, down Dostyk, formerly Leninstrasse or whatever the Russian equivalent is, to Panfilov Park, then to the Green Bazaar. Cigarettes here are dirt cheap, 80 Tenge or about 75 cents a pack; everyone smokes; people set up tables on the sidewalk with open packs, selling loosies. The Bazaar has tables chock-a-block with one selling bras in all colors, if not sizes, next to a woman selling kim chee fixings. Walked back down Dostyk, and stopped at the Guinness Pub for Lowenbraus (go figure). Then back to the hotel to meet Sasha/Alex and get a Kazakh cell phone and Internet card.

The problem with picking restaurants from a 2001 guidebook - sometimes they go out of business, but on the walk to there we encountered what we surmised were several thousand high school students and their parents celebrating graduation in the main downtown square. Incredible panorama of people all decked out, some in traditional garb, some in typical prom outfits. Got there just as all several thousand released the balloons they had been holding. At the center of the ceremony, about 50 young men in yellow hooded robes were carrying spears, bearing, in Candace's view, an uncanny and unfortunate resemblance to Klansmen. The whole ceremony was shown via video on giant, ballpark-style screens around the edges of the square. Kicked myself for leaving the camera at the hotel.

We ended up at Line Brew, a "Belgian" restaurant: beer is Belgian, food is Kazakh and pretty good. (An unchosen appetizer option: salted lard with pickled garlic.) As it got dark, the flies started to bite, and we high-tailed it back to hotel.

Two other vignettes that did not make it to the pictures. (This is Candace now):

• The center city is built on the side of a big hill. (Our hotel is at the south end of town, at the top of the hill, hence confusingly - for a New Yorker - called uptown.) All over town, there are stone-sided drainage ditches, about two feet wide, laid between the sidewalk and the roadway to shunt runoff down the hill. Wherever it is shady, flocks of pretty girls wearing tight tight skirts and high high heels perch, squatting on their haunches, facing each other across the ditches, cell phones in hand, text messaging their (presumably) absent friends.
• The whole place has the feel of an about-to-be boomtown. Ligne Roset has just opened a store under the restaurant at which we ate. As we walked back from dinner, a big black Hummer with a stunning girl hanging out of the sunroof roared by. (DJ: CD left out the four white stretch limos that almost ran us over. Pedestrians do not have the right of way in Almaty. Green walk signs blink twice and turn red and you better get your fat white ass out of the street, boy.) Got back to the room and as David did his thing on the blog, I realized we could watch TV in Kazakh, Russian, English (UK and USA versions), French, Japanese, German, Arabic, or (most bizarre of all) Spanish with Hebrew subtitles.