Exploring Almaty

First things first

I didn’t sleep deeply last night but had dozed from 2330 till 0700 this morning, which is fine for me.  After a greasy included breakfast of three fried eggs and sides, I left the hostel in search of ATMs (or bankomats as they’re called in this part of the world).

The first one I found at the Halyk Bank worked like a charm and there was no fee imposed either.  I got the maximum dispense of KZT100000 in KZT20000 (about USD45) notes.  I couldn’t relax until I managed to break it into smaller notes later in the bank.

I found the Zenkov Cathedral within Panfilov Park and went in for a visit.  Like all Orthodox churches I’ve visited, it is very ornate and gorgeous.  The Central Mosque on the other hand is a modern simplistic design from the outside with gorgeous shiny golden domes.  With shorts on, I didn’t try going in.

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Cheated

I found the Green Market which I had visited last time and was craving for fruit.  I thought some dried apricots and almonds would be good too.  I think I got badly cheated paying KZT 2000, 1600, 2400 respectively for them. It was the perils of working with a new currency combined with me being a bad bargainer.  Agreeing to go up “slightly” turned out to be quite an expensive mistake.

I consoled myself with a pastry (samsa) eaten on the way back to the hostel where I had a break.  The fruit, dried fruit and nuts turned out to be top notch but it still doesn’t justify the price.

I tried to make that my only food till dinner but it didn’t work and I had to have a doner on my next walk.  It was very good with pickled chillis offered separately.

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Museum

In the afternoon, I took a Yandex car to the Central State Museum.  At first it was the typical pottery, bronze cookware and costumes.  Fortunately, I came out with a couple of learnings:

• The Turkic languages here were written in a Runic script. I had only known about it being written in the modified Arabic cursive and later Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
• There was a large hall devoted to the minority ethnicities of Kazakhstan. It also explained the timeline for the Russian Tsarist colonisation of Central Asia.  For some reason, it devoted a lot of attention to Uzbek history.  Part of that included the forced deportation of Koreans, Greeks, Turks, Tartars, Poles from the extremities of USSR to Uzbekistan in 1937. The pretext was often that these ethnic minorities were cooperating with the war enemies.  You can read more about it here.

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Kok Tobe

I finished my exploration with a cable car ride up to the hilltop viewpoint at t Kok Tobe.  Here, the air felt cooler and less humid compared to down in the city.

I couldn’t see much of the snowy mountains that I recall seeing last trip (especially from the airport).

There was nothing to keep me up there for very long and I returned back down and grabbed dinner at a 24h value diner called Kaganat which I remember from my previous trip.

On my walks in the afternoon, I noticed many food delivery people (Glovo brand here) on foot!  Not on bicycles or in cars!  I’m thinking the food would not be very appealing (to me anyway) by the time it got to the consumer.

After the hot and sticky roam-around, I hit the shower nearly immediately upon my return around 1900.