Those mountains are a ten minute drive away. The smog just makes them look far-away and foreboding. Some days the air is so thick with coal dust that I come home with tan lines on my arms- you can see the line where my shirt stopped the coal dust from sticking to my arm. Most days when I check weather.com, this is what I get:
Weather: "Smoke." I mean, come on. Someone at the Weather Channel has a real sick sense of humor. Here's the city itself:
"Almaty" translates to "The Big Apple," and it's a fairly large city with more than a million people. Here are three of them, some of my roommates:
I live with two Kazakhs, a Korean-American and an Uzbek-American. We all squeeze into a three-bedroom apartment in "the Queens of Almaty." Here we are posing with bronze statues of the Kazakh Beatles:
Anyway, back to the apartment. It's cute, but there are certain "Kazakh" elements. Such as: no control over the heat, occasional orange water, power outages, etc. Also, we just got hot water. Before that, this is how we took baths and did dishes:
Yes, we are filling buckets with water. May I remind you that this is the largest and most cosmopolitan of all the Kazakh cities? Actualy, a five-minute bus ride will get you completely out of the city, and nature takes over pretty quickly.
The best way to get around the city itself is to hitchike, except you pay the person giving you a ride. Just flag someone over, tell them where you want to go, and haggle over the price. Some people pick up hitchkikers on the way to work to subsidize the gas prices. The catch? Sometimes you don't get the best drivers. Here's one of the many drivers I've had who was pulled over while I was in the car. I'm not sure why he was pulled over. It could have been for running a red light, driving against traffic, nearly hitting a pedestrian... any number of things.
All this traffic and city living causes a lot of stress, which some of us choose to take out on watermelons. The melons (which, like everything else, the locals tell us were "invented" here) are especially delicious. And you really appreciate them when you haggle for them at the bazaar across town, carry them home on the crowded bus, and then haul them up five flights of stairs.
How else do we deal with stress? By eating. A lot. Here we are about to dig into a big bowl of horse noodles:
When we cook for ourselves, the market is the big "Green Bazaaar," where I haggle to knock 8 cents off my kilo of potatoes. I actually really love to haggle. Having really poor Russian skills works to my advantage because vendors get so confused and frustrated that they eventually give in.
Sometimes the weather does clear up a bit, and the moutains are gorgeous.
So gorgeous that I occasionally lose my senses and do things that any sane person would never agree to do. Like hike. I've actually been dragged all over these mountains and still don't see the point. The mountains look the same when you're in them as they do in the city- just closer. Give me a break.
However, hiking is a good excuse for picnicking, of which I approve. I also approve of candy wrapped in the Kazakhstan flag.
Although Kazakhs cuisine is not among the world's finest, it does have a certain flare for the dramatic.
