{"id":6809,"date":"2010-12-19T08:30:42","date_gmt":"2010-12-19T13:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=6809"},"modified":"2010-10-16T05:08:08","modified_gmt":"2010-10-16T10:08:08","slug":"astana-is-a-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/?p=6809","title":{"rendered":"Astana is a Trip"},"content":{"rendered":"

We woke up that next morning in our rather filthy apartment in Astana, Kazakhstan and wandered into the kitchen to begin boiling water for breakfast.<\/p>\n

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As I fiddled with the single electric hot plate style burner that had been placed on the no longer operational and rather rusty soviet stove, I found myself scratching all over my stomach and sides.<\/p>\n

A strolled into the bathroom and picked up my shirt to see my body dotted with bites\u2026 bed bugs. Well, I guess they would come sooner or later. Tonight I would need to figure out some kind of new strategy, but for the meantime, it would serve me better to focus on making this coffee.<\/p>\n

That I was able to do, and soon I was joined by Scott, who also seemed to be rather covered in bites. We both grumbled a bit and sat down to a crunch audibly on mouthfuls of cereal and some of that delicious 3.2% milkfat Kazakh milk. \u00a0I have the not-so-enviable habit of salting my cereal, so we had purchased as well, a large 10 cent bag of salt, which I was happily utilizing.<\/p>\n

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The entire apartment had a dank mildew smell to it, so the evening before, we had also purchased some lavender scented candles, which we figured would be helpful in mitigating the smell. They turned out to do very little, however, other than provide a bit of flickering cheer to this otherwise soulless place. What we really needed was some heavy duty Sri Lankian or South Indian incense, but we were a very long ways (north) from that part of the world.<\/p>\n

With stomachs full of coffee and cereal, we then went at the long overdue task of washing our clothes, which were positively filthy. The Uzbek and Kazakh washing detergents are some of the best in the world, we\u2019ve found. They have a way of getting your clothes really, deeply, unprecedentedly, clean. The reason for this, we\u2019ve heard, is because the regulations here in the post Soviet world allow for the use of certain chemicals which in America, Europe, and even China are illegal due to their terrible impact on the environment. Whatever the reason, we found ourselves the proud recipients of a batch of really, truly, clean clothes, and this was something to be proud of.<\/p>\n

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We strung them up in a system of clotheslines that we erected in Scott\u2019s room.<\/p>\n

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With that task done, we set to wheeling. We began by heading out to the edges of the old Soviet part of town. You see, dear reader, Astana was originally a small soviet city, mostly populated by ethnically Slavic peoples. But when the new republic of Kazakhstan was formed, the new government felt that it needed to create a new identity and a new capitol city for itself. So, fueled by millions of oil dollars, it began construction of a concept capital in Astana, flooding the city with ethnically Kazakh peoples, and building a new city center across the river form the old soviet center (which is where the train station and our apartment were).<\/p>\n

The soviet part of town was pretty hard scrabble, with crumbling single story homes, no sidewalks, and large plots of dirt playing the role of yards.<\/p>\n