We are waiting at the train station to go to Astana, that capitol. Yesterday, after I finally woke up in the morning (I wasn’t feeling well) we went to the bazaar. We took what they call a taxi to get there. However, it is what we would call hitchhiking. The Kazakh people are not very orderly (or good) drivers and most of the cars do not seem to have seat belts. The drivers just seem to disregard lights for the most part and there are not really any defined lanes. The bazaar went on forever! If you liked something at a stand you could go in the back behind a curtain and try it on. Everything was really inexpensive so needless to say, I was able to buy a lot of stuff. There were many people, all of whom would knock you over if you didn’t get out the way soon enough. I took two pictures of the bazaar before Altyn got too embarrassed to let me take any more.
At night, all of the buildings have so many colorful lights on them. The streets have lots of Christmas lights. Many people just walk around all over the place, all the time! Now we are on the train in a cabin just like in Harry Potter. The trip is supposed to take a day so I suppose I will just read/play gameboy because there aren’t really loads of things to do.
A funny thing I noticed is that everyone is very excited to meet an American. They seem to mimic what I do and want to try out their English, although that consists of ‘hello’.
There and back again 