Astana

(october 11-13)

Firstly and most importantly Joanna pictures. The sideways shot in Astana (in the park in front of parliament):


And she takes an alcoholic bent on her own drink tour. You're not allowed beer without a straw if you're a lady in Kazakhstan:

Ben will complete his drink challenge in our Almaty blog post soon...

Now, MikeB likes taking pictures of cranes. MikeB would be very happy in Astana:



No building is complete without a crane on top finishing it off:


Most of the city is being built in one go so it looks a lot like a vast building site at the moment. Some of the main infrastructure of the new capital has been completed to the south of the river, away from the old town/village, so we went for a walk...

This isn't a flying saucer, it's the circus:


This is an apartment block, the "Triumph Astana":


Here's the city's landmark globe, in front of the presidential palace (or "White House"):


A nice new mosque, although the Kazakhs could hardly be called religious (vodka-drinking, pig-eating muslims...):

In fact the call to prayer was what alerted us to take a photo, and it was only us heading towards the mosque...

And here's a monument to independence or something...:


Beyond that the main touristy thing we did was go to the most bodacious President's Museum. We ended up looking at the gifts various countries had given the President for quite a while before we found the most excellent yurt room. Yurts are the tents the nomadic Kazakhs used to live in. They had all the appropriate horse and camel apparatus too.

One thing we expected to be a right pain was registration of our visa (must be done within 5 days of entering the country. But they seem to have made things easier, as we found the appropriate government building, went straight to an english speaking woman, chatted to her for about a minute whilst she put all the appropriate stamps in the right places, and we were done. No big $$ charges or anything. So they're obviously getting ready for tourists, not that they're actually expecting any. Everyone was very surprised that we were tourists, and most interested as to what we thought of their country... Fortunately we could say we liked it.

Astana means 'Capital'. Apparently the previous name of the village/town meant 'White Tomb', and the president had too many jibes about moving the capital there... so he changed the name.

And one last point on where the money for all those new buildings is coming from. Here's the oil pipeline running through town...: