Astana Day 2

Today we rented bikes.

I know, that wasn’t much description. I had great plans to write all about our day, but then we got tired and slept from 9 pm until almost 11 the next morning.

So here’s what we did: This weekend in Astana has been unusually warm. Everywhere we can see that it was just winter here yesterday. The ground is dry, but the cars all have dried mud on them. The sidewalks are still dirty from the trucks that must have been plowing snow only a little while ago. They have a bike-sharing arrangement here, but it doesn’t actually start up until next week, so there are all these bike racks, ready to rent bikes, but no bikes.

Ania asked, and we took a taxi to a little bike shop, where the owner rented us his own bike plus three more and a couple of chains with locks on them. It’s super flat here, so biking is pretty effortless. The roads are wide, and the drivers are pretty careful, and it seems to be okay to bike on sidewalks and in parks, so we just rode everywhere. We locked up the bikes so we could go to the top of Baiterek Tower. No helmets. The big danger here is watching out for holes, unusually high curbs, cut-off bolts sticking up out of the pavement, exposed wiring, big drops with no railing. Basically, watch where you walk, watch where you ride. Not a lot of lawyers here making money off slip-and-falls.

A tourist from Spain in Baiterek Tower told us we could buy train tickets from a travel agency in the mall, so Ania got us tickets on a Monday afternoon fast electric train to Karaganda. Then we rode to another mall, Ania and Marlena shopped for awhile, and Kostek and I rode around. After the mall, our five hours was about up, so we rode back to the bike shop, returned the bikes, got something to eat at Coffee Boom (seems to be a chain), and walked back to the apartment.

Ania is having fun exercising her Russian, which gets mixed reactions. A lot of the people we’re interacting with in this very mixed and tolerant city speak some English, and sometimes Ania’s Russian is better than their English, sometimes the other way around. Often it’s a mix, and transactions that start out all business always end in smiles and some emotional connection. Ania keeps getting the question “How do you speak Russian?”