almaty

every day, busses connect bishkek to almaty, the biggest city in kazakhstan. i went together with the alaskan i mentioned earlier, found the right terminal after some time, bought a ticket and got seated. when we got to the border, we both left some stuff on our seats, expecting the bus to go through customs and wait for us on the other side. it did not.

while we were already going through border procedures, a kazakh guy came up to me and said we'd have to find a different bus on the other side of the border. for me, the loss was a bottle of coke plus some cookies, while for the other girl, it was headphones, powerbanks, chargers, clothes and all. she started panicking, of course.

also, there was no other bus waiting for us, we had to walk through the border town for ten minutes to a random parking lot. don't know how we would've found it without the kazakh dude helping us. the bus from earlier was nowhere to be seen. we got onto the new one and started driving, when i saw out of the corner of my eye a familiar colour pattern. it turned out to be our old bus filling up at a gas station nearby. we stopped the bus and saved the day.

after a couple more hours, we made it to almaty and shared a last taxi ride to our respective hostels. i met a scottish couple with their 5 year old there, they had just been backpacking india and nepal for 4 months, but other than that it was pretty boring and i went to another hostel after two nights there.

that one was much better, but still not a social place. i had the opportunity to work out at the calisthenics park 2 minutes away and went on several runs. there was also a huge shopping center there, where i finally got some proper on ear headphones again, as well as some new clothes and accessories. i feel a thousand times more confident now in clothes that aren't just purely practical. all in all, almaty is a super livable city, pretty european by all standards. including nightlife, as i found out.

there was this place called bult, a progressive techno club with a great crowd where i spent basically the entire weekend. it was great to be back in a proper techno club, which, in all regards, was just like what you could find back home. i met some cool people there as well, including a russian political activist. she had fled to kazakhstan when the war started.

on the last day, i bought tickets for a bus to china and relocated to yet another hostel, this time the more popular international one that had been booked out the whole time before. had a hilarious evening with some 22-year old genius from stanfort and another british guy, rounding up my experience in what became one of my favourite cities so far.

(and like that, dear reader, the diary gap has finally been closed. everything from now on will be fresh out the oven)Read more