Almaty - Kazakhstan

A rather flash cinema - only showing black and white Kazakh classic movies the day I was there




My hotel... THE Hotel Kazakhstan



Nice view from my bedroom window (arrived a 03:00am in the morning - staff groggy, me wide awake (still evening in London) - I spotted
A) My passport had been 'accidentally' left in the photocopying machine
B) The problem with the door to my room was not that it would not open with th e card key - just that it would not lock at all - took three round trips to 11th floor with various card and metal keys and a taciturn janitor to persuade them of this...

and so an upgrade to a much better room with a very special view. I would much rather stay in a hotel with character (even if a bit creaky) than a soulless western style chain hotel

But tricky to see - there are apple trees everywhere through the city - but of course this is where they come from: "The name "Almaty" derives from the Kazakh word for "apple" (алма), and thus is often translated as "full of apples"." and "The wild ancestors of Malus domestica are Malus sieversii, which is found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang, China," (Both from Wikipedia)