Hotel Mukammal Astana

... with more friends coming and going. I am introduced to everybody and the is a constant stream of animated discussion. Regrettably I find out that Macdonals are already here in some of the shopping malls. Nothing is sacred. Dmitri, a former MIG pilot and then a commercial pilot learned his English to cope with the exigencies of flying but it is more than passable. We drink toasts to his future success, my continuing journey, friends, engines and anything else any of us can ...

... the battery cage to take the one Nikolai found. OK. I will pick the bike up on Monday and head south. Hopefully. How much is the battery? HOW MUCH? Still by comparison to the cost of the whole episode it is chicken feed. I can safely say that this is the most expensive battery I've ever had to buy, or ever will.

I end the day back at the hotel catching up on mail.

... is the creation of President Nazarbaev who decided to move the capital from Almaty in 1997. Just like that. And why not? It is incredibly clean and people seem very law abiding, they cross at traffic lights only when they are green, vehicles stop at pedestrian crossings. But rush hour here is exactly like anywhere else. Thousands of cars honking their way home. I did see a novel approach at ...

... my face.

A bulb flashes. Vladimir races over to the field and finds a bank Serge reverses the truck back to the bank and with the tailgate supporting the plywood sheets and the windscreen removed we manhandle the bike onto the truck. Well, its on, the questions are whether it will stay on and will it ever come off? I tie it to some unsteady stanchions with straps I have been carrying and hope for the best.

With a final goodbye to my two lady ...

... and 4 lanes in places, but it does make it hard to slow down when they have a 40k limit on a dual carriageway. Yes, we got 'pinged' and we are now looking forward to the border to see how good they are at collecting the fine. It was a fair cop this time although we were only doing what all the locals do. The one in China was less than a fair cop. So we had our usual lunch stop en-route, a little off road to watch a couple of very Soviet trains ...

... langsam ab** sich** auf die schon aus England bekannte Somm**modelänge umzustellen; nenne man es Textilblindheit od** d** Königinnen neue Kleid**. Ab** wenigstens ist in Kasachstan d** Nahrungsmittelüb**fluss nicht so offensichtlich, vielmehr könnte man fast denken, dass Futt**mangel besteht. Dabei fällt mir ein: Einem Fly** zufolge hat diese Woche das **ste Pizza Hut Kasachstan in Almaty seine Türen geöffnet! (-:

... zu tun haben. Und weil weder in den Sätzen noch in den Wörter eine gewisse Regelmäßigkeit oder Logik zu finden war hat er sich nach der gleichen Unlogik die Grammatik dazu hergeleitet (hm, da habe ich wohl zu lange auf dem "je" geschlafen, naja, sagen wir einfach "medlenjeje", wenn wir das dann auch noch so richtig schön offbeat betonen hat Heiko in 1.150 Jahren Freude damit). Dann ging es mal wieder einen Tag nach Astana. Um dort zu einer normalen Bürozeit ...

It is very cold here in Kazakhstan, and the ground is covered in snow. A popular winter sport in Canada is "Curling". Curling is a precision team sport similar to bowls or bocce, played on a rectangular sheet of prepared ice by two teams of four players each, using heavy polished granite stones which players slide down the ice towards a target area called the house. Other players use brooms to sweep the ice in front of the sliding stone. It is my belief that perhaps ...

A few thoughts on my trip to Mt. Everest and my journey to the top of the world! So, I made it only as far as the first base camp......... But it was still really impressive to be standing at the base of the highest mountain in the world and at an altitude that most commercial airliners cruise at! It is funny how when you are standing at the base of mt. Everest at 5200 meters (17,060 feet) 8,847 meters (29 ...

... I was doing in Kazakhstan. In her class there were two students that had been to America so we shared some of our experiences. One of her students offered to take us around town and show us the tourist attractions and take us to lunch. He took us on a driving tour of many monuments including the WWII monument, he showed us where the President´s office would be and also to Duman, the aquarium. We went up a tower that looks like a lollypop called ...