May 11, The Evening

May 11, another exciting evening in Astana

After our evening visit to the internet café we went for a walk to the food store to buy more breakfast cereal (Snow Flakes which Rob is hoping are Frosted Flakes) and dinner blinis (where else can you buy dinner for 4 nights for about a dollar total), then for a walk in the park to feed the birds. Holy crap, we are retired people! Next thing you know we’ll be complaining about the noisy people upstairs and that crazy “music” kids today listen to.

This is the park we went to. There’s a fountain with little grooves in it, which in theory, should carry the water down. Unfortunately I don’t think the water engineers thought it through, because about 1/3 of the may down the ball the water flies off the edge.

Next to the fountain is a bunker of sorts. I am not sure what it’s for, maybe the fountain keeper lives here. From what I’ve seen, they only have the fountain turned on in the evenings and on holidays. They also have a couple police ‘booths’ around the park to make sure no park visitors get out of hand. Rob was well behaved and there were no international incidents.













We spent a while feeding the pigeons some bread we bought the middle of last week. We think the bread is very fresh and they do no use many preservatives, because the bread became quite crunchy after a couple days. This first bird I call the John Rose Rose Bird because he sat and stared at Rob, which I hear from HRR is what JRR has done since Rob left. Can I get an Awwwwwwwww?
















Once word got out about the bread-fest in the park, all of the birds headed our way for some rock solid bread. They preferred the light colored bread because it took less pecking. But these little, or in some cases big, birds are pretty smart because they know which side of the bread is the crust and where to peck. I’m sure we’ll get to know them better as we feed them over the next month or 2.










I thought this picture of these 2 guys fixing a truck in rush hour traffic was pretty funny. Rob had a hissy fit when I took the picture, which I did quite discretely, so I hope you enjoy it after we spent so much time fighting over it. Apparently some guy spit in Rob’s direction and he was about to ‘kick his ass’, blah blah blahsky. Thankfully another international incident was avoided.











We also saw think mangy dog which I think is a Corgy, so Kim, if one of your dogs is missing and walked/swam to Kazakhstan, I think I know where he is.



Again, Rob was embarrassed when I took the photo. But in my defense, we were sitting in a parked van at the time (and no it was not a rockin!). Can you tell we have been spending too much time for any married couple together?