Always carry some cash

Day 59 - Astana to Almaty

It was another crisp sunny day in Astana, and we needed to get to the airport for our flight to Almaty, the old capital and the largest city in Kazakhstan, so we decided to use Yandex, a Russian app which is the Uber equivalent over here.

After trying for 15 minutes and not being able to find a driver we spoke to hotel reception, who informed us that Yandex was down but they could book a taxi for us. There was a catch though - the taxi only took cash, and we had none. So M rushed off to find an ATM, returning 15 minutes later with some cash.

We arrived at the airport about 30 minutes later than we'd planned to find that check in didn't start for another 40 minutes anyway. 

Coming in to Almaty we could see huge snow capped mountains in the distance, quite a sight. We checked in to a nice apartment near the Almaty Opera House, and ventured out to the local supermarket to do some shopping. The variety of food on the shelves was quite different to what we'd been expecting, with more of a Russian influence, and everything being in Cyrillic script made it difficult to work out what we were buying.

Later on we walked to a restaurant for dinner, finding the streets to be quite busy, there was a mix of tourists and locals, and buskers with varying degrees of talent, the worst one being the guy who just sang along very loudly to rap songs.