I took a Minibus cost 400 som from the new Western Bus Station in Bishkek around 10:20 am to Almaty around 2 pm. The border crossing was pretty smooth, except that there is no longer speedy line for foreigners at the Kazakhstan side. Our driver took a gas station and toilet stop right after the border crossing. I exchanged enough Kazakhstan currency to book a 24-hr sleeper bus to Urumqi, China 4 days later.
I have no SIM card for Kazakhstan and had no clue how to get to my hostel 5 miles away, yet a kind Kyrgyzstan young man who works in Almaty and speaks English kindly gave me a taxi ride and dropped me near the hostel.
Map.me showed the location of the hostel as inside a commercial building on the 4th floor; however, I and a kind local student could not find the hostel for 30 minutes and he finally called the hostel with his phone and had the hostel stuff came to get me there. So many kind people in Almaty!
Almaty is a real metropolitan city, the largest city, and capital prior to December 1998. My hostel is located in a high end shopping and residential area with a big supermarket the same size of a super-Walmart in the USA, and 8 time to size of a 24-7 supermarket in Bishkek. I guess that I am done with my nomad life. I bought a smoked Chichen thigh, Chinese cabbage, a local beer, a yogurt, two packs of local instant noodles, and bread for only 1133 Tanges ($3.38 USD)!
I cook the vegetable, made new friends in the hostel kitchen, and then watched TV the live closing ceremony of Expo 2017 (theme: future energy) an International Exposition taking place from June 10 to September 10, 2017 in Astana, Kazakhstan, participated by over 100 countries and 10 international organizations. I saw a 2-hr cultural performance of 15 Central Asia countries in DC in 2016, which was to tall different from the modern performance for the closing cemetery yet as impressive. I think you can find YouTube clips shortly.
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