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Astana / Kazakhstan · 2018   odd structures sprouting from the Steppe

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   It is good to arrive to a cold place well expecting the cold, which makes it a little warmer. When I stepped off the bus in downtown Astana (as it was called back then), the air was crisper than it was painful, and the prickly sensation of freezing nostrils reminded me of Canadian winter. Of course, before long, the smart designs of my moderated expectations fell back in step with reality’s factualities and I was as cold as one is supposed to be far below zero and without a buff winter jacket. Astana’s cocky boulevards were wide and straight, and the wind had a field day with them. With the snow-peppered gusts whooshing through my legs, they would get awfully stiff long before my mind would – always pushing headlong into the white – and one time I had to seek shelter in a mall because I could feel that my thighs were coming to a full, petrified halt in the form of jeans-colored icicles. I had little desire to end up trapped inside a statue of myself just then, with my thoughts racing through my legs unable to persuade them, even though I would have fit right in with the boardgame-look of Astana – just another accidental figure sprouting from the frozen Steppe.

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Compared to Astana’s tall and glassy razzmatazz, Almaty was so down-to-earth that it was almost undergroundish with its utilitarian pastel grids and institutional, desolate building blocks. Sadly, the mountains were covered in winter smog and I could only guess them.

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a glimpse

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what a fine firm hand to rule with Mr. President

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Astana/ Kazakhstan · 2018   presidential splendor

overland gas in baby pipelines

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Almaty/ Kazakhstan · 2018   residential candor

must have been something in the horse meat

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Astana/ Kazakhstan · 2018   putting on a show

glimpse: WOULD YOU RATHER | Would you rather be fed and safe or free and wild? Would you rather take care or get care? Would you rather share a shelter with all the others or be alone in the streets? Would you rather stay stray or go domestic? Would you rather put up with a -30 °C Kazakh winter or be put down?

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places / stories

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Almaty

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Almaty / Kazakhstan · 2018   petrified elasticity

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Somebody had made me as a tourist. Maybe it was the towering magma-colored backpack protruding from my spine that always gave it away all too effortlessly. But I had made him too, as a pickpocket or mugger or con artist or other slippery personage. There was a chance that the subsequent chase was a figment of my imagination, but then again my imagination is a rusty toy, immobilized by the heavy certainties of adulthood, and the gut feeling was well-informed fact, and so was the order of events: he came down the street I was walking up; he said something to me which I evaded with a mumble and unbroken steps; despite my maneuver I couldn’t even remotely pass off as local and at best I had gained a status of “primed;“ when I looked back he had changed direction and was now following me at a distance; he replicated my every artificial turn. Well then. It was that early, empty morning hour after a night train, so I kept to Almaty’s larger streets where things were slowly waking up. Every now and then I stopped for a weighty pause to let him know with my stern eyes that I saw him. At some point he spoke to someone before disappearing down some road and in my head he had handed off the “chase” to an accomplice, or split it with him. My accommodation wasn’t exactly central or easy to find, which disadvantaged me as the rabbit. The closer I got, the more I zigzagged, deliberately and inadvertently in equal measure all the while getting ready for… something. Well, I made it. What exactly, I don’t know.

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Almaty / Kazakhstan · 2018   asphalt artery

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Almaty / Kazakhstan · 2018   antennae

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Almaty / Kazakhstan · 2018   slush on dusk

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The city was smeared with winter grime – mocha slush all over the floor and a sooty sky all the way up to the ceiling. And while I accepted what it was, I dreamt of what it could have been, if I hadn’t been when I had.

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Almaty / Kazakhstan · 2018   oil isn't all: public bikes

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related

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photos | people

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Story Time

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we all have one

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Our narratives have been full of forks, twists and turns, shortcuts and detours, but here we are to intersect with each other in the now. see more

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photos | urban

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Office Prison Symmetry

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behind bars: office or prison? 

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Looking at it from the outside, I can’t help seeing bars in the symmetry that comes with the sterile and institutional blueprints of office buildings around the world. see more

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photos | urban

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Central & West Asia

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pastel Soviet grids & fancy modernity

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functional Soviet blueprints with lavish sprinkles & old stone fusing with glassy towers  see more

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photos | landscapes

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Asia

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neon-rice & snowy white

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In a realm so contrasting that it juxtaposes the world's highest peaks with some of its most paradisiacal beaches, there's naturally much to see: gargantuan caves, neon green rice paddies, bizarre monoliths, brackish lagoons, blue lava and a volcano inside a volcano to name but a few.   see more

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elsewhere

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in Central & West Asia

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