The Green City

I just returned back from a 12 day trip of visiting the other mission sites in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. My time in Kazakhstan was spent in and around Almaty, which is known as the Green City. I knew this before going there because when I was applying for my visa at the Kazakh embassy, I saw a guy with a pin stating that fact. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant until I got there, but it quickly became apparent. Almaty is just inundated with trees, bushes, and all sorts of leafy vegetation. Which meant, for me the tourist, that almost every tourist place I went was partially blocked by trees, making pictures not really worth taking. I mean, I could simply take a picture of a bunch of trees here, and tell you that there was a great building behind it, and that would be the same as what I saw, for the most part. Except for these couple of places: The first picture is a Soviet-built reminder of WWII, complete with an eternal flame remember those from this region who were killed. In my travels throughout the old Soviet Union, whenever I have come across a WWII memorial, they are all pretty much the same in their design: chiseled from stone, big, solid, strong looking, just as the picture shows. Of interest to me was the number of wedding couples that decided to get their photos taken here. In the few minutes that we were at this place, I counted no less than 10 wedding groups getting pictures taken, and I am sure that there were more than that.

The only really other clear photo spot was of this Orthodox church. We went in while a service was going on, spent some time listening to the choirs singing (which while it was in Old Slavonic, it nonetheless reminded me to the sounds of some of the older Catholic liturgy I have heard). The singers’ sounds filled the church and echoed. It was very pretty, but solemn, with a sense of awe in their liturgy. Plus, the other interesting thing about this church was the difference in the architecture, as it doesn’t look like the onion-domed churches in Russia so much. It was very pretty, but it had its own sense of style.