To the desert!!

A good day today. Not the craziest day ever, but a few interesting stories did come out of it. After leaving all our friends behind in Almaty we decided to go to Shymkent and then off to Turkistan (city, not country - that one's called Turkmenistan) to check out this really cool church. Well, our day started out not so good. If any of you have ever ridden in a marshrutka, you'll probably know that it sits anywhere from 1-13 passengers uncomfortably. For those who don't know, it's kind of like a mini van with a few extra seats in there. Well, to get to the bus station, we ended up taking a marshrutka with not 10, not 13, not 20 but TWENTY-EIGHT people crammed into it (29 including the driver). And only one window opened because ... you know, opened windows cause people to get really sick. Picture your local minivan with TWENTY-NINE people in it!!!! I felt like I was in the circus!!!



The mosque that we saw in Turkistan was cool, really old and with a few things that I didn't know; the design is written to spell Allah in Arabic, the domes help with air circulation, if you close the top hole of a mosque, the top will cave in, stuff like that - pretty cool, however the really cool part was the adventure to an old deserted town that we took. We grabbed a taxi (we were thinking of hitching, but in hindsight, we probably would have died, because you have to drink A LOT OF WATER IN THE DESERT) and after agreeing on a price to a place that he (very shortly would) become obvious that he had NO idea how to get to, we were off. After two small detours, we finally found out where to go. Our cabby didn't want to drive back through this one village and then back to the road, so after about 40 kilometers, off we were for another 5 or so across dirt roads through the desert!!! His car was kicking up so much dust that we needed to pay for him to wash it after!!!

I was really scared, because if he had bottomed out or something like that, wow... I would have felt really bad because that was his livelihood. We made it to find this really cool abandoned city (apparently, according to our taxi-driver (who had never been here before) it was fought over a lot. He took great pains to explain to us that inside the walls was where people lived, and outside was where people fought.)... which was already inhabited by spiders. I hate spiders. Especially spiders who run REALLY fast and have bodies the size of your thumb.

No, I didn't get any pictures because they creeped the hell out of me. End of story.