Talgar

This is they city where we are living for PST. It is a city of about 30,000 set in the southern mountains outside the old soviet capital Almaty. It is a beautiful and interesting place. The people are very very friendly and all pretty much know who we are now and say hello and ask us questions in the street, for both their curiosity and the amusement of us saying the same things over and over. To get around you can walk, take the bus or take a taxi*. Taxis are anyone with a car. It is essentially hitchhiking that you pay for. As you walk down the street you just point at the ground and some random car will pick you up and take you where you want to go for 50 Tengue. It is sometimes scary because they are insanely reckless drivers, sometimes passing around the shoulder in the wrong lane swerving around dogs, potholes and sidewalk stands. There are also a lot of dogs, which would be great - but they are not friendly. The dogs here are all bred to be guard dogs and they are feral so you have to be careful for roaming mutts chasing you. Im pretty sure that kicking them is culturally acceptable, but so far just acting like you will throw something at them keeps them at bay.
The city itself has a very interesting dynamic. It is mainly Russian speaking, which is both good and bad for me as I am learning Kazakh. Often people don’t speak Kazakh and it is almost impossible to communicate (i.e. bargaining at the bazaars). My Kazakh is coming along insanely well. We have been here for only two weeks and we can already carry on basic conversation as well as conjugate verbs to create simple sentences in past, present and future. Anyway the Russian also helps to work on my Russian, which I suck at.
I have been told that you can check out some sort of virtual tour of Talgar on www.e-talgar.com