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Day 0: We arrived- worth the wait!

Greetings from Almaty on Monday night (we are 14 hours ahead of Pasadena). Well after two days, make that three days (actually 30 straight hours) of traveling, we arrived in Almaty. 

Thanks to Turkish Airways and their three plentiful meals and a collection of movies (comparable to bringing our own Red Box), we kept our sanity. We enjoyed a tasty meal in Istanbul: PIDE (a boat shaped pizza style bread), DONER'S (lamb or chicken sliced over an over roaster) or LAMACHUN FLAT BREAD (a thin and crispy bread with a spread of tomatoes and ground meat on top). After arriving at the Almaty airport today, we dropped our gear at the hotel and ventured out into parts of the city of Almaty: the Mega Mall, a pizza lunch, city walks, a trek to the Presidential Park, our first subway rides, and a delicious meal with samsa, milk tea, salad and shashlik (chicken or horse meat on a bed of noodles). At dinner, we were treated to hearing from two men, one a Kazakh and the other an American, about their lives, experiences and observations re the Soviet legacy as well as many cultures in Kazakhstan. We are exhausted- the students were ready to go to sleep. 











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