"You must not park here!" says the man, waving the wrench in the air. I'm standing on a gravel yard next to the road and before I even can get out of the car, the resident appeared to rebuke me: "You have to park in the marked bays." After eight months Kyrgyzstan, the Swiss pedantry [...]
The taxi driver asks: "What was your first impression of Almaty?" I answer: "A nasty rip off by a taxi driver." In the morning, I took the Mashrutka from Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) to Almaty (Kazakhstan): Cost: 500 Som (10 USD) one-way Driving time: approximately five hours Border post: Korday Reason: visa extension [...]
"The shower is over there" , my couchsurfing host, Erdem, shows me his apartment. " A bathroom!? INSIDE the house?" I have not seen this for a long time. Erdem takes a beer from the fridge and puts it in front of me. Then he shows me the WiFi access. I 'm in seventh heaven. [...]
An American guy on the train told me: "Don't stay too long in UB." I wasn't planning on, but I ended up staying over a week and a half in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. Why? - Circumstances. Now I'm sitting here, in Sun's Nomads Guesthouse (10 U.S. dollars per night with breakfast), located [...]
"Das ist mir scheißegal! " Sasha shouts, pulling his eyebrows together. We laugh. "That really sounds German" I praise him. Sasha is my "couchsurfing host" in Irkutsk. He lives in a large two bedroom apartment in the city center. He is a programmer and speaks excellent English - a welcome change from my previous encounters [...]