City of Flowers

As we have said before, Almaty is a very beautiful city.  We want to take you on a couple of our favorite morning walks.  Almaty was the capital of Kazakhstan until 1999 and is still the largest city with about 1.4 million people.  Astana is now the capital and it has about 300,000+.  We live close to the buildings that used to house the country's government.  The buildings are very impressive and the area around them is kept manicured.  This building is at an intersection just south of us.  We have never seen flowers inserted into the side of a building like this.  The horizontal brick/column areas are actually banners.

Turning just a bit to the left, we see this beautiful mountain landscape.  Notice the flower containers hung over the guard rails of the street.

Here is another shot of the flower containers hung over the street guard rails.  Our branch building is just 2 blocks back up this road behind us. When we haven't had rain for a while, we  see water trucks with special sprayers for watering these flowers.

Just a little further on our walk is this garden and lawn in front of a business/apartment building.  Notice the electric lawn mower in the lower left corner.  We didn't see that at all in Russia.  Normally the grass and weeds were just left to grow however long they could.  It was very typical in Soviet countries to have businesses on the ground floor of a building and apartments for several floors above it.

On the street corner pictured above, kiddy corner from the building with the flowers in its side, is this clock.  The solid green is astro-turf and the flowers are in pots inserted into holders in this structure.  They also have some very beautiful new office buildings here in Almaty, as you can see in the background.

Another route we take on our walks is to the north (or downhill) from our apartment building.  This flower display is just on the other side of the Ramstore mall.

We walk down the street about a block and then turn down this street which goes behind a big government building.These beds are mostly marigolds, petunias and salvia.

When we get to this point, the fragrance is  almost overpowering, especially if there is a little breeze.  The rose gardens are huge all along this walking mall in front of the government building.  We can also hear the sound of the fountains behind us.

This is just one of the beautiful rose gardens with several brilliant colors.  The roses are the largest we've ever seen.

We should have put a hand beside these to give a perspective of their size.

A little further down in our walk is this park area with several statues and flower beds.  The park and the dome in the background are part of the roof of an upscale underground mall.  At night, different colored lights illuminate it and another dome to attract people to come shop.

This is one of the main government buildings.  It is the one we walk around.  The beautiful circle flower planting in front of it mimics the large crest on the building.  The wonderful water fountains we posted on a previous blog are on the left and right side of this building.

There are more flowerbeds and pots planted all across the front of the building.

After we walk up the right side of the building, past the water fountain, we come to another part of the street we turned down earlier.  Here we are greeted with more wonderful, fragrant roses.  Notice the street sweeper, on the left, out early to clean up the litter.

After walking behind the government building, we come to the other end of the street-side flower plantings we showed you earlier.  The fragrance here is also very pleasant because of the flowering trees and bushes.  Across the street is another government building which is completely fenced, but we can see through the fence to the lovely gardens and fountains around it.