Chimbulak and the Stadium

We drove up to the Chimbulak ski hill a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, it was a beautiful day and it would have been a great day to teach the kids to ski. The road was pretty good but it is extremely steep in sections and the switch backs made the ones in Smithers look pretty lame.
This is what the cabins on the hill looked like. Most of them were this posh--so judging from their appearance there will be no Vanwerkhoven Chalet in Almaty. The ski hill, itself looked pretty good but the bunny slope is closed for the next while. They have it covered in chairlift equipment that is going to put up sometime soon. So, they have changed the bunny slope to the area where Kyla and Cody are standing. If any child is out of control--which is quite likely, considering how these two act on X-country skiis--they will find themselves sitting on top of the hood of a Niva. There is suppose to be another ski hill around here that has a better bunny hill--feels like we are always looking for something and it is so hard to find places b/c their alphabet is different than ours and then to help things get worse--they only have signs in the downtown area--otherwise you are on your own. We found a great set of used skiis and bindings for Dave and some boots for myself and they were a really good price so we thought that we could just buy the rest at the sporting goods store in the city. The cheapest set of skiis here without bindings is around $500.00 and they were nothing to write home about--so off to the rental shop for us.

This past weekend, we stayed around the city and did some shopping and tried to find some sporting goods store--not much luck--but we did find the stadium. There were these statues in front and we thought they were pretty impressive.