Tastak
Manhattan of Sairan
Lately I've been taking buses farther and farther from my house, as I've already walked everything close by. I've gotten tired, though, of standing on the crowded buses to the outskirts, so I decided to take the subway this time. There's a station right outside my building, and the last stop, Alatau, is near a neighborhood I don't know well. It's mostly a neighborhood of older cottages, pressed in from the west by a dry lake, Sairan, and in the east by a commercial district. Smack in the middle, rising in stark contrast to the shacks around it, is a housing development gleaming with faux-marble panels. Locals call the complex "Manhattan."
My walk started with a surprise, as I stumbled upon an old mosaic I had long sought. I read somewhere online that there was a mosaic on Gagarin, but roving the neighborhood last fall I was frustrated by my inability to find it. Sometimes, I guess, it's easier to find something when you're not looking. Trees partly obscured the artwork, but the visible parts showed your typical utopian mishmash, space stations and literate peasants.
Past the mosaic, I found a peculiar neighborhood of pre-Kruschev mass housing. These kinds of apartment blocks aren't big and factory-built, but are modestly built with bricks and reeds called kamysh [камыш]. I was taking pictures of what looked like decomposing garages when a wandering pensioner asked me what I was up to. They weren't garages, she told me, but were in fact kladovki [кладовки], sheds for storing tools and jars of pickled vegetables. As old people here are fond of doing, she spent several minutes rattling off prices of Soviet goods. "Socks were five kopecks. Five kopecks! And now, oy, can't buy a single sock with a thousand tenge…"
My walk started with a surprise, as I stumbled upon an old mosaic I had long sought. I read somewhere online that there was a mosaic on Gagarin, but roving the neighborhood last fall I was frustrated by my inability to find it. Sometimes, I guess, it's easier to find something when you're not looking. Trees partly obscured the artwork, but the visible parts showed your typical utopian mishmash, space stations and literate peasants.
Past the mosaic, I found a peculiar neighborhood of pre-Kruschev mass housing. These kinds of apartment blocks aren't big and factory-built, but are modestly built with bricks and reeds called kamysh [камыш]. I was taking pictures of what looked like decomposing garages when a wandering pensioner asked me what I was up to. They weren't garages, she told me, but were in fact kladovki [кладовки], sheds for storing tools and jars of pickled vegetables. As old people here are fond of doing, she spent several minutes rattling off prices of Soviet goods. "Socks were five kopecks. Five kopecks! And now, oy, can't buy a single sock with a thousand tenge…"
The old apartment blocks soon gave way to old homes. Usually I find them hidden behind high aluminum fences, but in some areas (like in Bolshaya Stanitsa), the outer walls of the cottages front the streets, and I can get up close to admire their carved wood. When I was photographing a windowframe, an older Russian fellow passed by and told me to follow him. His house, he said, was even older, built in a log cabin style. He let me in his courtyard to see, but it wasn't much to look at. I preferred the wood to be decorated in some way, not just plopped log upon log.
As the sun got lower, the air got cool and everybody came out to chat in the streets and watch their kids play. With so many people out, I feel awkward taking pictures. Instead I just laughed at the kids playing tag on their bikes and jumping on a torn-up mattress. Nobody paid me any notice and I walked back to the metro station, down into the ground and back to my home.
As the sun got lower, the air got cool and everybody came out to chat in the streets and watch their kids play. With so many people out, I feel awkward taking pictures. Instead I just laughed at the kids playing tag on their bikes and jumping on a torn-up mattress. Nobody paid me any notice and I walked back to the metro station, down into the ground and back to my home.
