Astana Rings

I neglected to mention that on arrival to Astana we headed to the Welling's apartment. We received a warm greeting and an offer to shower. I don't think I've taken a more refreshing and rejuvenating shower. They served us a wonderful breakfast of eggs, bacon(!), banana muffins, and juice--it was a great start to a busy day. After breakfast we were able to make it out the door and see some of the city. The Wellings aren't just good hosts, they are wonderful tour guides too!

Although Astana is the capital of the country, it's a relatively new city. The capital was moved from Almaty to Astana around 1998. The city has been developed a lot and continues to be under construction. All of the buildings in the last post were constructed within the last eight years. The city has a large layout and the area where the President's House, Parliament, and other important buildings are located could be compared to the DC Mall. If you will recall the DC Mall is an open area, large in size, with the Smithsonian Museums and other buildings surrounding it. There is a similar open area in Astana with the important government buildings built around it; the exception being that this open area is full of gardens, monuments, and other interesting and symbolic structures. Much of our initial tour of the city involved walking from one end of the Astana "Mall" to the other end.

These are rings (there is actually a huge ring hole on the other side of the decorative facing) we saw in various parts of the Mall. They give an idea of some traditional designs. We later visited two museums that had areas of traditional jewelry, these huge rings are really good replicas. One ring wasn't duplicated, but was very cool to learn about. When a couple is betrothed the mother of the bride-to-be is given a special ring. It is has a very large ornamental face, and fits two fingers!

Button, button, who has the button? I don't think this button is easily hid, but maybe that's just me... ;)
The Wellings are serving a humanitarian aid mission for our church. They oversee all of the church's humanitarian aid projects in our area and have met a number of wonderful people in their time here. We thoroughly enjoyed our time with them! We will post about some more of the sites we visited, but they have seen much more of Astana than we could fit in two days. You can go to their blog and see more of Astana as well as learn about the humanitarian aid projects they've worked on in the last seventeen months.