We are the champions

This posting comes at a time of winter, and as such I will try to send some of the freezing cold Almaty air in your general direction (locals think the cold is good for the body).
First of all yeeeeee haaah! This here's a picture of us at the "Amerikanskii Bar i Gril"-hats off to those of you who can translate that into English from the "Russian." We had lunch there with Albert yesterday and kinda felt like we were back in the wild west...except this version of the American west had two portion sizes to choose from on their menu: standard portion and
American Portion.
We were, frankly, too embarrassed to choose the American Portion and opted for the Kazakh-sized meal, which turned out to be enough anyway. I had a chocolate milkshake (6 horsemeat platters out of 10), a hamburger (7 horsemeat platters out of 10) and freedom fries (4 horsemeat platters out of 10). They skimped on the fries. Maybe I should have had American-sized fries. C had grilled salmon, potatoes and zucchini, and a European-style Fanta. Yum. Note the wild decor behind us:

Today we went to Panfilov Park and took some pictures of the Zenkov Cathedral and a memorial commemorating the two World Wars. It was a beautiful sunny day, though still pretty cold. The cathedral was reputedly build without using any nails (dubious, but possible I suppose). The war memorial is one of the most intimidating bits of soviet art that I've seen. Voila la Cathedral:

And the memorial, which has soldiers bursting out of a map that is either the former soviet union or Kazakhstan, we aren't sure:


We also took two videos in the park: one taken by me of Christina, one taken by Christina of me. Click here for the video of Christina. Click here for the video of Brooke.