nice city

Saturday was a citywide clean-up day, held over, I think, from Soviet times. It’s really a great idea, and it works well and makes a difference: everyone who’s free (and it looked like a lot of youth clubs were involved) goes outside and cleans up. They rake up the trash that didn’t make it to the proper places and recently melted out of the snow, they sweep, they clip, they plant. It looks great. Oral is one of the greenest cities PC volunteers are sent to, mostly because it’s a little bit north of the steppe proper. It has a different feel from the other cities I've been in - a bit less Soviet-ified, almost frontier town-y. The houses on the oldest streets lean against each other. It can support a lot of trees (fruit trees included) and grass. It’s not as lush as the village in the mountains where I started off, where apricots were so thick on the ground you had to walk on them, but it’s far greener than Almaty. I expect leaves within the week, although one curve of the river is still frozen in the middle.