Day Fifty-Seven

On my 57th day in Kostanai, Marcy, Darryl, Nellie (our translator/guide) and I boarded a bus which took us to another bus which brought us to a taxi station where we hired a car to drive south west to the iron ore mining capital of Kazakhstan. We ventured to "Rudney," deriving from the root word "rud," meaning ore in Russian.

Partly for the scenery, partly for the challenge of traveling in a foreign land and partly for the experience of exploring a new locale, we departed Kostanai at 1:30 PM on Saturday afternoon. Initially, we were amazed to discover that Kostanai is much larger than we had previously believed. Surrounding the downtown area, are sprawling suburbs offering a mixture of single family homes and high rise condominiums. There are no swimming pools, despite pockets of great wealth and the scorching, arid climate that prevails throughout the long, hot summer months. Once outside the city limits, for as far as the eye can see, lie endless fields of low cut grass, wheat or tilled dirt, preparing to birth to this year's vegetable harvest. Every few kilometers, in the distant pastures, thickly clothed sheep or brown cows were grazing. And as is customary for a predominant number middle income city dwellers, there are clusters of brick or wooden sheds on small parcels of farmland where people lease or own land for weekend fruit and vegetable farming.

On the outskirts of Rudney, the distant hills reveal evidence of strip mining. The mining of ore and coal, in addition to Kazakhstan's oil reserves, metallurgy and chemical production, play an important role in Kazakhstan's economy, employing 27 percent of the total labor force. Another 23 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture with an emphasis on livestock and grain production.

Rudney is a small city or large village. It has extremely flat terraine, with wide streets, colorful metal store front facades and expansive tile wall murals displayed on many of the older, government buildings. As in Kostanai, Rudney also possesses numerous imposing, Soviet era metal statues, denoting the ore industry, military conflicts and the collective struggle of the common man. We walked for hours and hours but the sun doesn't set until after 9:00 PM so it simply felt like a v-e-r-y l-o-n-g d-a-y. Our final exploration was the new, local, three-story mall and the event center, replete with movie theater, disco, bowling alley, billiards and a Chinese restaurant. By 8:15 PM, we caught a bus for home which took us to another bus which dropped us off at the bottom of the promenade in Kostanai, one kilometer from our hotel. In a trance-like procession, we trudged the gradual incline just as the sun was setting in the west.

It was nice to get out and really nice to get back in! And we now know that we never could have done it without Nellie!