Sunday 28th March postcard

Dear all,
We are getting closer.
First from you, after you shifted your clocks to summer time last night, meaning that between CEST countries and Baikonur there is now 4 hours difference instead of 5 (Kazakhstan does have summer time).
Second from launch: we have now 11 days still to run and the coming week will be quiet busy and crucial!

So to keep fit, we had a long walk along the city wall (20kms/5 hours including stops) today. Some bits were not possible because of the presence of police controls. Therefore we slightly had to modify the planned itinerary but we managed to complete "a loop".
Now the snow and ice cover has disappeared, the sad reality of the city cleaning state can be "read'' on the ground where lay tons of ALL KIND of waste. The city authorities plan every year on 23rd of April a "cleaning day" which was widely advertised in the last issue of Baikonur weekly. This is certainly a nice and welcome initiative but the effort should certainly be continued the whole year. Putting that issue in a wider perspective, it is clear that the "clean planet'' is a concept that can work only if a "sustained and together'' approach is implemented. To that respect, as long as the merging countries have now adopted the western model of development and growth, it becomes obvious that solutions to present environmental problems can only be a joint worldwide effort.

Another thing that could be seen during this walk were white areas on the sand. This is the salt contained in the ground that now crystallized on the surface. Later in summer along the river one can observe a small "salted lake".

Last observation, seagulls have suddenly appeared in the landscape. It may sound strange in a semi desert zone, but the combination of the unfrozen river and food in the city may explain it (?). By the way, in his novel "The Steppe", Chekhov mentions all kind of birds related to the swamp/river bank areas as normal fauna of the Steppe...

We also passed by the market, to distribute the best portrait pictures shot by Shaf and Bill last February (printed on professional A4 format). This was certainly not a straight forward task to recognize and retrieve the people from the pictures. Therefore we did have to ask a few times:
-Do you know this person, we want to give her this picture, ?
One of the unexpected answer we had was:
-Yes, it is my mother!
or
-Yes of course, it is my wife!
The Baikonur market is definitely a small world and everybody there knows each other. So we managed to get all our stuff distributed at the end.
All of this activity brought a bit of animation at the place and due to our success, people who learn fast, were coming to us asking:
-where is my picture?
To meet these expectations, Bill took some more that will be distributed later on...
All of this was fun and done in a very spontaneous, friendly and trustful atmosphere.
Some of these pictures will be published in "Baikonurtsi Portraits".

As you see, we are in good hands here!

Let's simply hope that we will be as successful in our campaign in the next days.

Keep in touch.

Poka.

Kirill B.

PS:
I was wrong in my postcard last week, there is a second tulip in the city!