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Kazakhstan isn’t the first country I’d associate with modernism and gleaming infrastructure, but according to photos from English Russia, I’m dead wrong: the Altmay Metro is gorgeous. And, shocking to any urbanite, gorgeously clean, like Star Trek with more maids.
The project—which only opened last month—took 23 years to construct, starting back in Kazakhstan’s Soviet days. Now, it’s fully of eager passengers, smiling attendants, microchip-enabled fare cards, and tracks that look like you could eat off them. It’s almost eerily clean. Especially compared to our New York Subway, where you’re lucky not to witness human feces, let alone freshly-polished marble floors. One of the stations even shows a looped video of a rocket launch. A rocket launch! The future is Kazakhstan. [English Russia]
Try the Singapore subway, been running for decades and spotless, don’t forget this is the city where chewing gum is a crime, and food or drink on a train will see you in court.
I recall I dropped a bottle of cream on the floor, the bottle smashed and cream everywhere. People turned in shock for me gasping, suddenly searching their pockets and handing me tissues, then quickly moving away from the scene of the crime, to weird I was there cleaning it until the floor was spotless. If that happened in the UK, a couple of teenagers would have laughed at my accident, some old guy would mutter, shit happens, and I would have made a poor attempt of brushing it away, a very poor attempt.
God how I wish those rules were applied on the Tube. People just won’t stop eating McDonalds on the train, it’s really disgusting.
It’s actually Almaty Metro. Sorry to be pedantic.
I remember back in the late 80s. I was in Cairo and needed to cross a very busy road (traffic in Cairo is crazy, but that’s a whole other story) My only safe option appeared to be going down into their subway system and coming up the other side. Given they fact that the rest of Cairo was, to put it mildly, very dirty I was concerned that their subway system would be running with filth. Imagine my surprise at the clean, modern system they had, which actually made me ashamed of the London Underground. I have no idea if it is still so well kept but our underground hasn’t caught up with what I saw then yet.
It looks a lot like the Moscow metro, with the arched ceilings. Although not quite as grandiose. http://www.trekexchange.com/images/Moscow_Metro.jpg
This is far different to the kazakHatan portrayed by Borat!