Astana, Kazakhstan

Sunset from Luxembourg to Vienna

Central Asia isn’t far away in the sense that the flight is only 5 hours. That means you don’t really have time to sleep after eating the meal. So the night is very short. We arrive just before six in the morning.

Astana is still dark at six in the morning. The airport works well and we are outside quickly. Outside it is cold, probably almost freezing with a wind blowing off the steppes that will stop your breath.

The first day was supposed to be a day of rest, but the Prime Minister wants us to do his interview this morning. So we go to the hotel, take a shower and have less than an hour to rest a bit before heading out again. Prime Minister Karim Massimov speaks good English and we do the interview in English. We should have done the interview in Russian since it is one of Euronews’s official languages, But the journalist doesn’t understand Russian and that makes it difficult for him to do the interview. Going through an interpreter takes a lot of time… time that the Prime Minister doesn’t have.

Since we’re up, we continue with a second big interview with Timur Koulibaev, Chairman of Kazenergy.  He can also speak good English, but prefers to do the interview in Russian. So I record the translation and then we work with a translator to get a precise wording of what he said.

Finally, when it is dark again, we are able to head back to the hotel. By 10 at night we are in bed for an intense sleep before the next busy day.