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A string of cars crawled westward towards distant buildings; it was moving on the only two-lane road within a radius of twenty kilometres. The journey from the suburbs to the centre of Almaty lasted half an hour, including a stop at an unmarked gas station served by an elderly man with a moustache of considerable size. The only element that stood out from the grey facades of the crumbling buildings on both sides of the road were blue flags hung in the windows of most houses; it resembled images of saints or portraits of state leaders, and those could also be seen in some of the houses. Blind obedience and – at the same time – a quiet desire to change appeared on the faces of people looking out of windows or hidden behind a tinted car window, with an average age of thirty-one years, an average salary at the level of a quarter of the minimum wage in Poland, and an average population density of six people per square kilometre. A few minutes later, a few-year-old Toyota Camry, after a few bumps without a front bumper, which apparently was an unnecessary part of the body, stopped under a glass hotel. The driver accommodated two blue banknotes, both marked with number five hundred, and then drove away. Shadows were slowly falling on the right side of the men standing outside the hotel. Men, who were poorer by the equivalent of two litres of gasoline in their home country. In the distance, the sun reflected in the taxi driver’s window. Taxi driver, who was richer by the half of the average day’s pay.
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