Travelling on your own means you have to occasionally make a fool of yourself. I found a place in Pavlodar called Зимная Вишня (Winter Cherry). It sits on a corner in the heart of Pavlodar’s Tsarist Merchant quarter, which is a rather grandiose way of saying the old town. It took me a while to get inside due to the peculiar fondness for the one way mirror in this part of the world. Unlike Almaty, up north here they like one way mirrors. On no account should anyone be able to see inside, it would seem this might lead to chaos.
This is all very well if you are a local and well acquainted with what lies within, but for visitors like myself, you have no idea what you are potentially are walking into. There are probably many reasons for this. Strong summer sunlight and anti-glare measures are most likely. Historically perhaps it was felt desirable to not allow the masses to see inside places kept for the elite. When the name of a place isn’t nicely prefaced with bar, restaurant, shop etc it becomes a bit of a gamble. The customers of Winter Cherry one Tuesday afternoon watched me peer in the door and windows for a good ten minutes before I got the guts up to go inside.
Turns out Winter Cherry is a perfectly normal cake shop. Could have gone horribly wrong that one.
This is all very well if you are a local and well acquainted with what lies within, but for visitors like myself, you have no idea what you are potentially are walking into. There are probably many reasons for this. Strong summer sunlight and anti-glare measures are most likely. Historically perhaps it was felt desirable to not allow the masses to see inside places kept for the elite. When the name of a place isn’t nicely prefaced with bar, restaurant, shop etc it becomes a bit of a gamble. The customers of Winter Cherry one Tuesday afternoon watched me peer in the door and windows for a good ten minutes before I got the guts up to go inside.
Turns out Winter Cherry is a perfectly normal cake shop. Could have gone horribly wrong that one.