After leaving university I had very few opportunities to communicate with people from academia. I do have a very dear friend who is a researcher with Oxford University, but that’s about it. I also have a short and very unpleasant encounter with a foreign lecturer who teaches at one of the universities in Almaty. So those two people are pretty much the only academics I spoke to in the past 3.5 years.
Undoubtedly Astana, the capital of the Republic of Kazakhstan, has been a centre of attention in the past several years as it hosted a number of large scale international events including the OSCE summit and the 7th Asian Winter Games.