The One from Almaty

I told you before that I was pleasantly surprised by Almaty. Truth be told, I was shockingly uninformed about Kazakhstan and only mildly alarmed when I read the travel advisory or rather, warning, entry on our Ministry of Foreign Affair's website, as my Dad had done. It sounded pretty scary, in case you were wondering. I knew that there were quite some oil oligarchs and the hood around our hotel seemed to cater for their tastes and budgets. Right next to the hotel was a shopping mall with a Saks Fifth Avenue branch. Yep. I also thought I had a hallucination. Moreover, there was a sale at Saks. Oh-oh.

To cut a long story short, I ended up with a Phillip Lim Pashli bag and a rather unusual one at that:

Most signature Pashlis l have a flap, but I really liked the open-top version, which you can marvel at in more detail here. It is not as heavy as I thought it would be and holds a lot. I would not have minded a loud colour, but this dove-grey is not bad either and looks good in all seasons. My colleague tried to deter me by saying it looked like a "40 Euro fake leather H&M bag", but after paying it a visit 3 times I had fallen in love and decided the Pashli would come home with me. 

I have never seen Phillip Lim bags sold anyway in Austria and could of course have waited until my upcoming visit to the U.S., but I decided it was particularly cool to buy it in the nouveau riche mall in Almaty. C'est moi...