This is the area around Aunty Sveta’s place in Petropavlovsk (I think the government now wants it to be called Petropavl, but most people I spoke to still add the ovsk. This area of Kazakhstan is very close to Russia, so it is possible that the renaming is an attempt to make it sound more Kazakh).
The EDGE (think about GPRS v2.5 🙂 ) connection maxed out at 16kbit/sec (about three times slower than old fashioned dial up internet access on computers), consequently I unable to upload shots to twitpic until I returned to Astana.
OK, I’ve removed the six posts that were submitted by my phone on Saturday night and amalgamated them into this one post, with the videos embedded.
It was DanD’s birthday the next day, and so we headed to one of his favourite restaurant’s – Tiflis. I forgot to check in on foursquare or Google Latitude, so don’t have the exact co-ordinates, but I’ve searched on Google Map with Irina, and put where we think it is. The road is called Imanova St, but Google has a different label for some reason. However it is nearly opposite Cinema City, so that is the right street.
The old outdoor (well it had a roof but cut down walls to allow fresh air through) section had just finished being renovated, and we were all very pleasantly surprised by the new look. There are two floors, with an open central courtyard. Downstairs there was a normal seating area with lots of tables, and upstairs had some one table rooms. This worked out well, as they had a Georgian band playing for a lot of the night (see the videos below). The band were great, but when we wanted to talk, it was good to be able to shut the double doors, stick on the air conditioning, and not have to shout.
The food itself was great, with some sort of cheesy bread as a starter for me (salads still haven’t snuck onto my menu!), and a lamb sashliq (with chips obviously) for main. We were there for around three or four hours, and had a chance to congratulate Dan on his upcoming birthday (25th if you believe the normally otherwise honest Dan), and talk about life over here. The service was good, especially by local standards, and I’d happily recommend the place for eating out if you want to try something a bit different. You may find you need to reserve the rooms in advance, and I’m hoping Dan will read this post at some point and leave their telephone number here.
A couple of clips of the room, the company and the main course…
Everyone was still very sober by then, not many beers drunk or shots of Cha Cha served. The restaurant has definitely switched suppliers when it comes to the Georgian spirit of Cha Cha. It didn’t feel like paint stripper going down your throat, if anything it was a little closer to brandy, but not overly so.
It is that time of the month again when I get around to checking what people were searching for when they arrived at my blog via Google, Bing et al. For some reason, I have seen a resurgence in the number of visitors interested in Skype based scams. Although I’ve not posted about my favourite Nigerians in months and months, those posts seem to be getting attention again! Green tea and asthma (as in one combined search term) has also driven more traffic this way, along with the inevitable onboard sound driver issues I experienced, skinny dipping and tubes (NO idea which post that arrives at, will need to check), KFC in Kazakhstan, an old plugin for executing PHP code within widgets or posts, a WM PDA application for reading e-books (AlReader), and finally – funny double barrelled names, which this month has already bought almost 300 people to this site!
I’m at Pivavarov (Astana). http://4sq.com/aukaNG
Hmm, I was going to embed a Google Maps thing here, but foursqaure have disabled some Google features, and I’m too lazy to go and view the source code.
For now, it looks as though if you see a 4sq.com link, you’ll need to visit it yourself to see more information on the venue I’ve just checked into, sorry.
OK, so to clarify the tweets, twitpics and Qik videos from Sunday night, here is what happened… Irina’s friend from work had recommended a summer “café” in Astana park, near the river. (See below for the approximate location thanks to Google Maps.) Originally I had intended to check it out whilst watching a World Cup match or two, but friends and friends of friends already had their heart set on a different venue. So when it came to Independence Day (4th of July), we asked Walton and Assel if they would like to try out La Rivière. We arrived to find that it was less a café (which some would assume meant it was not as expensive as some restaurants), but decided to try it out anyway.
We knew there was the possibility of some live musical entertainment from Irina’s friend’s description, and we weren’t disappointed. When I saw the female singer (see previous posts for the male), my first impression was that she looked very good, and I therefore assumed that her vocal talents might not be as impressive. Although a few songs seemed to be outside of her comfort zone, the recordings below don’t really do her justice for the most part…
The lady singer preparing for her show at Rivière.
Here we have her version of You’ll See by Madonna, as well as a quick glimpse of a hookah/hubbly bubbly/water pipe that we had (water melon and grape was the flavour tobacco we chose I think.)
This time she is singing “Sweet About Me”, and another quick shot of the hookah
This was a cover of the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Penultimately we have Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop The Music”
And finally, she sang “Its A Wonderful Life” (Black I think? A group that has a colour as their name at least.)
The food was quite expensive, and there was apparently only a choice of two beers. However the cheeseburger (I know, I’m a classy guy 😉 ) was tasty, and the local Line Brew was relatively cheap and appeared to have alcohol in it 🙂 The samsas that were supposed to be a starter didn’t arrive until after the main course, but were OK. The service was great (especially by local standards), though if your company has given you a discount card for La Rivière, be aware that there has apparently been a management change, so these cards are no longer accepted. The water pipe was nice (we didn’t splash out on the extra money required to have a pineapple used as the charcoal bowl), and when the charcoals had died out, they didn’t try and charge us for more, so we were able to finish off the tobacco. The big screen (well projector and screen) looks like it could be good for the next World Cup match we go out to watch, though we may need to reserve a table in advance. Overall, I’d recommend this place if your budget isn’t tight, or if you only plan to have a couple of drinks and want to chill out outdoors, with the possibility of live entertainment.
If you search for the words Pizza and Astana in Google, this site has been number one for a while now. Fair enough, there aren’t that many other English language sources that discuss eating out in Kazakhstan’s capital city, I’m just not sure why the post that Google thought best matched this search term was one on the KFC Rostik outlet in Mega? I have written a few specific posts on pizzas in Astana, both in restaurants and home delivery, but apparently fried chicken was a better match.
Does anyone know what TMZ Fights is doing sitting around very high in a keyword search for my site? With a couple of different systems, if you enter chrismerriman.com as the domain name, it is either #1 or #2 as a successful search that bring people to this site. If it were “Almaty Nightclubs”, and I had written about it at least once, I could understand. However, after seeing the TMZ term, I ran a couple of searches (both frontend and also within the admin area for this blog) and couldn’t find any reference? I am wondering if someone has decided that intriguing sys admins for sites with strange search terms is a good way to gain extra traffic. I don’t think it can be an attempt at gaining backlinks, as no links have been placed since the term appeared in my site’s stats, and even within this post, I’ve not made a hyperlink to the site (enter the search term, without spaces, and adding a .com on the end), and I can’t see why other blog owners would link to it.
I tried to google for other people with the same query, and didn’t get very far. I’m genuinely interested if other site owners have come across this domain turning up in their site’s stats? I could understand the approach if the domain in question had impacted on my other twenty or sites (pretty much niche article sites TBH), but not a sniff so far. I also did a small amount of research into when other people genuinely mention it in passing, and the context doesn’t seem to apply to the site’s current content either.
Anyone have a clue WTF is going on with this?
