KZBlog

An American expat living in Astana, Kazakhstan

Tag archive for ‘Hospitality/Recreation’

  • Not So Royal Behaviour

    ChrisM has a post up on the Royal Betting Sports Bar in King’s Hotel in Astana. Worth reading if you want to avoid the bait-and-switch/squeeze the foreigners scams that some cafes and restaurants put up here.

  • RVS is Boring

    RVS is Boring

    According to Adil Nurmankov, the retro style restaurant that featured nostalgic Soviet chic, RVS, is now just a restaurant [RUS]. Once a magnet for tourists featuring Lenin’s portrait on the walls and quotes from Soviet documents, apparently now: in the halls, they have the same tables, but without the revolutionary menu. However, they do have […]

  • The Road to Beket-Ata

    The Road to Beket-Ata

    As promised in my post on Aktau, I want to write about the road trip to Beket-Ata. In Western Kazakhstan, there were a number of Sufi teachers who came and lived in caves in the area, running medressahs, consulting on difficult matters and healing people. They say there are 365 of these cave complexes (sometimes […]

  • Your Eyes are as Deep as the Caspian Sea

    Your Eyes are as Deep as the Caspian Sea

    As part of my aforementioned vacation, I went to Aktau in Western Kazakhstan. The main reason for this was to finally get a chance to swim in the Caspian Sea at long last. Interestingly while the Caspian has some romantic and poetic value in the West (I think of Jill Sobule’s Good Person Inside as […]