Sam and Jennifer

We decided to have her escorted home as taking another week off to head back to Kazakhstan was going to be very difficult. In the end it all seems to have worked out.

It is small but has a pretty varied collection of more traditional art as well as modern interpretations from local artists. We got a tour from the Director as we were the only people there. It is worth the hour or so it takes to walk through.

Are here it is on Google Maps:

The museum is small but has a really nice collection of original Kazak artwork, weapons, armor and dress. It is definitely worth the hour or so that it takes to get through it and is especially educational if you bring a translator to read all the information that goes along with the exhibits as everything is in Russian and Kazak…neither of which I can read.

Here are some pictures from inside and outside the museum:

And here is where it is located. What is interesting is that the Google satellite shot is obviously a couple of years old as it shows the ruin and not the fully renovated building (started in 2005 and finished in August of 2008).

The food is sort of what you would expect from a place like this – good but not great – and like most of the restaurants in Kazakhstan that try to do western fare they don’t quite get it right. But it is a nice change from the food at the hotel. The breaded hamburgers were a special surprise.

Of course the giant blow-up playground was the only thing Sam was interested in although we did manage to get a bit of food in her between rounds. The meatballs were particularity popular.

Some shots of the place:

Some more pictures:

I spotted this poster on a shop today here in Petropavlovsk so now I’m not so sure…(in all seriousness I haven’t seen a single person wearing one of these since we arrived…so I doubt the shop has a lot of customers for them)

The Real Kazakhstan

The Theoretical Kazakhstan aka Borat

The one thing that might not come out in the photos is how dirty the streets are – there is mud everywhere. It is no wonder the locals always wear black. Anything else and you’d be changing clothes multiple times a day. I was pretty amazed about the mud actually. Even where there are proper curbs and sidewalks there is nothing growing in the boulevard except some weeds or random grass. For the most part it is just dirt – or when it rains mud.

They do have street sweepers out all over the place right now sweeping up the dirt. It really doesn’t help….

We did end up finding it way down at the end of the street (about a 30 minute walk from the hotel – GPS: 54.873641,69.123852) but unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be anything that Sam could really play on. As you can see from the pictures it wasn’t exactly what you could call safe. So we are still searching for a decent playground.