Stan By Me

My first impression of the world’s ninth largest country was as follows: “wow, this is one desolate shithole.”  In fairness, asking me my impression of Kazakhstan after my arrival in a former Soviet biological weapons research and development center in the middle of the wind-swept northern Kazakh steppe on a cloudy, freezing day in November is probably the equivalent of taking someone from Dubai to a dilapidated steel town in Ohio in the middle of February and then asking him how he likes America.  When we first pulled up to our home away from home for the week, I thought “Oh, are we stopping by a juvenile detention center before going to the hotel?”  These pictures should help explain.

“Probably the nicest hotel in town.”  Soviet rules of architecture: when in doubt, construct a giant, featureless concrete block.  Seriously, though….why didn’t someone take the Soviets aside and say:  “Hey guys – I hate to tell you this but concrete is ugly and large metal monuments left exposed to the elements will rust over time and make your towns look like they are filled with heaps of scrap metal and/or industrial waste.  Just a friendly FYI.” 

Nice try, but the rainbow-colored benches don’t change the fact that this is the most depressing place on earth (view from hotel).

Not sure what the thinking was with this "landscaping."  Inspired by nuclear winter comes to mind.

On the positive side, I did get a kick out of this couch.

Trips to the countryside, sadly, confirmed my initial impression…and the weather didn’t do much to brighten the scene with the temperatures below freezing and snow blowing horizontally.  The villages we passed were mostly farming villages – think the Shire if the Shire were filled with corrugated metal houses and criss-crossed with power lines, only half of which connected to anything.  You might be wondering how that is anything like the Shire.  Well, since you clearly don’t have a fertile imagination, let me tell you.  All of the houses had huge piles of hay out back and there were lots of goats and cows. And wizards.

After a few hours of driving, I couldn’t even remember which side of the road we were supposed to be driving on. The accepted method of navigating potholes (the pothole to Kazakh human ratio is estimated by me to be 50:1) is not to slow down and drive over them but just to zig zag wildly all over the road to see if you can get away with not slowing down.  To the extent that you find constantly thinking you are on the verge of death fun, it was really really fun.

Once we got to the mine we had to trade in our SUVs for these former Soviet military vehicles.  I was skeptical but left thoroughly impressed at their ability to drive uphill in thick mud with five or six people inside.  Plus, the inside had a long upholstered-like-a-couch-from-the-70s bench seat, two chairs  and a card table.  In other words, cleanliness and furniture-wise, it was like a college kid’s living room.

Proof I was actually there

I got the impression that people from small towns in Kazakhstan spend a lot of time doing what people from small towns everywhere spend a lot of timing doing: drinking.  If you ever want to have a quiet dinner in Stepnogorsk, KZ, I wish you the best of luck.  At each of the one or two restaurants that happen to be open at any given time, there is probably some sort of special event going on that involves toasts of vodka every five minutes (that time interval decreases as the night goes on), loud Kazakh techno, and a flashing colored disco ball.